I'm sure we hve all been there at one time or another, the day comes when you decide to close down your site? What is it that made you take that decision? Was it financial pressure? Time? Lack of interest?
For me it come down to a combination of time and finances to keep it going.
I've shut down sites for financial reasons, some for performance reasons, some because I grew tired of the niche, and some because I had a bit of an emotional breakdown and needed to get away from them.
With my earlier forums, it was a lack of interest and a recognition that the site just wasn't meant to thrive like I'd hoped it would. With the last site I ran, it was a number of reasons, from feeling like I was the only one running things even though there were others on staff with me, a number of technical issues that just wouldn't get fixed despite me asking and bringing them up repeatedly to the person who was in charge of that, and just overall burnout. The other staff were just far too busy with irl commitments to help with the site, which was fine, and the members were just largely disinterested in the site and most were only really there for a game that was partially hosted on the site (but had most of the action on Discord at the time of me breaking away).
The real straw that broke the camel's back though was drama within the aforementioned game that not only largely made me quit the game (though that moment wouldn't come until months later, even after I'd stepped down from the forum's staff), but it also made me realize that I was tired of manning a site that probably should've been let go far earlier than it actually was. Honestly not even sure why I clung to it for so long, but it was a breath of fresh air not having that burden on my shoulders anymore when I already had far too much going on in my personal life and in the online communities that I was in at the time.
