Today's Moderators

[xlegends]

When I had boards in the early 2000s, it seemed everybody wanted to be a moderator and the ones who did, spent a great deal of time on it. Today's moderators are very part time to say the least. Though, I'm grateful and shouldn't complain over any volunteer work.

Regarding members, even though I have more active members today, its sad to see that the use of my boards have dramatically changed. Now, a member is in and out simply seeking information they need. In the past, some great friendships used to form on boards. People and moderators spent considerable time on bulletin boards in general, more or less of what they do on Facebook. I guess, they're all on social media now.

 

[FTL]

We can blame smartphones and Facebook for this decline mostly, unfortunately. I posted about just this situation only yesterday, so you may want to have a read.

Why it's so hard to start a forum nowadays

If you're over age 30 and didn't come to motorcycling late in life, you probably remember at least one of those motorcycle forums, even if you didn't belong to one. In the heyday of the internet forum, you could reliably punch almost any make or model of motorcycle into a search bar (AltaVista...

nerdzone.uk

 

[xlegends]

Good read. Took me years to get mobile friendly. Also learned the hardware. From theming to the way I organize, people don't like it that way.

 

[Wildcat Media]

We have a core group of moderators that do most of the work, but many others have come and gone, without a word, when they realized it actually took some effort to keep the forum going. In essence, it's the same core group that ends up doing all the work, no matter who we recruit these days. Since everyone is volunteer, nobody has time to sit all day and babysit a busy forum that sees at least several hundred logged-in members during the day. The main thing with social media these days is that some of the younger and/or less educated users don't last long as members since they can't even be bothered to type a sentence correctly, or use "lol" as punctuation for every. single. sentence. They don't fit into a place where people have actual intelligent conversations, not mindless babbling like on social media.

 

[FTL]

Since everyone is volunteer, nobody has time to sit all day and babysit a busy forum that sees at least several hundred logged-in members during the day.

It looks like a classic victim of its own success, which is so ironic. btw, I like moderating, so shoot me a pm if you'd like me on the team.

I'd like to expand my active membership (got so many that join and then never log in again ffs) but there comes a point where all my time would be consumed by forum interaction and management that it would stop being fun and I wouldn't have time for all the other things that I'm trying to fit into a normal day. I'm looking for "modest activity", but that's gonna be a hard balancing act to maintain if my forum ever grows in activity.

Oh, lately I get loads of spammers trying to register. Some get nuked automagically by the system, but most get stuck in the approval queue with a spam warning where I have to manually reject them. With so much unwanted attention, I guess my forum has "finally arrived", sigh.

 

[Arantor]

So here's the thing that's really funny... I have a forum that's small, it's indexed on the search engines, people are coming - but I have zero spam registrations. I even have guest posting in one board and zero bots posting in it.

(It's not an XF, and the content doesn't index particularly well, but it does alright in its very specific niche. I don't have advertising on the site per se so eyeballs are not a metric I give any hoots about. Current activity is 1-5 posts per day which is about right for it and its niche given its membership. No, I'm not about to mention it.)

I actually wonder if going branding free would actually help with that. I also wonder if it would be worth me looking at porting some of the anti-spam techniques I have over to XF, it might help.

 

[FTL]

So here's the thing that's really funny... I have a forum that's small, it's indexed on the search engines, people are coming - but I have zero spam registrations. I even have guest posting in one board and zero bots posting in it.

lol lucky you. I wonder why your forum doesn't attract spammers.

My small forum has had a spate of spam registrations lately, all getting caught in the approval queue so my members never see them, or spam posts. It's annoying, but I also find myself weirdly looking forward to them so that I can nuke them. I guess NerdZone "has arrived". Real members would be nice, sigh.

 

[Arantor]

xRumer of old would find new forum targets by searching for footer copyrights, I have none of those (legitimately) so won’t find me that way…