What advice would you give to a community owner/leader wanting to give up?

Status
Not open for further replies.

AjayJunkies

Well-known member
We don't tend to see this often but it has been seen and that is community owners/leaders and them wanting to give up when things don't go how they planned or they do not reach goals as quick as they thought they would.

As someone who is a community leader yourself, what advice would you give to a community owner/leader when they mention they would like to give up?
 
Sometimes they SHOULD give up, eh?

It's possible they picked a forum topic with too much established competition... and they have nothing unique to offer.

Or it's possible they thought they could just build it and they will come... without any effort to prime the pump and contribute content.
 
Well if you've lost all hope and interest you should give up. If you're not into it you're not going to put the effort anymore so why bother? It's not easy but if you're like me and just passionate about your forum you just keep going and going.
 
What? Absolutely not! Which world are you living in?
In my Facebook groups I have around 200,000 people who write thousands and thousands of posts and comments every day, I have two forums, one which is twenty years old with more than 55,000 members which has had two messages in the last month and another forum of around 15 years with around 9000 registered users who had 60 messages in the last month! Except for the very rare ones where topics that cannot be written on Facebook are discussed, they are dead
 
So close your forums. 🤷🏽‍♂️
I'm not closing my two forums because after many years I'm fond of them but I'm conscious and objective in saying that they make little sense! They are also poorly indexed by Google compared to a WordPress site with fewer pages and articles and therefore they also make me earn very little
 
It is a way of the middle but above all it is constantly evolving which does not happen for the forums that are stopped to when I started using them or 20 years ago
 
It is a way of the middle but above all it is constantly evolving which does not happen for the forums that are stopped to when I started using them or 20 years ago
You are partly right, between a forum from the 2000s and a forum today there is nothing revolutionary, a forum remains a forum but we cannot say, I believe, that they have not evolved. But between the Facebook of 2010 and today, has there been a revolution? Neither. Facebook remains Facebook.

Social networks would never have existed without the advent of cell phones, which is what brought this new mode of communication between people around the world. The forums missed this shift and did not adapt to the new devices, in fact they adapted but too late. Now that the damage is done it is difficult to recover Facebook users to transfer them to forums, not because they find the tool outdated or worthless, because a modern forum has a lot to offer and as long as 'we get a taste for it, we would start to hate social networks at the same time, but this population of social network users would feel alone, no more hundreds of likes every day, no more thousands of views on the photo of their cat in the garden, etc.

The fight is not technological but social, people want to show themselves, speak to the wider world, obtain a certain recognition, even virtual, and from this point of view Facebook and other Instagrams benefit from their user base which counts in hundreds of millions of users. Redit has its own operation which is more like a forum than a social network, but it is popular, very popular, because you know that if you ask a question there in a few minutes you will have answers and probably the good one.

All this to say that forums are not dead, they are just misunderstood, victims of their year of birth. A forum... LOL, this rotten old thing to discuss there?? No, it's no longer a crappy thing, it's just not a showcase for cats, swimsuits, beaches on the other side of the world and great chef's pastries...
 
I, however, remain of the opinion that forums are dead because programmers were not interested in the past and are not interested today in making them evolve! The forums are stuck at twenty years ago and have nothing new! the only thing that changes are the prices that increase more and more! The most obvious example I always give is that a forum administrator is unable to contact his users because there is no decent mailing system there. xf at least has a bounce email system (which I've been trying to get working for months) invision doesn't even have that!
 
have two forums, one which is twenty years old with more than 55,000 members which has had two messages in the last month and another forum of around 15 years with around 9000 registered users who had 60 messages in the last month!

I, however, remain of the opinion that forums are dead
I must be doing it wrong, then. My forum started 29 months ago.

1721694960259.webp

So, about 1,968 messages per month, averaged out. This is all organic growth. No paid ads anywhere.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top Bottom