Why do some people close their forum
- Thread starter Senpai
- Start date
I see a lot of people say they are selling or closing because they can't maintain it. School, work, life, etc. Post count doesn't equal activity. Some sites are based around things that die off. The worst is to see a site sold and the new owner does something that kills off activity.
Something that starts as a hobby can be hard to fund once it becomes successful. I mean I refuse to use advertising, but its a necessary evil sometimes. So I don't start projects that need funding. It's possible to take a $5 dollar DO VPS and support 250 concurrent users if properly configured. But once you explode, once you have a ton of guest traffic. It's going to take more.
Something that starts as a hobby can be hard to fund once it becomes successful. I mean I refuse to use advertising, but its a necessary evil sometimes. So I don't start projects that need funding. It's possible to take a $5 dollar DO VPS and support 250 concurrent users if properly configured. But once you explode, once you have a ton of guest traffic. It's going to take more.
It's okay to fail, you know. You learn from failure more than you learn from success, sometimes. What matters is the ability to apply what you have learned.
I've had a quick look at your particular site, and here are a few thoughts:
You can do this one of two ways. Slowly, with trickle-in members arriving over the next ten years, or fast, with a lot of investment. It can cost easily upwards of $15,000 to start a new board and make it big quickly. Hiring staff, hiring people to produce content, paying for advertising, all this and more is a huge business expense but can be - if you've chosen your market and staff well - very rewarding. If you're doing it without a whack of capital, then slow and steady is the way, and you have to nurture it like it's a seed you just planted. You can't go AWOL for a week at a time. You can't expect it to suddenly get big overnight. You can't go promoting all your friends to the staff team. You gotta feed it. Water it. Nip and prune the dead bits. It's a constant process. It is work. And for a long time it's going to be work that you're doing for free (though at the very least I'd get an affiliate link system set up so that if people do say "go buy this game" and link to it, you might earn a few pennies from each sale made that way).
I've had a quick look at your particular site, and here are a few thoughts:
- Your link just says "check out my website". That's not attractive. You need to tell people what it's about to encourage them to look.
- Cloudflare kept me waiting ten seconds while it checked I wasn't a DDoS attack. Most people will have left by then and never even seen your site.
- I love your design! I think it's snappy, legible, and bang on for a starter gaming site.
- Content. You need content, badly. You have a whole bunch of empty forums there. Either pare it down and only create new forums (and move threads into them) when it becomes apparent that people want to talk about that thing a lot, or start creating content for those subforums. I would pare down the number of subforums you have right now. Make it look snug and small. People love getting into new communities at ground level, not ones which already look like a ghost town. Why, for instance, do you have a whole bunch of off-topic forums when two at most would do? And you really shouldn't have a visible subforum called "Monetizing Methods" because it sends up a red flag to potential new members that, well, you want to monetize them
- The default new user avatar makes it look like all your new users are test users set up by the admin. Change the default to something less personalised.
- There's nothing there to tell new visitors what your site is for. Yes, it looks "obvious" from the forum titles, but what's different about you? What do your premium memberships offer?
You can do this one of two ways. Slowly, with trickle-in members arriving over the next ten years, or fast, with a lot of investment. It can cost easily upwards of $15,000 to start a new board and make it big quickly. Hiring staff, hiring people to produce content, paying for advertising, all this and more is a huge business expense but can be - if you've chosen your market and staff well - very rewarding. If you're doing it without a whack of capital, then slow and steady is the way, and you have to nurture it like it's a seed you just planted. You can't go AWOL for a week at a time. You can't expect it to suddenly get big overnight. You can't go promoting all your friends to the staff team. You gotta feed it. Water it. Nip and prune the dead bits. It's a constant process. It is work. And for a long time it's going to be work that you're doing for free (though at the very least I'd get an affiliate link system set up so that if people do say "go buy this game" and link to it, you might earn a few pennies from each sale made that way).
It's okay to fail, you know. You learn from failure more than you learn from success, sometimes. What matters is the ability to apply what you have learned.
I've had a quick look at your particular site, and here are a few thoughts:
You can do this one of two ways. Slowly, with trickle-in members arriving over the next ten years, or fast, with a lot of investment. It can cost easily upwards of $15,000 to start a new board and make it big quickly. Hiring staff, hiring people to produce content, paying for advertising, all this and more is a huge business expense but can be - if you've chosen your market and staff well - very rewarding. If you're doing it without a whack of capital, then slow and steady is the way, and you have to nurture it like it's a seed you just planted. You can't go AWOL for a week at a time. You can't expect it to suddenly get big overnight. You can't go promoting all your friends to the staff team. You gotta feed it. Water it. Nip and prune the dead bits. It's a constant process. It is work. And for a long time it's going to be work that you're doing for free (though at the very least I'd get an affiliate link system set up so that if people do say "go buy this game" and link to it, you might earn a few pennies from each sale made that way).
I've had a quick look at your particular site, and here are a few thoughts:
- Your link just says "check out my website". That's not attractive. You need to tell people what it's about to encourage them to look.
- Cloudflare kept me waiting ten seconds while it checked I wasn't a DDoS attack. Most people will have left by then and never even seen your site.
- I love your design! I think it's snappy, legible, and bang on for a starter gaming site.
- Content. You need content, badly. You have a whole bunch of empty forums there. Either pare it down and only create new forums (and move threads into them) when it becomes apparent that people want to talk about that thing a lot, or start creating content for those subforums. I would pare down the number of subforums you have right now. Make it look snug and small. People love getting into new communities at ground level, not ones which already look like a ghost town. Why, for instance, do you have a whole bunch of off-topic forums when two at most would do? And you really shouldn't have a visible subforum called "Monetizing Methods" because it sends up a red flag to potential new members that, well, you want to monetize them
- The default new user avatar makes it look like all your new users are test users set up by the admin. Change the default to something less personalised.
- There's nothing there to tell new visitors what your site is for. Yes, it looks "obvious" from the forum titles, but what's different about you? What do your premium memberships offer?
You can do this one of two ways. Slowly, with trickle-in members arriving over the next ten years, or fast, with a lot of investment. It can cost easily upwards of $15,000 to start a new board and make it big quickly. Hiring staff, hiring people to produce content, paying for advertising, all this and more is a huge business expense but can be - if you've chosen your market and staff well - very rewarding. If you're doing it without a whack of capital, then slow and steady is the way, and you have to nurture it like it's a seed you just planted. You can't go AWOL for a week at a time. You can't expect it to suddenly get big overnight. You can't go promoting all your friends to the staff team. You gotta feed it. Water it. Nip and prune the dead bits. It's a constant process. It is work. And for a long time it's going to be work that you're doing for free (though at the very least I'd get an affiliate link system set up so that if people do say "go buy this game" and link to it, you might earn a few pennies from each sale made that way).
