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Post by FRITZ on Aug 26, 2014 2:52:06 GMT -8
has anyone else noticed that sites are dropping dead, not because they can't attract members or activity is low, but because the staff are losing interest and abruptly closing or just abandoning their forums without warning? and you'll see the same groups of people in less than a month's time opening another site like it ain't no thang, only to close that one too in favor of a new project?
i don't have to tell you how hard it is to find sites open long enough to complete an established plot or even an established thread lmao. it's like.. why even go through the effort of making a forum if it isn't something you can commit yourself to?
not gonna name any names here, there are literally too many and the point of this rant is not to offend anyone, but hopefully get people thinking and caring about the communities they build. please tell me i'm not the only rper who's scared to join sites run by certain cliques or even new sites in general.
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Post by EMMIE on Aug 26, 2014 8:05:34 GMT -8
In all fairness, members can be pretty fickle with their muse / dedications to sites as well. I agree with what you are saying there. There are some people who are infamous for jumping sites and just up and abandoning sites to make new ones. Members are just as bad though. They always want something new and shiny and once the novelty of the first couple of days wear off? A lot of them will up and leave. It is a two way street I guess.
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MOTHER OF THE MAGICAL GIRLS
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Post by SIFR on Aug 26, 2014 8:58:32 GMT -8
Hah! You're not pulling punches with your first thread on the board, are you Fritz? I like it.
I'm guilty of this. I've been admining for the last 12 years, and only in the last two have I ever been so guilty of dropping sites like a hot potato. Despite the fact that I've only fully launched one this year, I have developed at least five to the point where they could have easily been opened to the public, and I didn't. Most of the time, it was outside stress. I work in a terrible work environment, and I do mean terrible. Customers are not always right, let me tell you. So I deal with customers all day, I come home, and the thought of dealing with more people? It makes me physically ill.
You combine that with the fact that 90% of admins are dealing with the education system in some way, shape, or form, and really the way I view it, it boils down to stress that they can't control. This is why you need to have a good admin team that can take over in your stead- but what happens when they have their own issues too?
Now, some admins admittedly are around just to design shiny new things, like templates and skins. Their focus is on sites that are pretty, and while that's all well and good, and sure, let them do their thing, sometimes it means that they are fickle after they've done their work. Before you know it, seven other people have asked them to do work on their site, and bam, they're up and gone.
Now, does that explain why they float from site to site and project to project? No. I have no idea, other than the fact that it seems awkward to close a site for a week because you're stressed and then open it back up. Should they probably wait longer before closing a site to see if it can survive on the backs of the members while they do their thing? Probably. Maybe even make a habit of handing off sites to others who have the time and are interested in working with what you've lain as groundwork? Absolutely! I've seen that happen rarely, and almost always it's worked out very well in the end.
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Post by ★SIRIUS on Aug 26, 2014 10:14:58 GMT -8
this is actually something i've been noticing lately, so i'm glad someone brought it up. cause whenever i mention it people just roll their eyes at me and say to 'get with the times, this ain't 2006 anymore.' sites used to last. every site i was on would be open for literally years with dedicated members. plots would be finished, year anniversaries would be celebrated. what happened? because it was like, seriously out of the blue, sites started dying left and right. i haven't come close to finishing a plot since 2011 or something with how bad it is. sites often close before any real development can take place. maybe sifr's right, our generation of rpers grew up and got busy with rl, and maybe that is true, but i don't think it's the core of the problem. when admins close a site, i see them open another. when members leave a site, i see them join another. if someone gets stressed with rl and can't handle it, i think it is perfectly acceptable to close a site/take a hiatus. that isn't really what i'm seeing though. i'm seeing admins and members losing interest. honestly? i hope this doesn't make me sound horrible, but i'm someone who gets extremely attached to my plots and characters, and with how things are, i'm not even willing to risk joining someone else's site because of the likelihood of it being closed and losing all my stuff. the last few times i have joined a site, within a few days it was closed. it sucks. as admins, i think we should fight to keep our creations open. i hear people say 'but the audience is too fickle.' well, so what? we are the ones who cater to the audience. site-owners are the ones who set the example and create the sites in the first place. equally, as members, because members are just as important if not more so, i think we should try to pledge some loyalty. pick a few forums and give them all we've got, instead of joining too many and having to progressively drop more. it's sad, because i've seen amazing sites with so much potential be closed, and maybe i care too much about rp, but if stuff goes on this way i don't know how long the community is going to stably hold up. Maybe even make a habit of handing off sites to others who have the time and are interested in working with what you've lain as groundwork? Absolutely! I've seen that happen rarely, and almost always it's worked out very well in the end. also, this. this is a great idea. if someone gets bored, why not hand the site off to someone else who still has interest in it? if someone gets busy, why not let someone take over until you can get on your feet again? sure, in some cases maybe someone can't be found, but it's at least worth a shot.
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Post by EMMIE on Aug 26, 2014 10:52:14 GMT -8
I have to say that I agree with you 100%, however, I was only calling attention to the fact that we can't call out one side of the spectrum without at least addressing the other side of things too. Members are a site's lifeblood and they are the most important part of the site. Admins, just the faithful servants to their mad creations.
I agree that it is the job of the admin to keep a site afloat. To be loyal to what they have created and the community that they have helped to build. I just wanted to say that it is a two way street though. You can't always point the finger and scream foul at an admin, especially those who have worked hard on sites that perhaps just have no following (like all the beautiful adventure time sites that keep popping up that no one joins)...
I'm not trying to cause riffs or anything, by no means. I am just saying that these are the two ugly faces of the roleplaying community. The fickle/muse starved member and the indecisive / site jumping admin. They go hand in hand really and they are probably both to blame when it comes to the subject of site jumping and the so called "rp epidemic"...
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Phantom of the Black Parade
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Post by Kuroya on Aug 26, 2014 10:59:01 GMT -8
This ended up getting a bit long, but this is the sort of subject I have strong feelings on due to my past experiences as a member, a normal staff member, and an owner and administrator, so my apologies. I'm not saying that what I'm saying is going to be right... but more I'm trying to say that I've seen all sides of the spectrum here. And thus I understand a bit of both sides.
I'm one who always believes that paths can be changed and willpower and attitude determines positions in life. But I remember back when I first started roleplaying about three years ago that members, on average, stay at most three months with any one site. Now, on average, I'd imagine staff stay a bit longer. But even so, that is a pain on administrators, especially if the system has to be a bit more complex than simple acceptance and ads and archiving - like Pokemon, Digimon, MMO-style sites, etc. That means, if you continue the assumption, they have to hire a new staff team at least every four or five months if the statistic is true.
Most admins I've come across do not like running sites on their own. They like having multiple administrators and a decent staff team running with them. But as someone who has staffed a site where the owner and I were pulling the weight a lot since one staff member essentially quit in favor of gaming, one was never online for whatever reason, and the other was on leave since she was traveling, it was entirely frustrating. So as someone who has closed sites before due to getting sick of doing all the work, I understand closing for that reason. Because as much as we would get offers from members, it got to a point where they would do the work for a week tops and then disappear themselves, and eventually it was just more work to keep anything open than to deal with it.
There's also the fact that in this day and age, if you have a disagreement over something or want to have a spot you're supposed to work for, instead of accepting the system, it is perfectly okay to "base things off of" another site's system, plot, main idea, whatever without permission or really too many changes made other than who runs it and what they do. And then members on the old place ditch for the new one and it is downright frustrating for an administrator, especially if because people are ditching the site cannot move forward for plot-based reasons.
I've closed for reasons such as both above; in fact, these usually are factors when I close sites. In my experience, it is far more common for threads not to finish or plots not to develop because the other members are ditching, not the site closing.
There's also the fact that some sites require more attention than others. As Sifr said, most roleplayers are still in the educational system, if not working or doing both, and for some people, after a long week of stress, sometimes you have to not do anything on a site. And if the site isn't at the point where it's self-sustaining, the absence of a few days can destroy the site and it may not seem worth it to reboot the site.
And I know from personal experience that sometimes handing over control of the site or moving the site doesn't work out. (This is a site that has been dead for over a year now, so I'm comfortable enough to talk about this.) One of the ones I staffed, the head admin handed over control of the site to her co-admin and hadn't been around for over a year - and when v5 conversion first came around, even though the remaining staff were in control, they couldn't access the admin panel since the owner intended on maybe returning one day and never officially handed over the admin account. So we had to move, and the move ended up killing the site since aside from the new owner (who wasn't the co-admin as it turned out since she had quit) and myself (who was originally brought on as just an ad mod and ended up taking over as essentially co-owner), no one really did anything since it was the whole "I don't want to do anything if no one else is" dance. We've tried re-opening sometimes, but there's still not enough push from the members we're still in contact with, so we have honestly not even touched it since v5 came through.
And although I will say that some sites shouldn't be made and some people should not be running them, they're not the only ones contributing to the problem. It's also the flaky members who ditch one site for another of the same type without a word, the staff members who disappear for months on end or simply don't do their jobs, the mentality of potential members who go "well this site's good but it'll only die in a few weeks anyway so I'll just not join" - all of them contribute to the problem. Because maybe, and this is a radical concept here so bear with me, maybe those sites wouldn't have been quite as likely to die if the owners knew there were people who were still interested in it beyond just the small few and who were willing to take on staffing it if they couldn't handle it anymore.
Does that cover everyone? No. There will always be those flake admins who close sites randomly, just as there will always be those sites who stick around for years and years. But personally, I don't think that taking the approach of not joining the sites out of fear is really the way to go. After all, how else are people supposed to change if they don't have any motivation (ie active members who want the site to stay open) to do so?
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Post by ★SIRIUS on Aug 26, 2014 11:17:17 GMT -8
i do get the member side of things too, like emmie and kuroya mentioned. the admin is the skeleton to the forum that keeps it standing, but the members are the flesh and blood that allow it to function. i'm an admin myself, so i know how painful it is to have a bunch of members join a site you have worked hard on and then have 98% of them lose interest and leave a barren board in their wake. because, then yeah, an admin without members is a big problem. the trouble is, how does one get members to keep interest and stay? with staff, i know they can help the issue by keeping their boards open rather than giving up and making new ones, but there's such a grey area with members. you can encourage them to stay, have interactive site events to try and keep their attention, but that seems to do little good in the end. rather than pointing fingers at whose fault it is sites are closing though, whether it's the members or the staff who are responsible, perhaps now that this topic has been brought to light we should try to think of ways we can resolve it. or at least improve it to where sites can remain open longer.
and, just as a disclaimer to what i've said, i do know there are some sites that have been around for a long time. i try to affiliate with sites like this when i stumble across them. they just are in the minority.
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Post by Starry Neko on Aug 26, 2014 11:19:55 GMT -8
Oh this is a fun topic. Well...like EMMIE said...it's a two sided thing. I've been rping for /years/ like most people. To be honest, I haven't had a plot in a rp finish since...well closer to 07. I was often a coding admin or something of the like but I didn't ask for any power beyond that, so I was more than a member but less than the normal admin. Being in this position most of the time to be honest showed me...well both parties are guilty as sin. Some admins just don't want to hold their baby with stress and most see it as 'well it's a fun thing' so often times if stress gets going they just up and leave. However members are always joining the new shiny thing and losing interest left and right. I've had tons of members join, then as soon as they hit a hiccup or see a shinier site, most often they join and leave the older/less shiny site. This 'epidemic' is a two sided nasty minefield of stuff. Members and Admins can be tasked in different lights to be flighty and not interested in the ideas they put forth. To ★SIRIUS 's point...well yeah. We are the admins and we fight and we fight. There are some people who fight all the time for their sites. There's one admin who I might not get along with, but I respect her drive for keeping the site open for years. The problem is, admins can fight...fight...and fight...and people will still be fickle. Admins are not all knowing or all powerful in keeping members who are fickle there. Some people get depressed and close it, and some people get well rather bitter about it. Both things happen quite often. I agree with Emmie that it's a two way street. Not all admins/members are guilty about this...believe me. However those that are know who they are and what they do. They all have their own unique reasoning. My point is it's not always staff and it's not always members. If you call out one, you have to be equally fair to call out the other for sake of discussion.
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Post by katya on Aug 26, 2014 15:22:38 GMT -8
I am the world's worst admin for pretty much this reason alone. I have run quite a few sites now. None of them have ever died due to lack of activity (except maybe Arcana--that one was kinda a clusterfuck). They've pretty much all died because I went MIA. The core issue for me is that, at some point, visiting my own site becomes a chore. This is usually at about the 3 month mark, in my experience. When I open a site, I open a place for people to rp. I don't want the rest of the baggage, but I'll deal with it--fix problems, communicate with people, stamp out drama, try to make everyone happy, address all the concerns--to have a place for me (and people with similar interests to me) to rp, because it's fun. Eventually, it's more baggage than fun. It is, in fact, the polar opposite of fun. A hiatus is required purely for mental health purposes. In the course of that hiatus, either I stop caring (which is 100% my fault) or the site dies on its own while I'm out (which is 99% my fault). There's another issue that kills me as an admin, and it's not really an issue per se. I don't think anyone's at fault, it's just bad luck. It's when I open a site, and I have a vision for it, and let's just say expectation does not match reality. Obviously, expectation never matches reality, but with the amount of time and effort admining takes, if it's not a site I want to even roleplay at, then it's not really a site I want to run. A 100% purely hypothetical and exaggerated example to illustrate the above: I open a Sailor Moon site, and I get a bunch of thinly veiled Mary Sues in all the canon spots. I might lose interest in the site after just a week in that case. (In my experience, putting up higher standards and barriers in the app process to weed out Sues only results makes your site unappealing to prospective members AND is a ton of drama+stress on top of that.) I've also seen migrant communities that hop from one site to the next like FRITZ talks about, but I think that actually makes sense. Those sorts of groups tend to have people playing the same/similar characters at each site, so the overall plotline that they're working on continues. It's just that the setting--essentially just a backdrop to the plot--keeps changing to keep things fresh. Plus, you get to constantly reboot your characters, teach an old dog new tricks, so they never get boring. As long as the group sticks together, the fun will continue. It's not an rping model that I find very appetizing, but I can understand the appeal.
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Post by FRITZ on Aug 27, 2014 6:36:59 GMT -8
hot diggity! wasn't expecting this to take off, now where to begin.. ok, let me just start by saying that i appreciate the imput from all these different angles and i do agree that admins are not always responsible for the death of their sites. fickle members are a huge problem and they do run off to the next big thing, which could explain why some admins scrap their established site and throw up another of equal newness. maybe that's the only way they feel they can hold the attention of these people who lose interest in the old and flock to what's new, but in my opinion this is counter productive—it encourages the site-hopping adhd and i think we should find solutions instead of ways to cater to it. as admins, i think we should fight to keep our creations open. i hear people say 'but the audience is too fickle.' well, so what? we are the ones who cater to the audience. site-owners are the ones who set the example and create the sites in the first place. equally, as members, because members are just as important if not more so, i think we should try to pledge some loyalty. pick a few forums and give them all we've got, instead of joining too many and having to progressively drop more. it's sad, because i've seen amazing sites with so much potential be closed, and maybe i care too much about rp, but if stuff goes on this way i don't know how long the community is going to stably hold up. ^^^ this sounds like a great idea. by keeping sites running instead of making new ones when activity slows, we're not supplying sparky places to run off to and thus, not feeding the fickle behavior anymore. i understand where you're coming from SIFR, school and work can drain the muse out of anyone and it's one of the reasons i had to close a site early. it's hard setting aside chunks of time everyday to moderate, check apps, answer questions, ect on top of writing replies with real world stuff sapping your energy, and sometimes you just do not have the motivation. Kuroya's reasons for closing sites sound valid to me too, they are actual reasons that would make anybody want to throw in the towel and not just 'welp i'm bored of this' i like the idea of giving someone else ownership of a site instead of outright closing it. there's a chance it might still die like the one Kuroya is talking about, but what's there to lose in trying if the new staff and current members want the site to stay afloat. sites not meeting our expectations can be frustrating, on my last site me and my co-admin had an epic vision of literate writers and compelling characters, only to get swarmed by.. katya said it, mary-sues and n00bs. being strict when accepting apps can intimidate people but i've learned the hard way that it's absolutely necessary if you want to build a good community. ask yourself what's better, a site made up of ten members that you actually want to plot with or fifty you can care less about? just to kind of wrap this post up cuz i've gone a bit all over the place, i don't think it's bad to close a site if you have things going on or even just if it's become a chore for whatever reason. my beef is with the site-makers who open and close new ones every other week for no apparent reason.
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MOTHER OF THE MAGICAL GIRLS
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Post by SIFR on Aug 27, 2014 6:51:32 GMT -8
What defines no apparent reason, however? Are they stating they have no reason, or are they just choosing not to share their personal life?
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Post by EMMIE on Aug 27, 2014 8:44:42 GMT -8
my beef is with the site-makers who open and close new ones every other week for no apparent reason. *slow clap* edited: what i think they mean is when admins close sites when the site in question is extremely active and very new. like, if you open a site only to close it one week later when there are very active members on the site and it was just starting to get popular. that is what i think they were getting at. and only close it to maybe open another one, not take a hiatus or something, like if something dramatic / time consuming was happening in their life.
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Post by redox-kun on Aug 27, 2014 8:48:18 GMT -8
tbh i'm guilty of site hopping in the sense that i'm extremely cynical about sites and i quit at the first sign that something is dying
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Post by redox-kun on Aug 27, 2014 8:49:41 GMT -8
let's just say expectation does not match reality. i laughed irl
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MOTHER OF THE MAGICAL GIRLS
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Post by SIFR on Aug 27, 2014 9:03:45 GMT -8
my beef is with the site-makers who open and close new ones every other week for no apparent reason. *slow clap* edited: what i think they mean is when admins close sites when the site in question is extremely active and very new. like, if you open a site only to close it one week later when there are very active members on the site and it was just starting to get popular. that is what i think they were getting at. and only close it to maybe open another one, not take a hiatus or something, like if something dramatic / time consuming was happening in their life. Oh, that makes sense. Thanks Gretchen. <3.
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