What are some things that discourage you? That make you question the reason you ever started a forum?
A decrease in overall activity will get to me. More specifically, the lack of new user registrations. I am interested to hear what everyone else has to say.
I become discouraged when I see the following: An (overall) lack of activity. This is something that will disappoint me to no end - but it's something that can be solved. Members who post short, useless messages (i.e. "Great.", "Cool.", "Yeah. Okay."). This will annoy me to a point of frustration. An immature memberbase - if you can't take the heat and/or defend your position, don't bother posting.
Rival forums - Especially when they appear to be doing twice as well as yourself when you put in twice the effort. In my case, the forum in questions was established a month in advance to mine and had installed VbSEO immediatly and henceforth dominated the search engines. Established members quitting - Heart wrenching when a gear that keeps your community turning - with new, fresh and interesting discussions even a few years after they've joined - suddenly due to personal circumstances or a shift in interest suddenly leaves the community. I have a lot of faith in myself and the users I keep close to me across several boards, so much so that I very rarely feel discouraged. There can be very little that could break my communities apart and we have survived sudden downturns and inner community wars over a span of several years. I think this defines a community though, ever changing but always lasting.
Well I must say that I think the same as the above posters. When the activity is almost none then I just wanna go to bed.
Inactive members, forums, not a constant flow of traffic, useless members who just register and never use the account; just registering to view all parts of the forum, competing forums who create their forum after mine and do better, immature members/staff. I'm really not one to talk of immature members or staff, because a lot of the time, if there's something I stand for passionately, I come across as immature.
The people that complain all the time. There is always something wrong with, this, or, with, that,,,,,. Its just a freaking forum, do something in real life and get away from the computer for a little while.
I have to say you pretty much hit that on the head. Especially the inactive members/ forum, no constant flow of traffic. I am at the beginning with mine and I am already getting a bit discouraged at the fact there I have 5 members and none post. I think if I got a few extra people that posted and we could create some dialogue I think it would be better than nothing.
I don't know about the others, Sonya, but I tried to post before and got security token errors. I just tried again and it's fixed now, so you have one post with more to come
The time commitment. Even when everything is going great it is a big time commitment. It is a labor of love but it still takes time away from doing other things.
Yes it is fixed and thank you so much for your posts. I actually have 12 visitors right now and hope that at least one of them joins. I have to say Twitter rocks because thats where I posted about my board and have that many vistors within minutes of posting.
Twitter certainly has proven to be a great traffic source. I created a thread about it here a while ago, if you're interested.
