How many is too many?

How many forums do you think you could reasonably manage at once? Are you already over your limit or just getting started?

 

1 forum, but 2 - 3 is my limit. and its not "just" the forum, and making post, its security updates, updating modifications, promotion,,,,.

My primary promotion technique is video blogging. I do not have the time to make videos for all of my sites. One saturday I spent 6 hours updating every modification I have installed, and the forum software itself. Now multiply that by how many forums you have.

 

I have reached my limit. One is enough, nevermind two forums; though I manage to take care of both sites and tend to both.

However, I do think 5 forums is the average limit.

 

I'd rather dedicate my time and energy towards one forum rather than two or more - I've found that this allows me to easily focus all of my creative energy on one sole project and therefore, yield superior results in the end.

 

6...

I think it depends on the person in question. You know what your limits are and how much you can accomplish within them. The number of forums you can moderate or administrate would depend on the support networks you have built around yourself. I don't think anyone else can say what your limit is. Some people will limit themselves to one site. Others will be administrators on a dozen.

 

And a dozen is no hyperbole!

I have met people on the net who moderate two dozens. It's usually teen agers with too much time, but seriously, that's a hell of a lot of forums!

 

6???

I dont know what planet you live on, but here on earth we only have 24 hour days. I tried running 4 forums at one time and gave up. It was just too much. Now I maintain mine, my wifes and my sons forum - and that is it.

Even with 3 forums, I barely have time to keep my blogs updated and my youtube channel updated.

 

I'd say about 2 forums is my limit. I have tons of time, but I really like to spend it on promoting the forum and getting good posts up for the members.

 

There are a variety of factors to consider here. If I am the sole administrator whereby all duties and responsibilities belong to me, then I can only do so much. Administration takes time; as Kevin said, you need to be updating the software, promoting, advertising, keeping content going, managing member relations, etc.

If on my forums I had a co-administrator or a team of staff, I could spread myself out and work on more sites. All of the responsibilities wouldn't be mine and I would have time to do other things.

Currently I administrate two forums - my personal forum and this one. Although all of my time isn't taken up between them, a lot of it is. I'm fairly confident I could handle another forum or two, but I haven't had an administration opportunity come by in a long time.

It really depends on the person, their responsibilities and their goals.

 

Blue Moon and PrP are largely the projects of other people - I adopted Blue Moon, and PrP was essentially the idea of two members from Elliquiy, so they put in most of the work to keep it running. Elliquiy, of course, takes up a fair chunk of my time, but being in control of the server lets me do a lot of work to ease the personal burden that simply is not possible on a shared / reseller setup.

I am going to be launching another community this weekend, which I will naturally be spamming in my article submissions here since it's basically a general administration (as in, server administration) and software forum - handling technical details and security, etc. : )

 

There is a ton of things to factor in when trying to figure out ones limit on forums. I could manage a dozen forums as long as they wasn't any bigger than my current set up. But you tack on 100,000 members and I have issues dealing with just one forum.

 

I could do about 8 easily. I work but I'm a co-owner of a business. I manage my time and I guess I'm just able to spend the same amount of time on each forum. I'll have different browsers open with tabs to sites I work on and do it like that. I'm registered on and actively post on about 18 forums at least.

Of course I'm not always available, I think one thing that sucks for me is that I always seem to miss those really long and funny threads where everyone is cracking a joke or something like that.

 

Focus on too many forums and none of them will be successful.

I have lots of free time, and I still only run one forum.

 

One seems to keep me quite busy, too busy in fact.

 

When I was administrator Sitepoint's forum at 100,000 members, I put in an hour or two per day on actual administrative work. I had a good team and I only needed to manage them. I did what they couldn't do. I wouldn't say I was slacking either. I had my username changed to Hierophant over there after I left so people would stop trying to contact me about issues. After six years of relative inactivity there, I still have the 8th largest post count on that site.

 

At this point, I only run sites that have less than 50 members and little to no activity, so it's not that hard...I mean, I'm sure I'll be able to handle a larger site when the time comes, but at this stage, I wouldn't be able to randomly take charge of a 100,000+ member site XD

 

I'm sure a lot depends on how active they are and what the community needs to keep everyone interested.

 

Well I think this is from person to person some person can't even manage one forum and some can manage alot more so if you can run all your forums very good then fine have as many as you can do that with.

 

100% effort into one forum would get the best results in the shortest time but 1-3 is manageable.

 

I couldn't agree more - then again, it all depends on the individual.