Biggest Challenges?

What sorts of problems are admins facing in 2014? I only work on a few boards nowadays, so I'm curious to see if these challenges are fairly universal.

To further explain the options:

Acquisition - marketing to, and acquiring new members

Retention - keeping members around and engaging them

Content - similar to above, but specifically having enough valuable content. attracts natural traffic.

Technical - limited by platform or lack of technical help

Moderation - platform is underpowered or we are overwhelmed

I'm avoiding blanket statements like "money" because that is usually hiding a deeper problem (not enough content or members, etc.). Are there any other key areas I'm missing?

I've been kickin' around the idea for a product for the past year or so, and if people are actually having this problem, well it's probably worth looking into further.

 

For me i face the issue of
1. Getting those new members who join to stick around and get involved....

2. My existing community is lazy...so getting them to do anything is a job on its own.

3. My staff(aside from a few) is useless

 

I think the answer is going to be related more to where a specific forum is in its life cycle. A brand new forum wouldn't have the same challenges as a huge forum started ten years ago would. For example, the two forums I have listed in my signature here have very different challenges. For my coin forum, we face challenges keeping the spammers and scammers at bay, while for my stamp forum the challenge is more with marketing and though we have a good core of members posting there isn't a great deal of organic traffic coming to the site so the growth is very slow. Member retention should be a challenge to every forum, at least ones that have members. The other challenges you mention, and most other challenges, are more or less relevant depending on the forum's life cycle.

 

• Viral marketing
• Guest to quality poster conversion
• UXD
• Engagement
  
• Content quality control
• Resources optimization
• Monetizing
• Moderator workflow, moderation automation & crowd moderation
• Converting or flushing low quality users

In no particular order of importance.

 

Thanks for the replies.

Answers can be specific to a forum's lifecycle... that's fine.

 

Personally, I've got a different issue that I consider one of my biggest challenges.

Design.

I have absolutely zero creativity or art skills, so just finding decent images and trying to come up with layouts ends up more difficult than actually running the site on a day to day basis.

 

I agree with this. Too many times an admin will have a bias towards one member to the disadvantage of another. This is obviously wrong and will lead to disenchantment.

 

The biggest challenge for me was growing my community to over 200k posts. It took us less than three years to do, I hope we can hit 400k before the next two years. It's a challenge everyday to come up with fresh new topics that haven't been posted. With over 17k threads, we continue to move forward. I'm just glad that we hit 200k posts before our third anniversary.

 

When I started my first forum (which lasted 9 years), the challenges were

- Trying to get the players from the game onto the forum (Starcraft)
- Trying to come up quality content to keep them around
- Moderation tools to prevent the constant stream of abuse

After launching a league to go along with the forum, that was more or less enough to get people to register and stick around. However, a few years later the league died, and the same 10,000 guys sticked around for a few more years.

Then, the above issues are magnified 100x and it eventually died off. I think the lifecycle of the forum outlast the game itself, so death was inevitable. However, those struggles are still very fresh in my mind.

To keep things fresh you really need to hustle.

 

I always try my best to hustle on a daily basis. Especially getting my users to create new content and interact on certain threads. In order to succeed, you have to work hard for it and success will come your way. Success doesn't just happen overnight, it takes time and a lot of patience because building an online community takes a lot of dedication and motivation to keep it growing, so I agree with you.

 

I voted it is creating content. It is content that gets the users, yet in a community, it is the users that often make a lot of the good content. It is a chicken and egg dilemma kind of thing and why a lot of forum owners don't get their forums off the ground. They want to start a community, but aren't experts in the niche subject they start their forums in themselves and thus can't really create relevant content to gain more users.

Scott

 

At the moment getting new users and creating content