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Full Version: People Creating The Same Forum Over And Over
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I guess I'll create the first actual thread in here, but I've been on Forum Promotion since 2011, and I still occasionally go on there looking for communities up my alley to join. Anywho, over the years I've noticed some of the same users creating the same forum over and over, albeit with a different name. First I thought that maybe they just like having multiple sites with the same topic, but then from the ones I've joined, it'll be busy for the first month, and then the owner stops caring, and then it'll be dead in a month. Then you'll notice they delete the forum, and a couple months later they make another one. The cycle then repeats.

What are your thoughts on people like this? I do understand that sometimes you just gotta shut down your forum because of lack of time, or whatever other reason. Or you think it's best to just kill off a site and start anew. Though at the same time, it does get silly when, for example, you see Bob make his 5th Zelda forum. In a way it makes me feel bad not wanting to give Bob another chance when I see him make another Zelda forum. Though at the same time, I end up ignoring it when I notice Bob made the forum, and I know he's going to delete it in a couple months and make another one.
Brb have to reopen Dashing

I'm not too fussed, it gives the owner a chance to learn from their mistakes. I don't understand the point of wiping everything and starting again though, as it's a waste of time working back up to the point you were previously. I suspect it is because they want to maintain some kind of posts per month ratio which is stupid because the only people who look at it are Forum Promotion reviewers who just need some kind of thing to justify their bs review scale (Dashing would never get higher than an 8 because 100,000 for 10 years is LOLTOOLOW, as if there's a way to improve it after that much time).

You do raise a good point about reputation. If you've seen someone open and close a forum a few times then that's a red flag about how much work they intend to put in. It's offensive that they'd just expect people to contribute to a site that they aren't keen on maintaining in the long run.
Some of the forums I see that delete and start over do it because there was some pretty bad drama or dirty shit going on, and they just want to start fresh with a new community with different people to get away from the shit that happened. Or it died years ago, and they know that nobody wants to post in a forum that hasn't had activity in years.

I will say that the majority of the time with these people starting the same forum over and over, the sites die because the owner just plain stops doing anything. I give kudos to people who try, but it just doesn't work out, but when you just don't do anything, I tend to pit the blame all on them. So it makes me wonder what they're expecting when they make multiple forums, and they just think sitting around doing jack shit will make it grow. It also makes things sillier when it's an FP staff member doing it. It seems pretty prudish to tell people the "correct" way to run a site, while simultaneously running multiple forums into the ground for not following their teachings. Then their friends in the staff give their forums 5 star ratings, despite they're as active as a rock.
Well yeah avoiding drama counts towards the 'learning from mistakes' thing. Which is fine.

When the owner just up and stops giving a shit about the site then what's going to change the second time around?

I always found forum reviews to be useless. The worst ones were the ones I'd get for Pokémon Meadow (Pokémon rpg forum I worked at), which needed to have 20ish moderators so they could frequently update people's journey threads and profiles. But reviews would just be like, "Herrderr 20 mods 0/10." The only good comments were things about forum themes but you could get that just by talking to your members. :/
I guess some people think traffic and posts just magically appear themselves. You're not doing yourself any favors when people join and the owner/staff don't acknowledge that people are posting. Kind of defeats the purpose. I definitely lose interest when I try to generate traffic by making threads or posting, and just get ignored.
This somewhat happened with the forum I met Rachel on. Started off as 6thfloor, went to Pokelegacy, went back to 6thfloor, and then to Lavender Town. However, either 2 of the times or every single time the forum went down, it was due to some sort of security issue. Every subsequent time the forum lost more and more activity though. People kinda gave up thinking it was just going to get shut down or hacked again.

I have seen forums willingly go down and around due to the owner multiple times though. I understand losing hope and wanting to give it another go, but rebranding only goes so far before you realize you need some of an established community to go forward.
That's kind of shitty for that Pokemon forum to get shut down for security issues. I feel bad for the community if there's stuff like that happening.

I do agree with rebranding only going so far. Most of these people don't have a community.
Forums are a dying thing in general tbh. If you're a group of friends that wanna post about whatever, starting a Discord or a Skype group is dozens of times easier. However the good formula for one is having a group of people that share the same interest and throwing it on a website. Advertise it to their friends and maybe word gets around that there's a place for everyone to discuss things and have it grow naturally from there.


It really is a shame to see Forums become more obsolete as time goes on though, with things like Reddit existing as well, homogenizing everyone with a similar interest to one page. Some exist but they're either out of the way or have been insanely popular for a long time (mmochampion is an example), but I guess they're still around for those who enjoy them enough.
My other forum is about to hit its 5 year mark soon. Didn't really realize it's that old, or that 2011 was that long ago.
The medium changes, the function remains the same: Literal forums in real space where people actually posted notices to an actual bulletin board, and met to discuss things; To digital Bulletin Boards where you dialed in with a modem and posted your messages; Then the internet came and so did HTML so then you accessed it through a domain name and a browser, yet people were still posting notices to a virtual board; Smartphones came and so did Tapatalk and now you post them through a single portal via your phone to many boards.
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