Failed forums and communities

While I am not proud to admit it, I've had two failed forums so far. They were brilliant ideas from the planning room floor that eventually matured into fully functioning forums. For some reason or another, I lost interest or got to the point where I didn't want to even visit the forum I was the admin for. And when admin stops coming, bad things happen and anarchy ensues (and lots of spam). But we fall down so that we can pull ourselves back up and I've embarked again anew with a better strategy and growth plan from the beginning.

It might be that I'm not interested in making money off the sites or that these forums don't generate money on their own (enough to be important to continually manage).

That said, have you had forum failures in in your tenure as an admin? Did you walk away, shut it down or resurrect it?

 

I've had two of these so far. The first is a forum I started years ago, it grew fast, has over 2,000 members and 80,000 posts. But I lost interest, life happened and I simply stopped going to my own forum.

I've recently gone back and started to revive it. Some of the old members have come back and there have been some new ones, but it is still no where near how active it was in it's glory days. There are maybe a dozen posts a day now, where we used to have a dozen posts per minute.

I hope eventually things will get rolling again.

The second happened a few months ago when I tried to set up a new forum for a community that was going to shut down. I had lurked there often and been a user for a while but not an active member. Big mistake. Huge. The community turned on me big time because they "didn't know me". I was just offering them an alternative so they didn't have to be homeless and I got bitten.

I will never do that again.

 

I have had several failed forums, it nothing to be ashamed of and it happens to all forum owners.

One of the big mistakes I think that causes failed forums, is not enough time to post or promote the forum.

Another issue is lack of attention by the forum owner. I see lots of forums where the owner has only posted 500 times in 6 months. If the owner is not going to post in a forum, why should anyone else?

 

yeah, one of the forums i was admin on has failed, havent had a post in weeks, and another one i was staff on which was owned by someone i know never really took off at all-its out there somewhere, good thing it was on a free forum host cause i wouldnt want to pay for it, theres only about 20 posts, all of them made in 2009

 

We had a business forum that failed once - but we ended up selling it.

 

I have one failed forum,for two reasons.

I started too big in scope and dropped it when I was given a different forum already established.

With a blog and forum.I find it enough for me.

 

I failed many times and each time I get back up with even more enthusiasm. I'm not getting off this one though. It's gonna be the "One".

I have failed with 2 forums recently. One is being buried soon. The other has been dead and the funeral was a few months ago. Both I just got bored of and got tired of no one else posting. So I gave up. Bad Idea.

 

I have a fairly active site; quite new. I could never consider giving up on it. Especially with all these pain-staking hours I've committed to it.

 

I've got 1 failed forum, lucky I own a gamer forum now so it has a lot of traffic going on it

 

i m feeling lucky that my forum is quite active

 

The forum I worked on before the one I have currently running went downhill for two reasons, 1) two big contributors turned the knife on me and stabbed me in the back big time, I don't know why, but they did. So since then I have been trying to keep it above water by myself pretty much, because I am too scared to ask friends to help run the forum as in my experience it just doesn't work that way. 2) I have psycho parents who were stalking me on my forum and it made me feel even more dishartened by it.

But now I am going for it again under a new name and I am feeling confident