Growing Tired of your Community

As horrible as this may sound, it's a viable question.

There are quite a few forum administrators out there today that become "tired" of their own community - or in other words, they lose the motivation that they once had and, because of this, give up on what was once their pride and joy. Now personally, I can't see myself arriving at such a problem - having both the drive and dedication, I've never felt the need to "give up" on any one of my web-based projects.

Your thoughts?

 

I haven't felt this either yet, though there are a couple of forums of mine that I'm rethinking my ability to be a good admin to. Doesn't mean I'm tired of the forum though.

 

And it also could be a "subtle" cry for change - maybe sprucing the board up with a new theme would help.

 

Not this time; a new theme would just be a cosmetic change.

 

Well, I do not grow tired of my community, I grow tired of the negative comments the user throw at me.

 

I have once or twice experienced this, but when i do i just introduce something new to liven up the board again

 

Sometimes, I do grow tired of both Setsou Design and Bird is the Word, to be frank.

Usually, I lose faith in the sites or just get fed up with the results.

But at the end of the day, both sites are my hobbies and I enjoy having them.

 

I have to be honest... I have lost interest in my own communities at times. It's not to the point where I lose the forum and everything goes down the drain, but I may not participate much for a while and do something else instead.

 

A lot of forum owners start their communities on the "hot topic" of the day. Of course they are going to loose interest.

This is why its critical to pick a topic that has affected your life in one way or another.

 

I have felt like this once or twice. But instead of giving up I might re-arrange the forum layouts and styles etc.

 

I had this happen with my pspforum.com years ago. I had the #1 psp forum out there but it wasn't a topic I was passionate about. Eventually sold the site off at about 300k posts. PSPF was one of my first major successes as a forum but ultimately I made some mistakes and the site suffered for it. It was a huge learning experience.

So far at HF I haven't lost any momentum. I suppose because there are many topics that interest me and probabaly always will. I like computing and I have added a few special forums just for my own pleasure.

 

I haven't yet gotten tired of any communities, but I can understand how someone could get tired of all the work that goes into it.

 

I have been feeling like this a-bit recently...

Those that have read some of my earlier posts know that due to injuries I am unable to play sport any more and because I love my sport I started my website as my way of being involved in the sporting community.

However after 12 months of planning and development, I launched the site on Jan 01 2009 and things were going well we hit 1000 members quickley and out of that about 800 were active, had over 30k posts and then we were hacked and got hit by the Gumblar.cn virus and had to start from scratch - we have been back online for 2 months now and only have 23 active members who have made just on 1,500 posts.

What annoys me the most is I am forever introducing new things, have spent money on getting prizes for our referral competition, and daily have 15-20 guests online at any minute I am checking the website but at the moment am getting one new registration a week if I am lucky and it is getting disheartening.

After spending so long organising sponsors for the site, which means free hosting on a dedicated server and over $2000 worth of prizes donated to our competitions, as well as being placed on the media releases of over 100 sporting associations, organisations and clubs as well as interviewing some of the biggest names in Australian sport I don't seem to be getting anywhere!

 

I think this happens to everyone at some point, when youre on the same forum day in day out fixing it up, making everything just right you can eventually run out of things that need doing especially if you have a great moderation team.

I havent got bored as of yet but I no longer post as much as I used to, I tend to focus on SEO and the marketing of the site these days. I am sure this will change as we top Google

 

That sounds really frustrating merk_aus. It sounds like you're doing everything you possibly can on that front, maybe you're not getting new registrations because of all the other sports forums out there? How are your Google rankings?