Running a forum - A thankless task?

[temi]

Someone I know who runs a small growing and fairly busy forum has decided to shut down the forum over this weekend, another small forum owner I know is finding it hard to continue, he as if I would like to buy his forum.

V7N was put up for sale in the last few days, iWT are having lots of ups and downs, this makes me wonder what is going on in the forum industry and why the heck do people start a forum anyway giving that most forum do not make money and give forum owners loads of headache, what are your thoughts on this?

 

[Bagi Zoltán]

I started to visit webmaster forums in 2006 v7n and Dp and IWT at the very same time. From these three my favourite was the IWT. I adores it, i was so proud when I was promoted there to contributor. But one I was requested to be a moderator, there was no more goal. Hard to confess but that is true. When you are promoted to a respected position you may loose motivation. You got new tasks, fight against spammers. It is far not an easy thing. I started my own forum with a friend of mine, but that was dedicated the success, since Hungarian market is not full of webmaster forums. Only have 2 or 3. I keep loosing motivation everyday since nothing new, same questions, no challange. I
can understand John Scott's feeling. He is fed up with seo. Telling the truth it is interesting for the first months, maybe years but after that it becomes very boring I think.
Nowadays I love DP since there are so many problems in the threads which means challange for me. The UKWW has a very own spirit, something similar than IWT had in the middle of 2006. I missed some member from here, and if they find their way here I suppose the best men would be in the same place.

 

[rhyswynne]

I did run a forum for a while. I'm going to consider re-launching it sometime down the road, and basically run it like a hub for all my sites.

I stopped the first time because it is a very thankless task. There's a lot of behind the scenes stuff that is done - spam destroying, member management, disputes settling. I was running phpBB, and that was a b***h to keep on top of.

I wonder how big forums such as Digital Pointless cope with all the above.

Well, in Digital Pointless' point, they don't

 

[seonotes]

I together with my friends in Canada started a forum 4 years back. We were 4 people managing the forums and we were forced to shutdown due to spam attacks E.g. Sql injections and Spam posts. The forum was built with soopportal an ASP based forum system.


We did get some investors but they shy away, when they find a large nos. of spam posts I switched off the forum and hosted a blog which I found hard to maintain now. (Lack of time and energy) The domain is promising and good to start a developer forum like devshed.

This is indeed a thankless job, well said temi!

 

[Midlandi]

It takes me in waves I have to say.
Last week was a bad week, not just for the Forum, but work on general.
I have to admit I was ready to give up and sell up right there.
I dont do it for the money but the pleasure of it,so if that goes its difficult to get motivated and thats bad fr the Forum.
Still I have picked up now and hopefully back on track.

The hardest part is getting the forum to the stage that your not constantly looking for ways to keeps things rolling, also without copying too much what others are doing (LOL...I sent a PM to Temi with a great mod I found today, another that I had installed I see is already here ..the referal one...!!! so do I use that ??...dosnt matter either way but you see my point!)

IWT is on a slippery slope but still can be recovered, I mirror Bagis sentiments regarding iwt.

Running a Forum is time consuming,frustrating,great fun,rewarding,annoying,baffling...........a real mixture of emotions.

The worst thing I do is visit others that are about the same size as mine to compare, ok if im having a good day and they are not its a boost, but the other way round is a real downer.

I was surprised to see V7n up for sale, thats a decent icome for JS. He says he is selling to go back to school, well with the income the site gets surley he could just pay one of his team to run it. maybe he has no-one he can trust?

 

[mikeinlincs]

Last week was a bad week, not just for the Forum, but work on general.
I have to admit I was ready to give up and sell up right there.
I dont do it for the money but the pleasure of it,so if that goes its difficult to get motivated and thats bad fr the Forum.

I think there was something in the water last week as I felt just the same, If someone had made me an offer I would have been gone.

The hardest part is getting the forum to the stage that your not constantly looking for ways to keeps things rolling, also without copying too much what others are doing.

That part Im still coming to terms with, only around a third of my forums members have ever posted, sometimes I wonder why they bothered to join in the first place.

Running a Forum is time consuming,frustrating,great fun,rewarding,annoying,baffling...........a real mixture of emotions.

Now I know why Im slowly going NUTS... it's my forum do it... lol

Mike

 

[OldWelshGuy]

i get IMMENSE joy from my rugby forum. We fight and bitch and slag off anyone who is not Welsh and then when we are done, we slag off each others teams etc

Do I make money from the forum? NO WAY. Do i WANT to make money from the forum? NO WAY. Any money that comes in in adsense etc is spent on kit for kids rugby.

You should run a forum for love, as a hobby, a place to get AWAY from work.

 

[Midlandi]

You should run a forum for love, as a hobby, a place to get AWAY from work.

I totally agree, thats my view.

 

[gizmo91]

Yes I know they dont earn that much money as mush they take headach, I too owned a forum before, and know how tough the task is, specially because it want full time, and no earnings,

____________

 

[kineticdc]

Wow, it sounds like so many of my friends who own manufacturing companies. Do it for love and and they are happy. Do it for money and sadness never leaves them. Thanks to all of you who are doing it for love.

 

[Jordandelozier]

Let me start by saying: I've made a considerable amount of money from my forum. The forum I run is targeted at professionals so the general bickering that comes from "general" or "teen" type sites doesn't apply. I still get loads of spam but I've selected such a good group of moderators that I hardly ever see it before they delete it.

My forum has also released several public open-source projects that many other internet website owners use. This gives me tremendous happiness in the fact that our projects are a success.
You may spend countless hours doing an upgrade and a few users hate it but in the end meeting the new people, conversing with people from different regions in the world, and helping others in need should give you enough gratitude. I spend so much time on my forum(s) that I'm afraid I've become addicted.