I feel like I can respond to this both because my site is 25 months old and the 2 biggest posters after myself (admin) both joined 14 months into the lifecycle and because I’ve had a surprising number of members come back after 6+ month hiatuses, which literally never happened to me before on other sites. We are also basically the last RWBY forum rp site active, in a fandom where the other sites that lived and died or are on long site-wide hiatuses refuse to even consider a move from jcink to proboards where I am now.

Honestly the main thing that I think is the difference is the fact that many of the dead sites tried to be generalist. They tried to appeal to everyone, and in the end nobody was invested enough to actually power through the slow periods because everyone got a mediocre experience out of it. The sites had no core audience, in other words, and thus failed due to appealing to nobody. On my own site I was very transparent with the type of system and type of environment I was trying to create – and more than happy to exclude entire playstyles that weren’t compatible with mine.

It's the same concept as a Session 0, getting everyone on board with tone/general preferences so we can all be excited to go in the same direction. If you like freeform battle systems where rule of cool reigns supreme and you can express your creativity by using your unique power a million different ways… I don’t want you on my site and I made that extremely clear. My entire system is based on well-defined limits and being able to at a glance at a character sheet tell you someone’s general combat capabilities and perhaps more importantly what they can’t do.

By excluding people with incompatible playstyles to my own, I’m allowed to engage in the type of roleplay that I enjoy that will sustain my desire to continue.

No matter what you do, the % of people who stick around will be low. This is one of the only hobbies where people routinely brag and write essays about how much they hate it and how much they don’t want to do it… and yet they still join sites. There will be some who just use sites, especially in a Covid environment, as a chatroom rather than an RP and they never had any intention of roleplaying at all. Whether you allow this is up to you, I generally don’t care even though none of them ever convert to be members. I only remove them once they start to actually prevent RP-related convos from happening, which is most of the time within a month or so in my experience. They get angry that people aren't using it as a chatroom only, despite the fact they joined an explicitly rp forum site discord. People are weird.

There will also be a constant trickle of people who will never get past character creation phase no matter how many hours of effort that you or your members put into helping them. They will suck on your free time forever until you burn out and stop helping them, and this is also a pretty common OOC character I’ve seen in the past two years. If you get baited by them, it will suck and you’ll feel like you did something wrong. You didn’t, and the fact of the matter is that some people find creating characters much more fun and fulfilling than actually playing them.

I’ve also found that spoon feeding threads to players via site events is a great way of weeding out who is and isn’t worth effort. If someone doesn’t take threads being thrown at them because they’re not perfectly tailored to them or not wanting to read a less than 500 word event intro or something… yeah. I just don’t waste my energy on them, because they have no intention of participating. Events is what hooked most of my current members, because they actually wanted to write and took the opportunity and made a cool experience from it and that got them past the “Ooo cool new site” phase and carried them through however long they’ve been on the site.

The biggest thing I’ve been told that OOC made the people on hiatus come back is consistency and the fact that I have zero problem removing people against their will from the discord/site if they try to abuse me or my member base. Many sites die and many people burn out due to OOC drama, and if you’re consistent it makes it very difficult to start any against you when the rules and expectations are transparent, and everyone knows them. There will always be people who rage and try to bulldoze you because they can’t handle basic responsibilities such as activity checks, doing their claims, or reading the introduction post to a thread… but those people can’t be allowed to stay and poison the site for long periods of time and burn other people out.

Also, frankly, I have zero problem telling people their character concepts will be difficult to make work if I feel like they are. Letting someone come in on a completely dead faction/area with no interaction possible with others or with the intention to make 10 wanted ads that they will RP with exclusively and allowing that to go through is just a waste of everyone’s time. Who and what you exclude, both IC and OOC will always be more important than who you include.

Speaking of which, one of the biggest pieces of advice I could give anyone generally is making your game world small.

Yes, small.

There is absolutely zero point of having 12 kingdoms on 12 continents if you have 10 characters on the site in total. It’s a waste of everyone’s time and makes it hard for any of them to do anything. Restrict the setting until everyone can reasonably interact with each other until you reach the point to where you are confident you can split the character base. The goal should absolutely be ensuring that every character, no matter the permutation of faction/location/flavor should be able to interact with most if not the entire site theoretically as soon as their character is approved. If you have locations/factions/flavor allowed that doesn’t allow for them to interact with anybody or are counting the 3 people who decided to app a faction but haven’t posted in 6 months ‘other people a newbie can interact with’ you’re just railroading them into a terrible experience.

And even if you do all of this people can and will just ghost randomly! I’ve seen new characters who could conceivably interact with 20+ that I came up with neat plot ideas for that could have some real mileage out of them because their personality on app would mesh really well with one of my characters and reached out to players individually as soon as their characters got accepted and just…

Nothing comes from it. They either post an open without informing anyone and ghost or just ghost. I’m thinking about one in particular that still makes me sad because they made an OC that fit exactly the type of personality I wanted in an ad that I was 150% willing to thread a bunch with that just… never responded to me and ghosted.

The emails to inactive members actually tend to bring 1-2 of them back for me every time, so thanks for reminding me to do it. Occasionally sometimes cold DMs to members who ghosted just to check up if you thought you were friends tend to work on my end too. Ghosting is much more common post-Covid I feel like because a lot of people have very unstable life/mental situations and frankly I don’t blame anyone for cutting a hobby out of their life so they can focus on their own health.

There’s also the extremely common OOC character who just takes on more sites than they can chew and your site is the one that drops first as the newest one when they realize they can’t handle multiple sites at once. Or maybe you’re like me and decide to join sites and write entire apps at 3am and wake up and wonder what in tarnation you just did. You could also have people who just randomly make accounts before they even read the rules or anything, which is also semi-common for some reason.

Or someone who joins because the only FC they wanted to play was going to be activity checked in 24hrs but the person comes back after 2 months after posting 0 times IC total to just make the activity check and deny you the FC you wanted – yeah I’m still salty.