i feel this on a spiritual level. 

there's nothing wrong with chilling out in the discord and whatnot, i can be a lazy pos sometimes but we all have our days

but it also sort of drags my own muse down when no one else posts, specially if it's a small site and there's events going on. just kinda lose my motivation a bit -shrugs-

That's a really rough place to be.

There's a not insignificant % of people who will view that as a personal attack and post less/leave to spite you for saying that, but you know your member base better than us.

I had this talk with my members and we compromised by making an event system that forced people to post or get left behind. I got sick of waiting for people and expressed that and it worked out, but in a different member base people would've felt personally attacked and took their ball and went home. For my site it wasn't the first time I had been brutally honest in my assessment of how things are going and nobody was surprised/offended by it because I always made a point of transparency beforehand so they trusted me enough to give my proposal a shot. We had the biggest 3 month spike the site ever had in activity, and all agreed to have a down period afterwards because the constant post spam got a bit much after that long.

In a forum where you hold your cards close to the chest and don't have that level of trust, it'll be a lot harder. You know your members better than we do, good luck.

^ To this post above me, I think I might really give that a shot. Just sit down and talk to the member base and be like "listen we need at least like two posts a week to keep this ball rolling." Or is two posts a week too demanding.... Hmm. Still, it'd be good to talk to members and see what kind of activity they can handle. Hold some big meeting and award points and things. I've always got some pretty good incentives for events though.

I think that as staff, we sometimes forget that we can just... Talk? To our member base? Set out some things and get some suggestions? Like I have a whole ass channel in discord dedicated to staff asking members things, because yeah.

Stuff like that will usually happen to me on launches and I'll end up over trying to engage everyone with plots until I'm burnt out. I can't say I've ever really been super successful at breaking the glass ceiling on launching things because I also get impatient with member base growth and participation. I've mostly decided to just support other people's work for now because it is easier to find an admin needing help than to be an admin looking for help.

On the longest running forum I'm on, only like 30 of 70 pages of members ever posted one IC post. A lot of that deals with it having a lot of reading, but I think it'd still hold true on other forums that a lot of people are going to register but only a fraction of them are going to participate.

If I decided to do it all over again, I'd have a second site to play on while nurturing the little seedling site. If you stare at it while it is growing you will drive yourself mad, and being over active can even come off as overbearing. You just need to water the site (post) and give it a little sunlight (ads). I've always made the mistake of trying to sprint towards having a large community, but those big communities are built on human connections. Things like chatting on discord might seem like a stupid waste of time, but I wouldn't even be on the sites I'm on now if I hadn't built social bonds with the people there.

We're super active on discord, it's just that we're not as super active on site that people seem to notice. However, we've added titanbot so people can now see up chatting on discord and join us in the discord if they want to.

An influx of new members is fantastic, but an influx of people who don't read anything and expect all the answers and then are super lazy about their characters makes me really wanna just boot them. x.x

[nospaces]

I have so so much I want to do. New species, serious events, and plot points that will just explode minds and it's going to be fantastic. I'm so excited. However... Life. Life seriously getting in the way of all the things. So I guess I just have to be patient and hope that my site doesn't die in the meantime while I get my shit together.

That moment when you have a concept idea, which leads to wanting to build a site. To being reminded that running a site takes so much time and effort. To deciding to write the stuff down to see if maybe that concept idea can work on one of my current sites. To sooner or later, dodging the creation of a site because I lost motivation for that concept. I must say, patients has been my friend this last month.

I haaaate..... Being absent... When I'm staaaaaaaaffffff. I know that it's a little rough right now but damn. Can I put forth a little more effort while I have time to do so? No? Okay.

Setting clear expectations and not budging weeds out a lot of problems.

If someone blows up and wants to implode over something basic that every member has to do IE activity checks, doing their own XP calcs, whatever your site does that takes very little time... let them.

If someone is super toxic and angry about things that don't matter and they agreed to do, what happens the first time something doesn't go their way IC? What happens when they have an actual disagreement with someone?

The same explosion that happened over the extremely minor thing that they'd rather spend 30 minutes flaming over and trying to bully others into letting slide them not doing it rather than 2 minutes doing except worse. I don't view it as my job to keep anyone who does this, and instead I let them implode all at once and then get rid of them. It's for the best for everyone involved.

People have bad days, but there's a difference between being supportive through a bad day and letting someone abuse you and your members off the site because for some reason you feel like you need them or don't want to deal with the issue.

I hate writing all the site info down on my own. It's such a daunting task, and it's part of the reason I stop halfway into making most forums.

Updating......... Information............ Seriously why do I have to do this? oh right... Cuz it's been like 2 years and things have happened......... BUT WHY