don't mind me casually moving this into the staff confessions thread because it's something i really want to talk about as a concept.

there's... honestly a lot i want to unpack here with this so.

i guess the first thing is that i feel like there is a grain of truth to this statement - animanga forum-based rp is a pretty small pond, in the grand scheme of things, and these days the community has definitely been very strongly moving in a direction that favors having either super big sites (that are typically either very established by this point and/or associated with big names in the community) or a number of smaller ones that struggle to get traction with very little room in between those two extremes. this isn't necessarily a new thing in the community, per se, it's just... two things that aren't really feeding well into each other and can make it a hostile place to establish a new site + keep it around for more than a month or two and have only become more exaggerated with the shortened lifecycle of a site now compared to five or six years ago.

but at the same time i do feel like there's a lot to say about a lot of sites just... not planning well for the possiblity of them staying smaller and/or for the long-term, both in general and in regards to less popular concepts. and while this is something that can definitely be laid at the feet of staff teams (since imo a plot-driven site should probably take precautions in laying out their pieces to make sure that there's enough active people in a given faction to make things work and to put failsafes in place for if they can't fill xyz big canon position, just as mod-heavy sites should do as much as they can ahead of time to try to stave off the inevitable specter of staff burnout from all the maintenance and systems), some of it can also be traced back to the wider community (since i mean... i think of all those digimon sites that popped up and almost immediately died off again after the hype of the new release wore off and people lost interest or all the magical girl sites that struggled to keep momentum going even though they're a somewhat common "site people want to see" [which i'm actually not trying to throw shade about that, just point out that even "popular" concepts might have major issues in gathering traction behind them that can make it difficult to plan around]).

most sites just aren't built from the thought of "if we get big, great, but we're going to assume we won't and work around that premise for our systems so that we're not having to pull off a surprised pikachu three months down the road if it's just three people doing their things here", and i say that where it's something i recently had to do and it was... honestly an interesting experience actually building the systems out in a way that was meant to be practical in the long-term even if it might be unusual for the wider community or have really weird consequences for the short-term (like letting people get away with not posting on certain characters because they're in plotting deadzones at a particular moment in time and the only way to reverse that situation is to wait it out until those areas populate out as the site grows and changes). and i think that's something you really need to be keeping in mind when building a site, especially in a niche concept, since imo it's a lot easier to scale a site upwards as you grow than to scale it downwards in the wake of a disappointing opening or after the new site smell wears off (and more likely to work out for you in the long-term than choosing not to scale it at all regardless of the situation you're in).

like i said, i have a lot of thoughts about this, and while i reworded it a few times on mobile already, i'm sure i didn't hit on everything and expressed some of my points a little poorly, but i really wanted to just let it be what it is and call it a day by this point lmao-

i agree with 99.9% of this with literally just one exception.

which is that if you have a limited amount of affiliate spots and you are very close to that limit, there are definite consequences to not cleaning out the inactive ones since imo newer sites aren't going to be able to affiliate because there's no room and most sites tend to lock their affiliate threads at that point so someone can't just apply anyway and you can combine the two chores. but that's it. that's the only real situation where having inactive affiliates can actively cause harm if they're not cleaned out.

but also spiral is dang right in just. if someone points out, just play it off as "oh! i generally don't check affiliates often, thanks for letting me know, do you mind going through the list and messaging me which sites are offline or haven't had an ic post in over a month? it'd be a great help to me if you did c: " valka knows exactly how well this worked on me, i was delighted to take over affs for her on ccr since oops that is exactly the kind of low-maintenance periodic busy work i love doing.