I'm starting to realize just how short a life most RPs have, and it's making me really frustrated.

Since AG opened a little over three months ago, I've advertised at something like 700 sites. About 660 advertised back. The last two days I've been going through all the ads and deleting the ones that lead to inactive/offline sites. I've deleted nearly four hundred ads (from 44 pages to 26) and I still have 19 pages of advertisements to work through. I shouldn't have to spend hours deleting ads. This is seriously wrong.

I go to these sites, sites I remember just like they were advertised yesterday (which they pretty much were), and what do I see? Offline messages. Like the following.

Oy. No kidding. These are a few of the things I've noticed as I've gone through the ad forum cleanout.

Just because the site is pretty, that doesn't mean it's a good site you should all rush to join! In fact, the prettier and trendier the site is, the faster it seems to die. How about you look for a site that has something like, I dunno, a plot?
Revamps don't work. Posting does. Plotting does. Talking does. Sheer will power does. But a 'fresh start' isn't going to guarantee anything.
RL and 'muse' are not excuses to shut down a site. WHERE IS THE COMMITMENT? WHERE?! Seriously, if you're not willing to push through the hard times, you shouldn't have started a site at all. That goes for members too; don't join unless you're seriously interested.
One to two months is not 'a good run.' It's an awful run. It's more like a lame sprint. Sites over a year old have had good runs.
A roleplay should be a marriage, not a one-night stand. Seriously. "It was fun while it lasted?" Congratulations, adminitrogdor, you just screwed your members over.
High member count doesn't make an active site. I've seen sites with 15 members that are much more active than sites with 150. I've had some people pop into the cbox and ask how active my site is. Me=Use your eyes. For example, we've had about three hundred posts in the last five days. A guest left a message saying "How active is your site on a scale of 1 to 10? <two minutes elapse> Eh...looks like a three, I guess." Their judgment was based on how many people were online at the time...which was the middle of the night for most of my members, on a week day. :angry: Don't leave messages like that in my cbox about my wonderfully active site, jerkface!

Gah. I just can't comprehend how some people lose interest in an RP so quickly. AG has been around for three months, but I feel like we've barely even started.

Administrators: Value the members you have! It's worth keeping the site open if there are two or three dedicated members willing to continue the RP. That's all you need to build a great, active site. Dedication. Dedication. Dedication.

Members: Don't make comments in the cbox like 'the site is slow,' 'people aren't posting,' 'I'm soooo boooooored,' and 'blah de whine whine blah.' That's your job, to post and make the site active! Stop wasting time chatting about what you could be doing and do it.

PS, Advertisers: Stop double/triple/quadruple posting. It's annoying.

I'll end on this note. It's a quote by that dude who invented the light bulb.



Now that's a bright idea.

how about a big, fat ..

amen!

Good lord, if more people would realize this, then the roleplaying community might be a better place. >_<

Okay, maybe not. But still, all these trendy, "OMG I'M SO PRETTY LOLZ JOIN BETCH" sites are really starting to get on my nerves. And, am I the only one that notices that it's starting to happen with support forums, as well? RPG support forums (like RPG-D & whitepages/caution) and graphic sites (like RCR & Pandora's) are coming and going like flies, I swear .. I'm just thankful for the ones that actually stick around.

Anyway, AshBeanNun, I seriously applaud you. I really do.

to beath the proverbial dead horse...

*hear hear*

-now goes off to pray that XMS hangs around for a while-

I have to disagree with the 'RL' being a good excuse deal... there are some VERY good RL reasons for closing down a site... death in the family being one or losing your computer or getting sick.

As for the others...

SPOT ON ;)

There are, how ever, some qualifications... another problem, for sites that are getting started, are members who aren't devoted to the board... I've been active on sites where the admin and right-hand mod are active like every day... but the members that sign up for it get on when they 'feel like it'...

So the 'laziness' factor extends to the members as well as the staff. If your going to join a site be devoted to it. And don't blame the admins if you loose interest - muse lose is a good excuse for neither admins NOR members :p

There's a sign on the wall of the dojo I go to rl. It says "A black belt is a white belt who never quit."

Whenever I start thinking, not just about martial arts but about anything, "I can't do this" or "I'll never learn this" or "I won't make it" I remember that sign.

There's also the silly belief that how many posts you have today will determine how many posts you'll have tomorrow -- or that a board that hasn't had a post in two weeks is dead.

I've personally been running a board for two years. It was around at least a year before I joined. Then the original administrators quit the site and myself and a then-moderator took it over. I enjoy the pacing and slower posts don't bother me the way they may bother other people. XD

I suppose it's just personal taste. Anyway. Best of luck to everyone in attracting quality, dedicated members. I love mine. Small group, good people.

AshBean, your trouble with advertisements is exactly why my co-admin and I made the decision to -not- have an advertising section on our forum. ^^; Too much work and too little reward.

Ash and I have been RPing together for a long time, and I'm sure she remembers the days when I started a site as soon as I had an idea...and it was normally dead within two weeks, if it ever picked up in the first place. I was the QUEEN of flash-in-the-pan sites.

I'm proud to say (and I think Ash will agree with me) that I have learned restraint...in everything but making characters. Anyway. I am more dedicated to AG than I have been to any site before, and working on it with Ash has taught me a lot about what a site needs to succeed.

Long live AG!

:D

I can definitely empathise with the whole "guest posts in Cbox, gets no reply after 5 minutes, decides the site is dead, leaves" thing. I've had that a few times, and the guest happens to post at like... 9 AM my time. Do you think I spend my life on the computer, retard? Like, honestly. My members also don't spend their lives on the computer (most of them, anyway >>). I wish that people would, instead of posting once and leaving when they don't get an IMMEDIATE response, come back in an hour or two, maybe register and THEN guage site activity. Or click that little link that says "Today's Posts" to SEE the activity. But no. That makes sense. Slowly I'm learning that the more sense something makes, the less likely people are to do it.

It's funny because I do do some of the things people mention here to do when checking for activity. I check the times of the last Cbox posts, the dates of the latest updates, the most recent posts, and basically look around looking to see if most of the forums have been posted in recently.

It's one of the first things I do. Actually the second.

The first is to make sure there is no Wall of Shame...

Oh I love your rant and I totally agree! Many admins nowadays just let their site die too easily. They don't even really try! And I really really hate when a member complain in the cbox!! Don't say you're bored! Go to post or play some game in the game forum I don't mind but please don't say in the cbox that you're bored! And don't say anything in the cbox that the site is slow/it's not that fun anymore cause I don't want to here them at all! As an admin I totally understand how my site is running and I don't need you to remind me. I don't mind if the member send me a pm concerning about the site, but please don't do it publicly. And guests, I really hate it when they ask how active the site is when my site is really very active with new posts in almost every forum. Why can't you open your eyes and check it yourself?

Too doggone true. I've seen guests ask about board activity on the Cbox then vanish before a reply is given two minutes later. It's maddening. Especially since I know a lot of people rate a board's "life" by how many posts were made that day. Sure, it can be a good way to judge activity, but it's not always accurate. Things are slow at AG presently, but we're far from dead. It's a good day if we have four or five IC posts, but it's not a catastrophe if we go a few days with only one or two a day.

Get some patience, people! Just because everything doesn't happen ZOMGRIGHTNOW because that's how you want it to, doesn't mean a board is dead or not worth your time. Cripes.

I think I love you, AshBeanNun.

Seriously.

Having just gone through the directory here, it makes me a little queasy to see how things just... die. You can't afford to just give up when it looks a little tough. Inter-staff issues and genuine disinterest are the only online reasons a board should close... perhaps aside from server failure, and the entire internet blowing up.

Staff issues can be hard to resolve where more than one person 'owns' the board, and there are some ideas that just won't take off. If you've tried to market it every which way, but still haven't found one other person... you can close up proud to know you did your absolute best.

By this, of course, I mean hammering at it for a good month. Not posting one advert and being disappointed at the rush of members that doesn't appear.

There can be a lot of RL reasons why a board will close, RL is tricky like that. But if you don't have the patience to hold your board past the first month, and keep pushing it, you need to stop and think before you go creating.

Btw -- if that's me double posting adverts, I apologise. I have no head for remembering where I've been... and a connection too slow to check. XD

Ugh. I find this to be so annoying too. I hate looking through advertisements and finding 95% of them are dead, even some of the ones that it seems like they just posted their ad not a week ago. I really don't understand where these admin's heads are at, unless maybe the answer is "up their butts". Sometimes it very obvious that people just let their boards die, that they didn't try to keep it active at all, advertise, or scrounge up any interest at all before saying "Oh well! It looks like we're not going anywhere, time to close shop! We had a good run for two weeks!" and I was to poke them in the eye. Then the next day they rush out another site (How do they create them so fast?!?! o.O) and I want to poke them in their other eye when they just do it again. It's lame.

How hard is it to understand that a forum isn't going to start up itself? You've got to be willing to commit to doing some actual *gasp* work until it takes off (However long that may take!), and even be willing to maintain working to keep it active when you get an established base of members. Like you said, it's not a sprint, it's a marathon. >_>

Even RL doesn't seem too valid an excuse. *shrug* I've been running SotE for almost 8 years now, for instance, and have suffered through a few close family deaths, lotsa RL drama, and loads of RL hardships but have still kept it going fine. When RL gets tough, that's what the co-admins and mods are for. :3 And if I ever felt like I couldn't run my games anymore (hah! xD) I'd give them away to my co-admins. They shall last forevah as far as I'm concerned. :B

I don't really see many reasons why a game should close as long as there is still interest because, again, there is always giving the game away to someone who can maintain it when you can't.

People just don't have the dedication or patience anymore. People need to learn to just join an RPG instead of making one. ;D And then to actually stick with it. Gah, I don't get the short attention span stuff.

And I've had the C-box thing happen before. It drives me batty. Most of the people don't use the C-box--we're all on MSN or the chat room! And you can tell the games are active by the number of posts in the forums (and their respective dates). And the sheer age of both games.

The C-box is not an accurate reflection of activity, peeps. xD

Yeah, I can understand RL for a single person, of course. But it just doesn't work for me on a site-wide scale...shut down an entire RP because of one person's problems? It's not necessary if you have at least one good staffer or member who could take over (aka, what Rhi posted while I was writing this).

Haha...there are many reasons we work well together. One of them happens to be that we can find a happy balance between short-term and long-term relationships. I create a site, and you create 47984078390 characters to populate it!

I know! It's a lot of work, being a good administrator. One of my members wanted to know how to start her own site, and I gave her the basic order of things, and she replied with "I better write this all down so I don't mess up." Yeaaaah. It's not as easy as it seems. Which may be part of the reason why so many of these sites don't last. Some people know what a good RPG looks like but they don't know how it really works. They get stuck somewhere after the skin.

I know I love you, Mousie. Even if you've posted Tally's ad multiple times. ^_^

Lots of interesting opinions about activity here. I usually do what Radsos does, because that's how the majority of sites seem to work. I look at what's physically happening on the site rather than trusting what's going on off the site, because so many RPs are flash in the panners. Slow growth sites are few and far between these days. It's strange how different sites favor different means of communication. The cbox on AG has tabs that allow for private conversations, and we use it a ton. I like using the cbox instead of AIM/MSN because I never bother to get on Pidgin. When I see sites

Oh! And I have to ask this. What is a Wall of Shame?

Then again...maybe I don't want to know.

At any rate, it's awesome you all agree with me when I say that roleplays shouldn't die that fast. How in the world are you supposed to develop a good story and characters and write plenty of threads--just roleplay something to its full potential--within one or two months? It's ridiculous that admin and members won't try any harder. Stupid instant gratification society. :angry:

It's actually a good thing if you know what it is. Basically a Wall of Shame is a thread on a board where the admin/s post things that they find on other sites that were stolen from them. Plots, rules, plot page codes, forum areas, ideas, skins, almost anything.

Usually these are way over the top and not needed and turn people like me off of the game. Why? Because more often then not, I find that the admins pick at the littlest of things if they have a Wall of Shame. They say 'oh, we came up with that'... even if it's very generic information that can be found on HP Lexicon or some other informational site of that effect.

Others call them 'blacklists' on occasion.

EDIT;;
Yes, the second paragraph is my opinion.

But don't you know? If you haven't earned 20 members in the first five hours of opening your board is doomed to fail!

....

Perseverence and stamina are probably an admin's greatest assets in creating a board. The difficulty is pushing through the luls and continuing to advertise and POST even when things get slow, which they're bound to. Members flit in and out as their interest piques and then wanes. The ones who stay and labour with you through the dry periods are the ones I love to pieces.

SyoF has only been open three months and, while it's not boiling with activity, it is steady and it keeps me interested. I'm constantly dreaming about what my character might do next or what possibilities there are for future plots.

I hear ya on the c-box complaint though. Jeeze, I have a life!

To be honest, when I'm searching a site, I don't even pay attention to whether it's active or not. I don't need much activity. It could be just the admins who are present and I'd be willing to plot with them. SOMEONE has to dive in right at the beginning or there will never be activity. So long as the site has effort, an intrigueing plot and the possibility for compelling characters then I'm likely to put more effort into joining.

Unfortunately, sites like these are less common than one would hope. So I have my own babies and I love them instead :p

When I started StC, I did it literally the day after a site of the same genre closed, knowing that there were other people like me, hacked off that the admin hadn't had the patience (or something) to keep it going.

I started StC not knowing a thing about running a forum, or how to do half the tricks and stuff to get something like the look I wanted, but I did it anyway. And started posting. And telling people about it. And posting more. And RPing with the people who came in. And persuading other people to join. And in between all that, I tweaked the board.

I couldn't afford to get the board looking perfect first because then I'd've lost a whole bunch of interested people. Two months in and we're active with new posts every day, both IC and OOC (and IC/OOC where the characters do OOC stuff - they're currently planning a trip to Alton Towers. As 19th Century characters. Which is mad crazy, but I love it!).

Incidentally, StC doesn't have a CBox. Do we need one? I don't think so ATM, but please feel free to tell me different. Even if I don't end up taking your advice... :D

This makes me absolutely insane. INSANE.

Now, Three Wishes -- my 'serious' game -- isn't hundred-posts active. However, it averages a dozen IC posts a day, and for a niche site that's amazingly, marvelously active. I have fantastic friendly players and a sweet original plot.

Last night, while I was in the middle of a post (I use the quick-reply feature most often, which means I am down at the bottom of the page writing my reply; I can't see the chatbox from there), a guest appeared, asked if the site was active, waited a few minutes, said 'guess not,' and left. It made me feel like absolute crap, I'm serious. :b I AM NOT YOUR DANCING MONKEY, LYING IN WAIT TO ANSWER YOU THE SECOND YOU SPEAK. BE PATIENT.

This is WHILE there are hundreds of lines from *just today* in the cbox, a dozen posts on the 'recently replied threads' list, and two dozen characters who've been online in the last day.

Frankly, if you're going to be so lazy that you can't be bothered to click down to the bottom of the page to view the site's stats or even see the last post date within at MOST two days on each IC forum, then I don't want you on my site anyway. :b

HEAR HEAR! and amen to that! And I love you for wording this all out.
I completely agree with you.

It makes me sooo sad and frustrated to see sites close down. Especially if I'm a member and I had fun time but they just suddenly close down after few days of seeing activity slow down. If you can't handle hardships do not create a board! Do not join a board!

I recently created a board and went through all the ads on an older site and I really noticed that out of hundreds of ads most were closed! Literally only like 5 sites were still alive and even they seemed pretty dead with almost no posts and c-box not used since Christmas. It's just sad to see the short life span...

It is so true that boards with hundreds of members can actually be very inactive compared to sites with five members posting! I'm a member at a board where there really are just four of us but we are still very active and I pretty much get to post daily..unlike at many places I've been to. And I know that us four will stay there despite hardships because we enjoy the game!

I just realized something. Maybe if they need to CHECK something to see if it is active, then it's not active.

Besides, I think it's probably better not to have the members that do that "is this site alive?" *insert four minutes later* "guess not..." stuff, basically because it's impatient, abrupt, and would make me think that perhaps the person was just checking for a site that he could use RIGHT NOW to appease boredom but not join long-term. Also, I would be wary as to whether they read the actual rules or not... since they obviously can't scroll down to check the most recent posts or anything.