General Biggest forum challenge to date

[Shawn Gossman]

What has been your biggest forum challenge to date?

How did you overcome it?

 

[InMyOpinion]

I think my biggest forum challenge to date is getting everything behind the scenes done. I am by no means a technical person so sometimes I struggle at things like making medals or special name titles etc. Anything with graphics I pretty much hire people to do because I am really not good at it nor do I have the eye for it. Give me makeup and a face and I can do wonders but give me a graphics program and an idea and I can give you something that looks like kindergartener drew haha.

The posting and the coming up with ideas for events, contests etc. I can do. Anything graphics I need help.

 

[Cory]

Keeping the motivation in check at all times can be a tough challenge. Sometimes you feel like drifting off your forum due to a lack of motivation. This can often be caused by little activity from your user base, the feeling that you're the only one putting in the effort, and sometimes people will try and drag you down to their level and you feel like it's pointless catering to people who do not respect you as the forum owner.

 

[Shawn Gossman]

I think my biggest forum challenge to date is getting everything behind the scenes done. I am by no means a technical person so sometimes I struggle at things like making medals or special name titles etc. Anything with graphics I pretty much hire people to do because I am really not good at it nor do I have the eye for it. Give me makeup and a face and I can do wonders but give me a graphics program and an idea and I can give you something that looks like kindergartener drew haha.

The posting and the coming up with ideas for events, contests etc. I can do. Anything graphics I need help.

I agree with you on this one. I'm not at all good with graphics. But you always have Fiverr and you can find designers there for a pretty cheap rate. If you use them enough, they'll usually take care of you.

Keeping the motivation in check at all times can be a tough challenge. Sometimes you feel like drifting off your forum due to a lack of motivation. This can often be caused by little activity from your user base, the feeling that you're the only one putting in the effort, and sometimes people will try and drag you down to their level and you feel like it's pointless catering to people who do not respect you as the forum owner.

I hear that, man. One thing I always tried to at least do is post one really interesting topic each day - even if it's just one post.

 

[Arantor]

I think in all honesty it was the time I was asked to help out on what was then warriorcatsrpg.com (before it rebranded to feralfront.com and before it was sold to 'a developer' who converted the site from SMF to Woltlab and shut it down shortly after)

WCRPG was, at the time, the largest SMF installation ever as far as we know. At its peak, 90 million posts - doing 90k posts a day (some were 1 liners, though). And it had a bunch of custom code and janky add-ons from various places.

You must understand that all of these custom things were "essential". Everything was "essential". Even if literally only one person asked once, this would become "but my members will all leave if they don't get this". I don't believe it was ever true but Wynette was, shall we say, highly strung. It was a definite clash of personalities, but the site was struggling to cope with the traffic and I was asked to see if I could make it run faster.

It turns out I did - I found an actual performance hole in SMF 2.x (this was long before 2.1 was out) where a query would be run every topic view even if the result wouldn't be used (which was about 90% of cases), and stuff like that. It took a little while but we wrestled with some of the janky custom plugins that were never designed for that scale and made it run pretty good all things considered.

I suspect running the same code today on a current gen server with current gen PHP and MySQL would be less scary, but this was 2012 or so, we didn't have the massive speed-up of PHP 7 yet.

And of course, it wasn't my site so I was legit terrified of breaking anything because there was a lot of janky stuff in there that I didn't necessarily know about. But it all worked out in the end, at least at the time.

 

[Shawn Gossman]

I think in all honesty it was the time I was asked to help out on what was then warriorcatsrpg.com (before it rebranded to feralfront.com and before it was sold to 'a developer' who converted the site from SMF to Woltlab and shut it down shortly after)

Sounds to me like this would be their response if I made a "What was your biggest mistake in your forum career?" LOL

 

[Cory]

I hear that, man. One thing I always tried to at least do is post one really interesting topic each day - even if it's just one post.

That's a good idea and could keep people coming back. I might try and start doing that, even if I suck at thinking of new topic ideas. I might have to use AI to help me think.

 

[Shawn Gossman]

That's a good idea and could keep people coming back. I might try and start doing that, even if I suck at thinking of new topic ideas. I might have to use AI to help me think.

Another good thing is to reply to every post and use AI to help you if you can't think of what to say

 

[Arantor]

Sounds to me like this would be their response if I made a "What was your biggest mistake in your forum career?" LOL

You’d think but they were adamant they’d done the right thing. Trouble is, after the guy bought it, not only did he migrate to Woltlab, he also gutted the content from 90 million posts to barely 2 million. People do not appreciate it when “their creative work” is gone like that. (The objective merits of such content are highly debatable, but from the writers’ point of view, practically passion projects.)

 

[Cedric]

Another good thing is to reply to every post and use AI to help you if you can't think of what to say

Be careful with that though. As it creates dullness among your community. I’m in favor of using AI to get topic ideas, but I wouldn’t let it create an opinion I don’t have. If you lack the inspiration to create a reply, then personally I think it’s better to say nothing at all.