General What keeps you going as a forum owner or admin?

But, also retired and it's a hobby.

Potential, and my site/forum is one of my dream projects.

Forums are my go-to to destress and relax. I have a passion for them considering I've been using them for over two decades. I own a resource board that's all about providing and helping fellow administrators, which can be a gratifying accomplishment. I too have a passion for coding using JavaScript/jQuery, so a resource board for software that highly relies on this programming language to enhance and customize the board, I enjoy what I do.

Seeing members on my forum being active makes me love my forum a lot more.
In general I like to create discussions.

I enjoy having a community that I'm in control of without the fear of it going down unless it went down due to my own negligence. I also think forums are the best way to communicate with other people, they're more organized and you can have way more meaningful conversations on forums than social media.

Potential of building something big.

When I get appreciative feedback from a member, is all I need now and then.

Like @frm retired and do it as a hobby. I also enjoy working on servers and messing with different software. I'm a nuts and bolts guys so I'll get my hands dirty and dig in the code.

Cloaked said:

Like @frm retired and do it as a hobby. I also enjoy working on servers and messing with different software. I'm a nuts and bolts guys so I'll get my hands dirty and dig in the code.

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I just can't believe that you did it for so long on Windows environments, especially with so many conflicts and workarounds needed (perhaps even with XF and Invision).

However, I might've been with you if I weren't a poor teenager at the time. I started developing with ASP and moved to ColdFusion. However, Windows shared hosting was like $20+ more expensive at the time, and a Windows dedicated machine was $75+~ more (with higher setup fees). Had I settled with Windows, it would've cut into my profit dramatically, and at 13ish years old, that was a lot (like 3 new t-shirts I couldn't buy on my own).

I don't come from rich roots and my mom struggled to help pay the $10 hosting that I had, supporting my vision until it "worked" and I was making $100+ on my own (her check was $377/mo, but rent was included as it was on-site, but that also kind of made it a 24hr job).

I'm still bitter that an adult took advantage of me, as they were an excellent graphics designer and could've made my game stand out against all others (and did), then 3 months in turned off my FTP access/etc. saying I was demanding too much (just 1/2 of the earnings which was 2x more than I was making as he had tier-1 ads with DoubleClick while I could only get on tier-2 or tier-3). I'll never do business again without contracts because of that, no matter who the person is. It was literally our way out of poverty, poof. God bless her for putting stuff on credit and making the minimum payment, essentially never making a dent in her balance; the first thing I did when I got my sales job and 5-figure check was to call up her creditors and secretly try to pay off all her debts (though, for whatever reason, you can't just pay someone's debt... so they had to 3-way call her for permission for me to pay her debts).