I love your forum! Bye now!

This'll be a short one.

I keep hearing about this sort of situation: You start up a forum, RPG or not, it doesn't matter. You work hard on it. When it's all ready to start, you tell your friends and anyone else you think might be interested, about it.

They ooh and ahh over the graphics, the concept, the layout, the setup. "I love your forum! Wow, great work!" Etc. You have people crowing over your board, which is great news, right? You're going to have an easy time starting this one!

Then, none of them or almost none of them actually sign up. A few might, but even they tend to drop off quickly. What happened to the love? The grand plans to join and become great members?

The truth hurts, but it's simple: They're just not that into your board.

These people are your friends. They'll compliment you just to make you feel good about something that they know you worked hard on. Even if they are initially wowed by it and genuinely might want to join, the actual level of interest just doesn't carry in this case.

But what about the strangers you asked on Helpmewithmynewforum.com? They were all diggin' it too! Well, probably not as much as they or you thought.

The big mistake most people make at this point is waiting for them to show up and follow through. They won't. Cut your losses {if any} and move on. Make sure also that you aren't fishing for compliments when you ask for opinions on your board. Ask for genuine feedback, and prepare yourself to hear things you might not want to hear. What seems perfect and intuitive to you might not be the same at all to prospective members. You need their perspective, not yours. Frankly, your own point of view on your own forum is about as far as you can get from a helpful one.

Your best feedback comes from those people who, in the end, didn't join your board.

"I just can't please them! What am I doing wrong?"

That member who has joined your game, and has managed to point out just how horrid and flawed it is. What you wouldn't give to fix your game and make them happy!

Perhaps they started out nice enough. They joined, said a big "Hi!" to everyone, and then their complaints reared their ugly head in the application phase, or maybe they did okay there and got as far as the roleplay itself before finding a hundred reasons why your website sucks. Something's wrong with your rules, your staff, your plots, your members...you! And like an attentive, caring admin you look into these issues and want to fix them ASAP!

Well of course you do. You're a good administrator and what good administrator wants to run a bad forum? So you change a few rules or whatever on their recommendation. You figure, what the hell, right? If it winds up making them happy, you can all go back to having fun and you won't have lost a member in the process.

Only...it doesn't make them happy. They find more and more to hate about your board. Everything that happens, they find at fault. The littlest things seem like a big deal to them. And there you are, scrambling around trying to find a fix for your forum.

What would you say if I told you the fix is easy and right in front of you?

I only wish I hadn't had to learn all of this the hard way--several times, because I don't always seem to get it on the first go-around. :P:

Changing or bending your game hoping to "make the person happy" never works. Never. If they come in unhappy or grow quickly unhappy with the game as it is {and I mean within the first couple weeks/months--many people have a "new person" phase when they are on their best behaviour but it soon wears off and they appear to change for the worse without cause--this is not them changing, this is how they really are} that is not your game's fault. A naturally happy and easygoing person will adapt to your game when they are new and familiarising themselves with it, or if it doesn't suit them, they will casually leave--because it isn't in the nature of happy, carefree people to stay in a situation that makes them unhappy when they could easily leave it.

Unhappy, complaining people will be that, wherever they go, and whatever game they join. Whatever you do to try and make them happy on your game. Yet they will often not leave of their own accord. Misery loves company, after all.

And unhappiness is as contagious as happiness. Surround yourself with the happy folks on your game. I mean those who are glad to be a part of it the way it is, even if it isn't perfect, because nothing is perfect. Let the rest go on and find somewhere else to commiserate. They will not be happy until they figure out how to do that for themselves.

So! About that fix?

By now they may have gotten totally out of control, so the first thing you want to do is shoot them a polite but firm private message, and halt any chaos they are currently causing, chances are they are causing some, somewhere on your forum. Make it clear to them they have stepped way over the line and face suspension if they don't respect your authority. If that doesn't work, have the ban hammer at the ready.

Again, misery loves company. They won't be alone out there.

Why is my RPG dying?

I've covered topics close to this one, but I think that, or at least hope that, this is a first for covering everything that I am trying to cover in this entry.

Currently it is about 90 degrees in this room, I am monitoring my own roleplaying site while browsing around and trying to keep cool. I visited one of my old haunts while clearing out my bookmarks and come to find that despite supposedly having once made millions of posts, it too is now dying, like so many other long term RPG forums.

What makes a roleplaying forum die? Most of the same things that cause any forum to die--mainly stasis. But to just say "stasis killed my board" isn't very helpful so I'll try to get to the meat of it.

The focus of this post is roleplaying forums so I will be specific to those, though a lot of it applies to any forum. You start your forum with a small group of friends, either those you had already or those you get right after you set it up, or a mix. Many times a forum dies after this core of original members moves on, because your forum failed to adapt to a changing member base. Maybe it became too closed to new players--a very common problem often exacerbated by the senior, original group of members who will often exclude them.

But a great many forums don't act exclusive at all. They are open to newbies, welcoming and kind, yet those newbies somehow stop coming after a while. You still have been advertising, still affiliating...doing everything right. So why after 5 years {or thereabouts} is your forum going belly up?

Many RPG owners are happy to let their community shrink down to a few folks and roll to a satisfying stop, before closing the game and happily moving on with fond memories. But there you are, a struggling administrator who certainly isn't ready for retirement. You're trying new plots, encouraging members to recruit others, and still your game continues to go.

One big sign that there's serious trouble is a lot of long term, active members leaving in groups, with few to no newbies coming in. This is perhaps THE alarm signal that your game is drowning. When this happens the end is already near and unless you do something drastic, you're looking at closure of the game usually within a few more months, though it can limp along for years if at least a few people stick around and you're willing to keep plugging at it.

Stop the struggle; it may actually be simpler than you think to turn things around.

To understand why it's dying, it may help to understand how it has lived. A roleplaying forum goes through life stages like a person does! Starting out in an energetic infancy, with an open mind, if little experience, growing into powerful prime of life with well established staff and members, and eventually succumbing to old age, when it tends to become set in its ways and not as open to different ways or change anymore.

But unlike a person, we can give our aging RPGs a drink from the fountain of youth!

--Your game likely began things a lot more open and rules-light than it wound up. How many rules have you added over the months or years? All games need rules, but if you're down to your last handful of members anyway, how many of them do you actually need? Turn back the clock and strip away those rules you thought you needed but that are probably the #1 factor killing your game. Ideally, you could just go back to the rule set, and minimum writing standards {do you REALLY need 500 words per post?} that you had when you started it. It was good enough then, and at this point, what do you have to lose? This is a rebirth of your site, so give it a second life! But brace yourself--people hate rule removals a lot more than adding new rules. Be sure to make it clear to them that it's a trial period and done as a last resort--and it was what got everyone started anyway. You can make a couple compromises if you need to, but the aim here is opening your game to as many new folks as you can.

--If you think tightening up on activity rules and activity checks is a smart move right now, think again. Your members' interest is flagging as it is--the last thing they want to hear is more pressure to log on X number of days a week. It just might be the breaking point for them. Remove them altogether--they don't work anyway.

--Don't do major changes to the plots that are mandatory in any way. By all means introduce new elements--you should be doing that on a regular basis anyhow--but don't require people to up and change their roleplaying just because "this is how we're going to do it now." Give them an alternative to continue playing out their original roleplays while you bring in the new elements as optional.

--Promotional efforts also need to be kept up to date. Chances are that the methods you used 5 years ago are probably not as effective now.

Here's hoping these tips help you rejuvenate your game! It's never too late.

So, when does this thing start running itself?

Being a long term member of message board and website management sites, I have been hearing some things over and over throughout the years. One of them I'll make the subject of this quick article: Once your forum is large and really rolling, it gets a lot easier, and you the owner don't have to do much besides maybe occasional server upgrades, tweaking those advertisements to bring in more revenue, and maybe a "Hi guys, believe it or not I'm still here," to your teeming masses of members who probably thought you died. Otherwise you can put your feet up. You've done it! You built a forum from the ground up, and now your hard work is over.

Over time as my own forum grew, I noticed something: It wasn't getting easier to run. It was getting harder. More members meant more misbehaving, more warnings, more requests, more complaints, more bannings, more drama, more issues, more more more...Rather than moving towards that easy peasy sweet spot it was moving away. Delegating the "hard stuff" to moderators didn't solve the problem. That was another thing--as it got larger, the staff team grew with it, and grew more difficult to hold together.

Why was everything getting harder?

I have one thing to conclude from my experiences in large forum management {and my forum isn't even very large by global internet standards} it doesn't "get easy." Growth brings fresh new problems to a forum community that didn't exist at a small scale. For a while, I was wondering where these issues were coming from. I first noticed it in terms of communication problems between the staff. Things began falling through the cracks, and I realised that I was less and less aware of what was going on on my own board. It's easy enough to "be everywhere" and literally see everything that gets posted to your forum when you get about 50 or, if you're diligent, even 500 or so posts a day. When 10,000+ posts are coming through, not to mention PMs and profile comments, you can no longer be everywhere and anywhere that your guidance is needed. You need a stronger staff team. This is when you realise just how hard good moderators are to find. Tasks that used to be minor become major ones. Time becomes something precious and anything at all that reduces the time needed to complete forum tasks, like a code that automates something, is priceless. But in the end, all it can do is buy you some time before things get down to the wire again if your forum is still growing. It's sort of a never-ending arms race. And a large forum is very, very easy to literally lose control over. When that happens, getting it back won't come easily or quickly.

You know how large forums have a reputation for being cliquish and unfriendly? Well this is likely why--forum administrators who long ago gave up on actually trying to manage their communities and aside from a handful of extreme, possibly illegal actions made by members that resulted in a swift {or not so swift} ban, took their hands off the wheel.

It doesn't have to be this way. The key to keeping the roof on a large forum is efficiency. Once your staff team gets to be over around 30 to 40 people, communication between them {and keeping drama down between them} may grow more difficult; do whatever you can to keep it within this limit. Any task that can be automated--automate it. Any rule that can be done without--do without it. You learn this form of frugality to keep things balanced. Time is gold.

So, what about that day when you can put your forum on autopilot?

Well, chances are that if you worked this hard to get your forum to such success, you're not the type who would want to quit it anyway. You love your message board community and chances are they love you too. You've got a bright future ahead.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

Login to all 20 of your accounts, everybody: We don't want to look like losers.

On smaller RPGs in particular, it's often a recommendation. In some games, it's even a rule: You the player must login to all your accounts every day, or at least whenever you drop by. The whole one account per character thing--not something I'm a fan of personally, but I see a place for it and that some people do prefer this approach. That isn't what this article is about, however. I don't think that the debate of "Single account vs. multiple accounts" on an RPG {or any forum} is anything more than personal preference, and both can work just fine.

This is about making it look like your forum is a lot more active than it is. Multiple accounts are frequently used for this. It seems to have been an offshoot of the practice of using an account for every roleplaying character a player owns on the forum. The admin glanced down at their info centre one day and said to themselves, "Wow. My forum looks like it has 200 people on today even though we only have fifteen members! Maybe more people will sign up because of that."

There are other ways that a message board will try to appear more bustling than it is. One is just boosting the online time threshold to appear like all the members you had in the last five days or something look like they all signed on five minutes ago. Or just flat out changing up those numbers in the postcount, etc and completely fudging your front page.

I'll skip the ethical debate on it, because one's mileage may vary and to those willing to try these practices it doesn't much matter. The real question is, does it work?

Though again, one's mileage may vary, I have to say from long years of obesrvation that ultimately, it doesn't.

Oh, you may get a few extra signups and if you are only slightly exaggerating your forum's appearance it may provide a thin margin of help. The key is whether you can hold up the promise that this flubbed appearance makes to them once these new members enter your board and begin actually using it. People looking for an active forum want a lot of response to their posts and a lot to respond to in turn. If you can deliver, then perhaps it won't hurt you to fib a bit on those numbers out there. Obviously, if you're making it look like you have 5,000 members when you're sitting around with 5 other people on your board, new members will quickly see that they've been lied to. Nobody likes being lied to. Sure, it's not like you literally told them to their face you have thousands of people you don't have, but any time someone takes time out of their day to do something going on what they've been informed is worth their time, then they realise that the true situation is not what was shown to them at first, they'll feel lied to. Chances are they'll just be mildly annoyed and may never check out your board again.

So. If you are going to try this approach, do it subtly. Better yet, don't do it at all. If your board is having problems gaining or keeping members then all that pretending to be more active will do is sweep the problems under the rug. It isn't going to fix what got you into this situation in the first place. It isn't going to get you out of this situation by itself. It might even make problems worse because believe it or not, there are many people out there looking for an active yet SMALL forum to play on. If you go around pretending you're big instead, not only have you lost out on those members who might have loved your forum for what it is, but you don't stand much chance appeasing those who want a big forum either.

Put down the stat modification codes and have a look at your game and where you are failing to attract or keep members. Is it nobody is signing up? Examine your game's eye appeal and readability. Are they dropping out later on? Make sure the gameplay is easy to get into yet offers fun and exciting challenges. Make sure every new {or old!} member is treated with kindness.

If you want a bigger forum, make a better forum. Big will follow.

Your RPG is dying? Here's why it's on you.

Because you are the administrator of your game. Your community relies on you to lead the way, to take the lead in developing it, and when it's in trouble, to front the rescue effort. So let's say your RPG forum {this can also apply to non roleplay forums; my warrior cats forums have both and have suffered slumps more than once} has done well up till now but is showing signs of low activity. So, when you bring this up, what is one thing that at least one person will say as a possible reason for the slump?

"It's a bad time of year. People are too busy to roleplay."

Really? What time of year would that be? Maybe...

It's January/February. It's post holiday blues, and people are all back in work/school, nobody has time to roleplay.

It's March/April--spring break time. Everyone's on vacation or doing family things, nobody has time to roleplay.

It's May/June. Final exams, graduation plans, who's got time to roleplay?

It's July/August. Summer time. People are having summer vacations, going away to camp, and, you know, spending time outside! Who's roleplaying?

It's September/October. People are all going back to school, taking up classes again. Nobody has time to roleplay.

It's November/December. Holidays--Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hannukah, just about everyone is too busy shopping and preparing for holiday events and vacations. Nobody has time to roleplay.


And so when the site goes down the tubes, at least you can sigh and say it had nothing to do with anything you did wrong yourself. I bet a lot of sites that aren't around now might still be up if their owners had taken responsibility for the issues and really looked into turning things around rather than saying it was a "bad time of year" and waited for it to improve.

In my experience, NOTHING ever comes of hoping without doing. Stop telling yourself it'll get better on its own. Look critically and objectively at your site. What are the patterns governing the low activity? Where are players stumbling the most? The information is all there, you just need to uncover it. It won't be easy, but nothing worth doing is. And if after all that, you try your hardest, trying everything and the site STILL must close, at least you can then say you tried your hardest and best. {By the way, it's never too late; see my articles on reviving a dead forum!}

The time to act is now.

It's an epidemic: Why "plague" plots fail in RPGs

I have covered a lot on this blog over the months and sometimes find myself struggling to grab onto something new to write about. Fortunately the RPG world is not only full of surprises, but is endlessly deep and convoluted. Today's subject: "plague" plots.

Wha? Yeah, I am talking about what is usually intended to be a wide scale plot on the RPG in which a deadly contagious disease is ravaging the lands, taking victims by the hundreds/thousands/whatever is mass scale to that particular game. It sounds like a great way to create widespread misery, suffering and panic--and clear out a lot of underused characters in the process. This is what makes it so alluring to gameowners. Kill two {or 2,000?} birds with one stone!

So they ask their players: Hey guys, how about a plague hits the town? The reaction is typically enthusiastic. Who wouldn't want a twist like this if the game was, maybe a little slow, or even just needed something new. Plagues make history. They're THE plot material, and the best part is, no real complex plotting or character motives need to be worked out. People start getting sick and dropping dead and the rest takes care of itself.

Nothing can go wrong with this, until somehow it just goes wrong. More like it doesn't go at all. I've seen it again and again. Now, time for a disclaimer! YES I am sure that somewhere, somehow an RPG has made this work and work beautifully. About as beautifully as two thirds of a town's population dying in incredible pain and ugliness. An RPG somewhere made this work for their game to what was considered great success.

I'd love to see such an example, because in my more than a decade of PBP roleplay, I've seen several attempts to make it work and not seen one take off in more than a minor way. At best, what is intended to be a major plot settles for a minor side story, with a handful of players participating and less than a handful of characters actually dying, unless NPCs are used, and then who really cares anyway? None of them were actually characters. So, other than a bunch of red shirts and maybe an amount of real characters you could count on your fingers, nobody is actually dying of this plague, not even largely abandoned characters or underplayed ones, and so, it is the plague plot itself that dies.

Nobody wants their characters to actually DIE in the plague.

But I noticed something. Pick any battle going on in the game that's reasonably large and you see characters dying left and right. Not to mention death in childbirth, a very popular way to kill off female characters, I have observed. It isn't that people are unwilling to kill off characters. It's that they don't want to do it by disease.

Why? I thought I'd write about why, seeing as it might save people the trouble of trying one of these plague plots for their game--at least, on a large scale, and then being disappointed when it flops.

Killing characters by a disease involves deciding beforehand that the character will die, and then carrying it out slowly and painfully. People develop emotional attachments to characters they play, to the point of actually going through grieving processes, though muted, when they kill them off if they had played them enough. People seem okay to do it as long as it's over quickly. Death in a battle is pretty quick, as is childbirth. The character can sometimes linger to say a few parting words, then go, and their suffering, if horrible, was at least brief. Killing off by disease will prolong what is usually a painful process. There is no hope, and a million chances to regret one's decision to do it, and emotional pain when they realise what they got into and that they cannot get out of it. I had a lot of people who initially decided to do it, begging halfway through for their characters to pull through as a survivor. Some actually got uptight when pointed out the "this thing takes no prisoners" rules they had agreed to themselves at the start. A few people did play it out, to great emotional effect. They were excellent mini-plot threads. They were anything but a large scale plot.

Larger isn't better, but a game benefits from having both large and small plots, and when you plan out something big and it fails, it can translate to a lot of wasted energy, even on something as easy to plan as, "If your character gets this disease they start to vomit blood, and in 3 days they're dead."

But you want to try one anyway? Well, I have nothing to suggest that can guarantee its success and my main suggestion is to avoid these plots as major plots. Unless you're using abandoned characters as fodder, and even then it can fail, because people will be playing them again and there's every chance to get reattached. If you want to try a plague, start small, don't play it up like it's the 'next big thing' for your game and you may very well get a few devoted players with strong resolve to give a drawn out, horrid ending to their beloved characters.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure!

Yeah, well we don't allow that anymore.

After years of playing on roleplaying games, participating on forums, observing both from the outside, and helping administrate forum RPGs as well, I have come to recognise a pattern that almost all of them follow if they last a few months or more. It doesn't matter if they are beginner/all levels, advanced, small or large. It happens whether they are stably staffed or full of drama. It happens regardless of what genre they are.

They all grow stricter over time.

Now, this may sound like a generalisation, and I am sure there are games/forums that are outside of this "natural law." {This paragraph is a disclaimer, you might note.} I cannot recall one in my recent memory.

The typical RP forum will start off as a free and easy RP, with a basic set of rules. Soon after the game's inception, the rules will usually be adjusted. This is generally just because it was hard to foresee all issues before its start, and once it kicks into gear the staff can see what they feel needs tweaking. But once the game is stable and going several months, the rule accumulations don't stop.

They seem to come in the form of word minimums appearing, character applications rising in difficulty, format rules either appearing or increasing in number, even such things as profile format rules. There may also be character number limits, posting limits, limits on character traits/types/powers {game breaker powers--powers that if allowed would change the entire game dynamics--would obviously need limiting, but often the limits come down on something that was allowed for a long time} the list goes on.

Even when the game is dying and it is obvious that the overburdening rules are contributing to its demise, they are not usually removed or changed, or at least not significantly. There may even be additional rules created at this phase, like mandatory activity checks.

Why does this happen?

I'm still thinking on this, it'd be nice to know since it's a killer of so many games. But what I have observed is that whenever our own RPG lifts a rule or loosens it at all, even a little, there is often vehement protest from a small but vocal porportion of the member base.

My advice: if your game needs a boost, loosen that noose. It could very well be it is choking on its own limitations. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

An Open Letter to Authors who Don't Like Fanfiction Of Their Work

This is in no way referencing the wonderful Erin Hunter, or J.K. Rowling or any of the other multitudes of authors who openly welcome, or at least tolerate, fan fiction of their work. The Erins I admire for providing a large space on their own website {on Harper Collins} at no cost at all, for fans to do just that.

No, this is addressing the authors who are so determined to clamp down on any reference to their work with 100% iron control that they forbid any fan fiction at all from even being posted up on the internet.

Dear Authors who don't allow fan fiction of your work:

What a hypocritical stick in the mud. Nobody's an island, everyone gets their ideas from somewhere and even most of Shakespeare's plays directly derived from earlier works not his own, often almost completely. Whatever gave you such vitriol against your own fans who are so deeply inspired by your work as to want to express their own creativity about it, while giving you full credit AND free advertising? You control freak, you don't DESERVE those fans. Go write something and shove it into a private vault if you don't want the world to ever do anything with it.

As for roleplaying about your work, I'll be glad never to come within a mile of anything about it. There's lots of other stuff I can get inspired by and lots of authors open to those who like to weave their creative works into the mythos of human storytelling culture. Pity on you for missing out.

Sincerely,

Wynnyelle

Well, they're really more like guidelines.

"This is an advanced RPG, but we have no word minimum. We do strongly suggest that you aim to make around two large paragraphs per post. Try not to powerplay except where necessary, and it is recommended that in a group thread, use a posting order so that everyone gets an equal chance to post. Generally you should try to limit the number of characters you play, make it a reasonable number. Oh--and don't go too nuts with the multi-threading, a member should not be too much all over the game at once--only within reason."

Sounds like a decent setup till you actually try to follow these 'guidelines.' What's wrong with this rule set? Everything. In that it isn't clear at all what is required and what isn't. It's a sight better than unwritten rules--which I've had the displeasure of discovering all on my own in a few RPGs I used to be in. Used to, being the key word here. I don't go for unwritten rules, suggestions and other assumptions that if you don't just know what is being implied and figure it out for yourself, you don't belong. It's being assumed that a new member to the game already understands it before beginning. It's going to cause the members and staff plenty of frustration and possibly lose them some members, including ones who might have done very well if it was just more clear.

People writing up rules for an RPG in this manner are living in a box, though they probably do not know it. By this I mean they are assuming without thinking that their ideas of what's expected in an RPG are shared by everyone signing up for the first time. What is "around two large paragraphs"? For that matter, what is a "large" paragraph? Large, small, quickly, slowly, these are arbitrary terms one should always avoid in rules. Along with "should," "try to," "strongly recommended," and other terms that not only don't specify whether anything is actually allowed or not, but nobody will listen to them anyway, trust me. If you don't want it in the game, say "can't," "don't," "not allowed." Use word minimums if you want people to write longer posts and short ones are unacceptable to you.

I've written exactly these points before but from a slightly different angle. In my last visit on this topic I was writing strictly from a rules perspective--how to get people to listen to them. This is part of it here as well, but what should also be addressed are any underlying assumptions that you the admin could be making about members you don't have yet, or just got. People come from all over to an RPG and their ideas for what an RPG is or should be might be entirely different. {I didn't even know what "post matching" meant till I had it explained to me--last week!}

Use hard numbers and solid rules for your game, and you will then all be on the same page.

So you wanna start a forum?

I'm putting this one out for all of you folks interested in starting up your own online message boards. They've been around almost since the Internet first came into a form of existence vaguely resembling how it is now. Though the onslaught of competing media over the years--videos, blogs, and of course, social network sites--the forum has continued to stand tall as one of the dominant forms of interactive website. And even better, it's gotten a bit snazzier over the ages while never forgetting its roots as a fountain of knowledge, enduring friendships, and infamous Internet memes.

Who wouldn't want to be at the centre of one?

Well, a lot of people who get into it not realising what they are getting into.

I can't blame people for getting in over their head when they try to run a forum if they've never tried it before because from the outside, as just a member enjoying the fruits of another forum owner's labour, they cannot really have any idea the amount and intensity of the work that goes into managing a forum. It is not like managing a blog, it is a lot more intensive, involving, demanding, and often stressful. You have to ask yourself, "If I knew I wasn't going to make a single penny on this forum ever, would I still do it?" If the answer's no then you should not try to start a forum. Because you likely won't just not make much or any money at the start or maybe ever, but you're quite likely to lose some. A few forum owners who plug away at it for a while will achieve large success, though, and it's those forums that inspire people to give it a go. Just know that it is not a walk in the park.

I wrote an E-book of advice I learnt from my 10+ years experience in forums and it didn't sell so well. Why? Well, maybe because I was a little too honest. I emphasised that it isn't a get rich quick scheme or even get rich at all scheme and that you have to work at it, and here are some good steps to take with your hard, hard, hard work so you don't waste all that time and effort.

Be prepared to be on your forum every single day or almost every day, the more time you put in the better; posting, handling issues between members or from trolls, and of course answering the pileup of private messages your members will bring to you. Questions, complaints, concerns, whining, nagging, and who could forget: drama?

What really kills me is the woeful misconception that the hard part is STARTING the forum! Your forum's slow, early days are indeed critical in helping set the tone of your community later on--don't be like me and blunder into the middle of things and have to work to change that tone later--but the larger your forum grows, the more work it will entail and the more you will experience the trials and tribulations of being a leader. You are the face of your forum. If something goes wrong, guess who's to blame--or at least, guess who IS blamed?

Be prepared to do plenty of damage control to keep things peaceful. Keeping the community in a warm tone is what will enable it to continue to grow.

With all this to give you a headache, is it any wonder most forums close their doors before their first birthday?

Think long, think hard, and if you still want to run a forum at the end of the day, go into it not with cold ambition but a blazing passion for your forum's topic and the community itself.

But it's not the destination, it's the journey.

I'm the KING OF THE WORLD!

Or queen. Why? Because I'm an administrator of a FORUM! That's right. If you don't like how I run this place, too bad for you, you can just go pack it. What's that? You want me to stop being mean? Oh boo hoo, poor baby, maybe YOU should stop being such a dumbass and whiner, maybe then someday you can understand half of what it takes to be as awesome as me. Cause you're just a n00b and you know what else? I don't like your face. So unless you're kissing my ass every minute on this forum I'll happily ban you and rid this place of one more l0zerrr.

Funny...there seem to be a lot of those lately...Oh well. You just can't stand how awesome I am. That's right!

...Wow I even started to hate myself while I typed that example. We've all probably seen at least one mod or admin like that. Nobody can stand them, yet why are there still so many?

Could it be that some of us are like that and might not even realise it?

This isn't an article about avoiding asshole admins. I think we all know one when we see one...Unless, maybe, it's the one looking back at us in the mirror?

No way, you think, never in a million years could you be one of those intolerable, pretentious bitchy snobs you take pains to avoid, and gripe to your friends about having to deal with. Well I always hope not, but I decided to write this up based on the possibility that some folks out there may be giving off the wrong impressions on their websites. One very different from what they think they're giving off.

There's no one way to diagnose it, but instead there are a few warning signs that I'll outline, from experience. First...

"If you don't like how I enforce things, too bad. I'm not softening myself up for anyone."

Everyone has the right to make whatever rules they want to, right? Of course! So why is the above a warning sign? Because as an administrator it's a little bit different. While you should never change your rules if you don't want to change them, you need to think of how you come across to your members. If they take offence to what you tell them, consider that and ask yourself whether you're speaking kindly-but-firmly {good} or coming off as a bitch {bad}. If you word something like this:

"I understand you don't like this rule but we have it for a reason and at this time it isn't changing. Please comply or you will be [banned/warned/etc.}."

...you will still get your point across and I don't think anyone could legitimately accuse you of nastiness.

"I don't like you."

You don't have to like everyone on your board. And you probably won't. But enforcing the rules should never bring your personal gripes against someone into play. Keep those likes and dislikes of members out of your administrating or before long you will be known as a gameowner who plays favourites...and least favourites...and who doesn't give a whit about people's feelings.

"This character application--if it could be called that--reeks of Mary Sue's armpits for about 100 reasons and I'm going to list them all right now in detail. You came up with a clever name for the title--and the niceness and praise ends right here...{proceeds for another 5 screens of barbed critiquing}..."

While constructive criticism is welcome for any character application that could do well in your RPG if it just had some things tweaked, personally, long-winded stompings of bios, full of snarkiness and holier-than-thou comments, disgust me to no end and I'm not alone. If the application is that hopeless I don't see any other reason to waste 3 hours writing up a scathing review other than to enjoy cutting someone else down. If you want to, go ahead...you won't be admired or respected for it as a kind and considerate gameowner if that is how you deal with members whose skills are not up to your standards. It is more productive to be brief and polite by saying something like,

"I admire your effort and thank you for trying out at our game. However, the level of writing that your application demonstrates is not up to the game's minimum standards--this is a game for more experienced players--and it would be unfair to accept this only to see you unable to keep up. If you'd like to polish up on your skills and get an idea of what we are looking for I encourage you to check out our guides/roleplays/approved bios. If you have any questions just ask."

It can be easier than some might think to let an administrating position go to their head. I hope this can shed some light on it and help people avoid this pitfall!

You KILLED it! NOW where am I gonna roleplay?

500-word posting minimums. Hidden code words in the rules. Only invisionfree {proboards, forumotion, wetpaint, SMF, vbulletin, MyBB} can advertise here.

No n00bs allowed.

Do all these things and you'll have a civilised, intelligent, creative, mature, friendly, and most of all, neat and organised roleplaying game that is part of a larger, equally endowed roleplaying community.

Increasingly, it's also a dying roleplaying community.

I refer primarily to the Invisionfree/Proboards community of RPGs. I've heard people in this community lament that post-based roleplay is dying. These people usually blame other media like Facebook for its declining state. They have obviously not seen the many thriving roleplay circles and sites, such as the Wetpaint and Webs roleplaying community, Roleplayer's Guild and other multigenre sites, even my own Warrior Cats game. All of these and more are post-based, thriving, and not hooked up with Facebook any more than any other play by post community--though Facebook does have a roleplay community, it has not caused the death of play by post.

The people closing their boards off to only IF {or proboards, or any one software} are contributing to a larger problem that is slowly killing this particular roleplaying community. Anyone who was around in this community back in 2005, 2006, even 2007 could tell you it was another world then, a much more active one. Over time these sort of prejudices have sprung up as they often do along with an increased tendency to shut out "n00bs." Fewer people seem to be finding their way in. It can be a hard struggle to get a new site off the ground and keep it there. 20 members on per day is considered highly active.

How did this happen? More importantly, how can it be reversed?

Well, I have seen a general tendency as a roleplaying circle ages, to raise its requirements and expectations and to become more closed in on itself. This stasis cuts off most beginning roleplayers and they fail to come in anymore at a replacement rate. It becomes an inbred, specialised circle that slowly decays. The solution? To drop these prejudices that fracture the community even more. Being as open as possible to other softwares/brands will greatly aid your game as well as the network of roleplays that form this community.

And let those "n00bs" in. We were all n00bs once. Shutting beginners out is the beginning of the end.


Disclaimer: There are still quite a few thriving sites left in this community. It's the overall state of it that this article refers to. Placing this here to respond to the commenters who may come here saying they own/play on several active RPGs there. Yes, I am aware.

Now you've pissed me off...wait, no you didn't.

Or, how to discipline. Every administrator or moderator of any kind of forum is going to have to know how to do this. For me, disciplining didn't come naturally. I'm more of an innovator than an authority figure and had to figure out by trial and error how to effectively keep a member base happily under control. But if I can do it, anyone can...

Yes, I said 'happily under control.' Members who do not know their limits are unhappy members. Many will act out just to find what those limits are. After all, they don't know them. The first thing to make sure of is that you have all your rules clearly stated somewhere prominent on your forum. A rules board right up top, or a sticky thread announced over all boards works well.

So let's say you have all that but your members still act out. Welcome to the world of forums. To make sure that one member acting out doesn't become 700--because it will unless you do something--you need to quickly discipline them.

The faster it's addressed, the better, of course. Keep your language firm but friendly enough, say something like, "What you just did there [quote the infraction so they know what they did, especially if it's now a few posts or more back] is called a powerplay. A powerplay is when you damage someone else's character without permission. Please see our powerplaying guide [link] for more information, and if you are unsure of our rules don't hesitate to ask for help."

The player should correct; it helps to also PM it to them though this may vary. They are less likely to miss a PM than a post, though.

Let's say they keep it up and make the same rule break a second time, a third, etc. Let's say that they argue with you. "It's not a powerplay and he didn't mind! The other RPGs I play at don't have this stupid rule," says the member who's always right.

Here's where I normally step in with the warning bars, checks, etc. along with a scarily calm notice PMed to them that unless they change their wayward ways they could be abruptly removed from the member base. I'd say something like, "Regardless of how other games function, this is how our RPG is set up, and nobody forced you to join. Our rules are clearly displayed to guests. Your arguing and disparaging the site for an error you made has earnt you a [warning bar, etc.] and you will be banned if you continue."

If they continue, it's ban time. Whether temporary or permanent ban, for me depends on the situation.

I always tell my staff, never "raise your voice" to your recalcitrant members. Keeping your language neutral does a much better job of demonstrating you are in control. Someone who's truly in control and doesn't feel threatened by a member's challenges has no need to lose their cool. It also demonstrates to a member acting out that they are unable to get under our skin or make their rule breaks and insults have an impact on us. They may be acting out of frustration because they can't do what they want, but they're also testing you and testing their limits. And your other members are watching. Show them what those limits are, and everyone will be happier for it.

I Quit, Forever...see you next week.

We've probably all seen it--that member who for whatever reason, has had enough with a forum. They don't just call it quits--they scream it.

Then, before long, they come crawling on back. Usually within a few days to a few weeks. They may lurk for a while, seemingly unable to separate themselves from the community they supposedly grew to hate with a passion.

"I'm sorry," they say when they return. {Well, maybe.} "I was having a bad week...can you forgive me?"

So, some people have asked what one as an administrator should do about members like this? Chances are there won't just be one.

I believe prevention is the best cure. As an admin you should do your best to hear members' concerns out, help them with site issues, and generally let them know they aren't just an account number to you. Go the extra mile--they'll notice.

But will that be enough to magically prevent these sorts of dramas? No, of course not. So do you let them back?

I say it's a matter of how severe their quitting. I make sure to make things very clear that if someone has an issue on our site, that they either let staff know so we can help them, or they must hold their silence. Otherwise all they're doing is creating drama. If they left, but their leaving was not any kind of offencive against the community, I just let them return at their own pace if they do and welcome them back with open arms. Water under the bridge!

If they take it to the next level with a hateful rant against the site {or any member on it--I see no difference between the two in this regard} I ban them, forever or for a very, very long time--think years. This sort of thing is not just a "rant," it's an attack. I strongly recommend any admin do the same. Someone thoughtless enough to take their bad time out on a community that only tried to help them have a good time isn't welcome in my neck of the Web.

My recommendations for avoiding this stuff: First, hear members out when they have concerns. Make sure you and your staff are approachable and friendly so people don't feel scared to go to you guys for help. Second, handle their issues with concern and effort. If two members are fighting, see what you can do to smooth things out, and if it cannot be done, see if you can help them both settle into separate areas of your site so they can participate without interacting with each other.

And third, if someone attacks your site with a hate-filled "I quit and here's my 100 reasons why" thread, ban them. If they hate it that much, let them eat their words. Chances are, if their rant thread is the length of the average rant thread they won't be going hungry any time soon.