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.