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.
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