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.
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