Site Management What's the reason why you gave up on your site?

[Heatman]

A lot of communities have come and go for one reason or another. Some people find it easy to run a forum with everything being in place and ready for them to see things through while some people start struggling either from the beginning or mid way through running the forum. This will eventually lead them to give up and end the project.

What's the reason why you gave up on your site?

 

[Ravenfreak]

I gave up on a few sites throughout the years because I lost interest in them, or I didn't have as much time to work on them. I'm thankfully a bit better at this though, and have had Thee Zone around for a bit. (It is a combination of three communities merged that I started about 2 years ago respectively.)

 

[Cory]

I closed my Yu-Gi-Oh Marketplace forum on two separate occasions because it was a hard niche to promote and gain members. Both times it was open I didn't gain not one new member. Besides, most people trade TCG cards on social media these days.

 

[joelr]

The #1 reason why a hobbyist site closes is because of the owner. An owner really needs to think through their commitment before starting up a new community or forum: do you have enough money to sustain the community for several years, do you have any content, do you have enough time. This is all wrapped up in the life of the owner / forum admins.

 

[Tracy]

What's the reason why you gave up on your site?

I imagine that many are due to losing interest in the niche.
I know I sold one of my domains (and the XF script and database) to a friend for $25 because ultimately I did not have the time to devote to it and he wanted to try to make a go of it to get some additional income.
That site really did not cost me any extra as I knew that I was not going to be rushing out to upgrade the script since the developers had not given me crap to care about on it, and I already had a VPS for other sites that it could run on. I simply had lost interest in posting in the niche since my current one is rather expensive to support and obtain items to create content for.
I still pay for and maintain the VPS that site I sold is on, but it's now on another provider (Contabo) as I have some other sites on it also and main site is now alone on its VPS instance.
I just decided, as mentioned, that I did not have the time nor the interest to generate content for it. And to top it off, I did not see the point of my giving XF more money when they aren't giving me what I would like. I've got XF and several add-ons actively licensed.. and I STILL cannot upgrade to XF 2.3 because a few of my primary add-ons STILL are not updated to 2.3 version compatibility, never mind it's been around 6 months since the release of the 2.3 BETA (and that is telling that it takes 1/2 a year or more for a primary paid 3rd party developer to get updated as XF is SO dependent upon 3rd party add-ons to make it work well).
My main site I still run as a hobby for me and offer others the opportunity to participate there if they choose. It gives me somewhere I can post my content without having to worry about ticking someone off because I may offend one of their site supporters. Of course, I've NEVER been known for calling anyone out.
📣

 

[joelr]

and I STILL cannot upgrade to XF 2.3 because a few of my primary add-ons STILL are not updated to 2.3 version

Isn't the whole model of XF though to slowly upgrade at your leisure? Like, what's the rush to upgrade especially if you depend on 3rd party?

 

[Shortie]

The very first forum I had that was pretty successful was one I ran from 2009 - 2017. I was proud of the forum but in 2017, the hosting prices went up drastically and I had to decide to move hosts to one not as good or close the site. I chose to close the forum and move onto something new but kept the backup until my laptop hard drive died and I lost that too.

I still miss the place to this day and have tried to reopen it but never found the time to put into a forum like that one again.

 

[Tracy]

Isn't the whole model of XF though to slowly upgrade at your leisure? Like, what's the rush to upgrade especially if you depend on 3rd party?

There are bugs that are present in 2.2 that are fixed in 2.3. Several of them do impact the operation of the site.
Of course, there are a constant stream of bugs being found (and some even fixed) in 2.3.
I've pretty much just decided I'll be waiting on the next version that has a better editor. Where I am with 2.2 works, albeit with some issues that are present on any 2.2 site.
But honestly.. I don't think waiting 1/4 to 1/2 a year to update is exactly rushing into something.

But as for the topic... every site I let go was in a niche that I was playing in. Once I lost interest in the niche I also lost interest in the site. It is rather hard to create content on something that you are not active in unless it is one that you got out of but have a long history of being involved in before.