If you have to beg for volunteer staff for your forum, you are failing.

Seeing this over and over again here. "Help staff our forums!" Where 'our' is a synonym for the three of you - 'me, myself, and I'.

That looks -real- slick when you have a spammer account just sitting there profile spamming.

Here's a free lesson. If your forum:

1) Has gotten to the point where you don't have time or skill to manage or promote it on your own.
2) And you cannot draw people with the necessary drive and skills from your own membership.

You either
1) Need to find the time or get the skill,
2) Pay someone with the time and skill, or
3) Accept that your forum is going to die a miserable death like millions of others before yours. Congratulations.

I include skill for a reason. Numbers wise, your forum can be a huge success, but my main forum's biggest 'competitor' is known for ... repeatedly crashing and burning. Just last week, the database got wiped for the fourth time, because the host was incompetent. Over all four incarnations, it had over nine hundred thousand posts.

What does this mean?

1) Focus on one forum at a time. If you want other people to post, you yourself need to provide something of value to respond to - either by doing it yourself, paying someone, or convincing a friend. Random folks on the Internet think of themselves as busy people - your voice for building a community is just one out of a hundred million.
2) Do not needlessly divide your forums. Forum division should only be done for cultural or technical reasons. Hell, don't even create too many -boards- within a forum. Some people say no more than twenty, I say no more than six, at most. The perfect forum software would handle one forum with grace.
3) If your forum gets large, do not underestimate its technical requirements. A large forum can be a huge drain on a tiny server, and you get what you pay for. If your technical staff cannot competently make full daily, offsite backups of your forum, then when everything crashes, you own your own failure.

The bottom line is, you need to invest time, skill, and resources into your forum. The Internet is littered with the corpses of a hundred million failed forums. If you refuse to lift a finger for them, then your forum will join them.

And yes, at some point, $2 a month hosting is not going to cut it (they went for the $2/month hosting option -after- I told them to get a 'real host'...). $10 a month will not cut it. If you're particularly skilled, $50 a month will work for quite a long time.

The world is not going to magically lay itself at your feet. It takes work.

/rant

 

nicely put. I totally agree with what your saying. Too many forum admins out there think that everythings going to be handed to them on a plate and with little or no work their forum is going to become the next digitalpoint. lol

 

I was one of those people until I got down and dirty. I devoted more than 8-10 hours a day to my forum. Its now been online for just around 3 months and we almost have 700 members, over 11,000 posts, and lots of activity. It takes hard work and its not easy. I cut it lucky with a #1 search result for my keyword.

 

I am sick of all the "we're looking for staff for our forum" threads. Then when I look at their forum, their thread/post stats are all:

Threads/Posts
0/0
0/0
0/0
1/1
0/0
0/0
0/0
0/0
0/0
0/0
0/0
0/0
0/0
1/2
0/0
0/0
0/0
0/0
0/0
0/0
0/0

And they still insist that they need like 10 mods.

 

lol. very true.

Another thing i noticed is forums with about 100 posts and 10 members asking for donations to help run the forum

What do they need donations for? Obviously they can be on a very cheap host with little bandwidth coz its hardly 'server intensive' running an almost obsolete forum.

 

I thought it was just me who noticed this

Nice post also, to the OP. Excellent points

 

It really takes hard work and hands on it.

 

:d ...............

 

Lots of people want to make forums but don't want to do the hard work themselves!

 

nice tip.. but $50 a month? how can my forum earn like that? was just about to ask the same question..

 

How should i select an admin/mods?

 

When you need it you should be breaching ~1m pageviews a month or so anyway.

 

From your active and dedicated membership. Find the helpful, friendly and active people on your forum and promote them.

 

thanks for the input buddy!

 

Yeah, one must prepare for the hard work to manage a forum, it really a hard job! I run a forum in China in a free host, but less people visit it, For there are no so many good posts!

 

I started looking for volunteers to help keep the forum clean only when the posts reached more than a hundred thousand. I don't understand why a forum administrator has to look for forum moderator when there are no posts to show in the forum site in the first place.