How do once good communities fail?

Let's say if we have a good community that's pretty popular, and then something happens, nobody is posting anymore... What do you think is the cause for a lot of good communities failure? Could it be from the lack of commitement or?

 

I've seen a lot of forums fail due to the actions of the ownership/moderators. Once a few key people leave, they might go someplace else then other people follow them and the original forum becomes a ghost town. A lack of commitment is generally low down on the list since most people who post on forums actually like posting on forums.

 

Do you people give up because they believe their community can survive without them, or what? I've seen a lot of good communities that have fallen because they lack new content, and people aren't posting anymore.

 

Forum gets hacked
Forum gets a new mod who is power hungry
Lame members acting like 12 to 14 yr old post retarted stuff
People just getting tired of posting
Not enough new members are joining

 

I'm just about to start a community. The fact that few famous forums have turned into 'Ghost Towns' shakes me up from within. I guess, new posts, good content, events like contests, etc. could help sustaining and help grow traffic.

 

A forum is a LOT of work. It can "fail" for a whole number of reasons. Most of all, poor management. It is a misconception that "once a forum gets big you don't need to do much." You need to do more than ever before, or you could see the entire thing collapse. This is also a chief cause of a once friendly forum getting rude and nasty.

 

No motivation to keep posting. The owner needs to constantly be adding new, fresh content to engage discussions. Otherwise, the forum will get boring after some time, and members will start leaving.

 

Do you think its up to the owner to get the community off the ground, and make sure it doesn't die? If the owner isn't active, and has staff members that are working for him/her, shouldn't they be to blame as well?

Why do you think this sometimes happen?

 

Sex, drugs and dancing, all the young kids dancing to their hippity hoppity music these day, our communities are going straight to Hell!!! Also, if the water is bad then you know the people got to be.

/lolz

 

I think it's fully up to the owner to get a community off the ground. It takes time & dedication. Being lazy and hiring staff members to do the work for you shows a lack of that. But yes, if the community dies because of inactive staff members, they are to blame also.

 

I think the best way to kill a forum after it is doing well is either over moderation or under moderation.

If it gets full of spam, it will die.

If moderators are over powering and bent of feeding their ego, it will fail. When you do moderate, do it quietly. Don't make a big deal of it just deal with the offender.

Like they do here, seeing banned besides a users name is enough.

Not long ago, I saw a board owner complaining about no one posting. That was probably the worst thing he could have done.

When I saw it, I was like, you haven't posted any thing new. It is your freaking board. Say something yourself. I didn't, I just went on about my business but that's really a bad idea. Announce to the world no one is posting and then don't post anything of value. Not smart.

 

I think a lot of times, a forum owner just does not understand the time it takes to keep a forum updated and interesting. My forum is a ghost town once members convinced me to make much of the forum private. They kind of wanted their own group to chat and that was about it. Unfortunately, I listened to them, and my forum has been suffering.

It just gets old to. Once you do it for awhile and nothing takes off, it seems as though your time has been spent for nothing. I'd like to sell, but don't think I'd get much in this economy.

 

Sometimes it just gets too big and the signal-to-noise ratio changes.

 

i think communities fails when owners became greedy and show more ads and spam your email with email

 

Not producing new and original content.
Another site comes along that presents better content and visual appearance.
Website doesn't evolve with the internet times.
Bad owners/moderation. Losing members to no moderation is common and even more common is power hungry moderation.
No loyalty from owners.
Loss of funds.

 

you need to keep the members coming back again, and again (and get new members while doing so)