Have you been a forum administrator?

[jeremiah]

If you have/had your own forum, what have you learned about being a good administrator?

There's no such thing as a 'good administrator', at least not in my world. There are Fair admins, EgoManiac Admins, Lucky Admins, and Lazy Admins. I fall under Lazy, that's for sure.

I run/own about 8 forums and am admin on one of the largest webmaster forums online. My smallest forum, one that I have actually 'almost' given up on gets around 300 new members a day on average, thousands of posts daily, and has 30,000+ members now. I started it this year and it has been up and running for about 3months now. Kicker is, it's infested with spam, I'm talking 100's of thousands of posts, but then...it gets like 80,000+ uvs a month, so I've stopped complaining and learned to adapt.

What I have learned is, adapt or die. Once the spam started bombarding the forum, I had 3 choices:

1. hire mod help to handle spam
   
2. spend 18hours a day on there myself cleaning crap up
   
3. say to hell with it and figure out hot to monetize the insane amount of spam

As I'm the Lazy type, I went with 3. Now, site is earning me a little over 130 a day off adsense (on average) and some change off affiliate links.

(i might end up making a thread about how to earn off spam traffic one day on here, could prove to be a bit of an interesting/controversial little shindig)

ps. anyone interested in checking out the spam forum in question, pm me. will link you

[Arеs]

I haven't been a forum administrator, but have been a site administrator. I think I will be one in the future.

[Kye]

Well, I made my own forum and it never quite got "Big"
but it got about 50 or so members and about 10 active ones...

I wish that forums could have taken off with al least 500 members and like 50-200 active
members, anyone got any tips for making a forum big?

[Brandon]

Gibson, keep at it man. Not everyone starts off big. So what if your forums are small, keep writing content and publish it to the web so others read it. Tell everyone you know, tell them to tell everyone they know. Just keep going, eventually you'll start getting randoms and it will spread. It doesn't spread big, but if you keep trying you'll do it. Don't give up is what I'm saying, that's why you failed.

[Eve]

From what I have observed of forum administrators, the successful ones are consistently productive. The first one or two years will probably have cycles of activity and inactivity. Qualities like patience and discipline are required by the administrator, because it motivates the community to remain interested. If the administrator s not committed, the more active members become disappointed and the less active members become bored.

And that is just the community management aspect of forums.

[AceInfinity]

If you have/had your own forum, what have you learned about being a good administrator?

I've had that experience before. It's like a democracy, you have to consider the opinions of the majority so that they don't get frusterated, even if you don't want to make changes based on their opinions that they have. You can't be an idiot, and you have to think in fair terms, and follow the rules that you have put in place yourself. I could type 10 pages on all of this, but a lot of it comes down to being respectful, consideration for your users, and improvements as opposed to your competition sites so that you can gain more members. It's all about updates too, as you've said, they can get bored easily, which means less activity, and your forum slowly dies. Seen it over and over again.

[MarkW7]

Backup! It's crucial to make back ups at least once a day.

Make it fun, no one likes an ass hat admin.

[Pineapple]

Admin for about 5/6 years. I learned how to manage users and how to express my opinion.

[Lemons Kushy]

Once, for like 10 minutes haha

[versx]

I've learned a lot from being a forum admin, #1 thing I've learnt is how MyBB works, how to install it and the plugins/themes for it.