Azdgari wrote:WildSimba wrote:But if the admin doesn't work on driving activity, then they can't expect activity to come.
Well, it did for the last 6 or 7 years, didn't it? If Moka was super involved in keeping up activity over that time, I guess I wasn't privy to it.If he wanted the site to survive, he'd had several ways of marketing the site on a backlog (most sites that get big or want to get big, generally have a marketing team set up). Honestly, I don't think there's anything at this point, not even anything that Moka can do to drive up activity.
Really? I've been on fan forums for a long long time (whaddup OG InvisionFree squad) and have staffed/run no shortage of them myself, and dedicated marketing/external advertising teams are a rarity in my experience. Maybe in the early phases, sure, you make a concerted effort to reach out to other fan sites to draw users, but most forums self-propel once they hit critical mass.
I guess my thinking is that Moka is, and has always been, technical. Were I him, I would assume that the role of moderators/non-technical staff is, at least in part, to drum up activity, think up/execute innovative forum activities, etc (I don't think moderating is actually particularly time consuming, assuming the staff is appropriately well populated for the activity level). I mean, no offense, but if the green name is supposed to imply community leadership, why haven't I seen a green name post in the last, what, month?
In general, though, I do take your point. Admins typically function as leaders. But I don't think Moka has really played that role as long as I've been here, so I don't associate him with it. To the point about archiving, I suppose it all depends on whether or not Moka is willing to continue to finance the place and keep the lights on.
That is most certainly what moderators are meant to do, but from all of the time I've been here, aside from a few people, I never saw much of people drumming up activity. I'll just be honest here, this site had poor management in general. It wasn't really Moka's fault, because as you said he never was completely a leader so much as the technical portion. He put his complete trust into the wrong people here and it backfired. This is what happens when you let your friends run a forum, with no true grasp on how to spike activity in a site. (To be fair even I wasn't a good choice for that, being that I didn't have any experience doing that.)





