Ten ways to KILL your forum

The title is self-explanatory. This thread will teach you the 10 ways to kill your forum overnight.

Want to see how you can decrease traffic, turn away members, and sink your SEO rankings? This is how you do it....

1. Have a 200+KB banner that is 1280+x400+. Earn extra points if it's cut up into 20+ slices, as they'll never load properly, and it'll look like a jigsaw with a few pieces missing.

2. Your forumhome includes forum icons that are wider than the Grand Canyon and stick out like a Broadway sign. Why is that a bad thing? Because with width, comes height, and those poor forumites are going to have to scroll down to the bottom of the canyon (3 days later). Earn extra points if it's a set width forum style, with encyclopedia sized descriptions.

3. Your forum is #000000 with #ffffff text. Much worse, #000000 with #ff0000 text. Worst of all, all #000000 with #ff0000 text and the forum icons even match the background ("Oh, stealth skin!!"). :rolleyes: Earn extra, extra points if it's #000000, with #ff0000 text, the icons match the background, but show a #ffffff matte.

4. Decide to put all your navigational buttons and links in a left sidebar. Make it real hard for those members with 1280x1024 and 1600x1280 res monitors to even get to them. Increase Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, mouse dust bunnies, and eye strain of looking a-l-l the way across the screen and trying to get Mr. Mouse even Home.

5. You get an wonderful idea of including popups for your forum, thinking it's a good way to get another ad view. Earn a zillion site killing points by including even more.

6. Visited vB.org and go hog wild and install *#(%#_*_# many mods. Then wonder why (#%*)_#%(_ members complain, "Yo, Admin, this site crawls!!". At least your visitors won't complain, as they can't even load the page, and nowhere to be found!!

7. Get a brand new spanking Quad Xeon 64bit system with 32GB of memory (just for mysql), and 4 dual Xeon web front ends with 8GBs each. Beautiful Cisco firewall. Even comprehensive DDoS and IDS protection with a nice pricey 24/7 hands on Level III sys admin. Then when a script kiddie comes around and cracks your Admin password (you know one that is like Admin123), he goes in and wipes out your database, because you like to do mysql edits through your admin panel. Add the worst forum killing points for forgetting to do any nightly backups. Bye bye forum!!!!

8. Have a hot thread going (Evolution vs. Intelligent design vs. Creation thread that is like 12,000 posts long) that gets known on the usenet. The members of said newsgroup doesn't like the topic decides to visit. Next thing known you have all of the pests associated with a newsgroup on your site. Beware of the kooks; grossest porn links; spammers of the nth degree; and a REAL hacker who wants to use your server as his personal open relay. Oh, don't forget the REAL hacker also stole your database and is data mining it for email addresses too, and he's smart enough to cover his tracks so the FBI can't even find him. Earn the ultimate forum killing points when you tell the hacker to FOAD and the newsgroup posters to HTH. I don't think I need to explain that your forum is now dead and your forum-forum's-forum WILL be dead!!

9. In the effort to increase your SEO you learn some tricks to increase traffic illegally but you think you won't get caught. You submit your site to Google and Yahoo. Within days they find out of the cheats and your site is delisted. Do you have another domain? Because your forum now no longer exists to the largest search engines -- which makes your forum good as dead.

10. The forum has a disagreement on how a member or favorite thread was banned or closed. The infighting gets so bad the Admin has to step in and ban a ringleader. The ringleader gets irate and launches a steal-member-campaign. Next thing you know is your membership shrinks overnight, and you're totally powerless while they leave. Meanwhile the ringleader's friends take apart your site literally piece-by-piece. Even the Marines can't save the forum now, as it's being transfered wholesale to the other forum!

Now that you know how to kill your entire forum (and maybe website too), DON'T DO IT.

Chris

(moved to more appropriate catagory)

Very good write up - and all true. Ive seen all that at least once.

Seen couple that employ all! lololol

Makes it worse is when they're sooooo touchy to change, complain for months why not, then wind up changing in the end because the members have had enough. Wonderful example of what happened at the Hannity forum with every known exploit was done, and they resisted getting vB way toooooo long (phpBB really isn't safe forumware).

Chris

Whats funny - is number 10 is basically how my first forum got started

Think a lot of communities are begun because they didn't like XYZ site, so they strike up their own. Either by grabbing old members, or by competition.

But if an Admin doesn't amend a bad situation fairly, his forum will die out, as members vote with their feet. So Admins need to be on top of their membership needs (as they'll tell the staff, and sometimes very directly). It's why to not try to ban a member unless it's the last option (and trying to work it out privately -- publicly causes folks to lose face, which escalates a situation).

Chris

And that is exactly what happened - the admins basically chased me and a few others away - when they cold have fixed things anytime.

Today I have 5 times as many members as they do.

Most forums have members that are vain and think they can control the forum by complaining to stupid moderators, I have seen bad moderators that let members dictate how the forum is run many times!

The gang mentality on some forums and moderators that allow it to happen is the main cause of destruction on any forum!

There are a lot of cry babies and fools on forums, bad moderators do not understand their own members and the way they think in many cases!

Bad moderation will make a bad situation worse when management allows idiots on their board that should have been banned by them instead of keeping the fools around :o

What gets me is that these same members go from forum to forum too, and they repeat the same junk. :(

When I was posting on the Hannity forum they had a little clique of premium like members, and they ruled the forum (having that private but public forum as well), and they went around claiming that had zero powers. Funny they were moderators and the Administrators. I tested out a theory (well, I wanted badly to leave the forum as I got tired of the political BS from both camps) on how far they'd go, and sure enough like a pack they went on a mass ban after the 2004 election (so much about bipartisan unity!) over anything not "conservative" to them.

Sometimes getting banned is a good thing. You just venture out to new forums and meet new people (like here). :)

Chris

That Hannity forum is filled with bias blind Republican fools that support a loser like Bush who barely has the support of 30% of the American people!

What does that tell you about those assholes :confused:

I agree with your "going to vb.org and installing 10,000 hacks" theory. I've got a few installed, plus a skin. Thats about it.


I also agree about the admin password. It needs to be something not so easy to decode. Personally, my admin password is

Hf0937fnFHFIUGHubfie33030fh391gf843bng08gh4l2l3mmm m39nv98n4g4ng3

Pretty good huh?:wave:

That Hannity forum is filled with bias blind Republican fools that support a loser like Bush who barely has the support of 30% of the American people!

What does that tell you about those assholes :confused:

Same applies to Freepers, DU and Daily KoS sites too. They're all extremist in nature and harbor some of the largest AHoles known, both administratively and by membership (but they have some very exciting debates!!). :D

I know one of the founders of DU and he's a good guy and all, but can't stand when each side lies to try to persuade public opinions. Doesn't give me a very good opinion of this political process, as they try to play Robin Hood or become anarco-capitalists. Then each side claiming they're for the "common man". :( The "common man" is trying to live while jobs are shipped overseas, taxes eat at their wallets, and there's little time to even sit down and watch TV because of how technology has gotten a strangle hold on their movement (i.e., cellphones, and programing XYZ to do ABC to even operate something!). Used to be to warm up food in a microwave was just turning a dial and pushing the cook button. Now it's hunting the right button, adjusting the heat level, and then clicking a cook button. :( Even worse in trying to just operate a DVD player (remember one of the first consumer ones, and it was just a couple of dials and cassette buttons to push to record/rev/fwd/stop/play). :cry:

Chris

There is something called right and wrong, I hate anyone that supports corruption because corruption supports their hidden agenda!:o