Why did you close your RPG?

This is a good topic. For me personally, I always ended up closing my forum because my life got in the way. Graduating high school, starting college, college exams, college graduation, starting a job, working way more than I should, trying to start a career I can be happy with, family, relationships... the list goes on. It's always been a "me" problem and nothing wrong with the forum itself. When I closed my forums, I set them to maintenance mode and let people in to collect their character profiles, save memorable threads, and do whatever they needed to do before I deleted the forum entirely after a few weeks. Unless I planned on reopening it, there really was no point to leaving it up.

 

I never send a site to Maintenance mode, since the users should probably be able to get things off of it, as well as the chance that it may attract new people if I get the time to go back to it. So I guess the "Graveyard" is what mine sits at when they don't take off, or they grind to a halt.

It's kind of nice now, because I've really been able to dig around my roleplay sites and find what was and wasn't working. So a lot of things have changed, but they're looking better than ever!

 

I never really closed an rpg.

The first one was spread over 2 boards, really. We had multiple stories going on on the second board, which just faded away without being 'closed'. The board itself was still active, because we did more than just write stories.

 

Angel Valley, how I miss thee. It was fun, though the end of Sinlah ended a lot of packs. Iversia, Do you know I still hang out with Catta/Castlemew?

 

@Inversia Can you believe how far we've come? From the days of Homestead WSYWIG to now, where we're both professionals working on the web! The world is insane. For me I mostly just see the you and Dani. You should prod me on Facebook ;)

 

Funny thing. I actually went back to the old suddenlaunch forum this evening :) It's still there, suddenlaunch still does forums!

 

I haven't closed one in a while. I still keep a few just in case in hiatus on Yahoogroups. But most... because no one showed up any more. Generally became inactive. Sad really. And it's a constant plague to online RP stories.



~Lady B

 

The RPG I am talking about wasn't actually mine. I had been a moderator, then, when the administrators lost interest, me and another girl were promoted as administrators. But she found a demanding job... and like in the story with ten little negro boys... there remained one.

But at least we ended our story (yes, all three ships apotheotically sunk - it was up to each character who survived and who didn't, and who survived... it was another story, an unwritten one). And we put a closure message.

What did I do with it? I don't agree with the term "graveyard". It is a story. It was written online, two years, and it is normal to remain online, for everyone to read.

 

I've closed... three, I think. One, I just didn't have time and the staff and members slowly just faded off. The second one was more or less the same story... the third one, I had real life crisis happen and by the time I could get back to it... I just didn't want to revisit anything that reminded me of that time and sadly the game in question did so I talked with the other staff and we agreed to just let it lie. The first two games are still viewable, a sort of silent tribute and the third one I think the domain expired or something.

 

When I close a roleplay, it's always a combination of me losing interest and lack of activity. I wouldn't want to close if someone is still there and trying. With them, I can find something fun to do, and perhaps renew my interest. However, if there is no one left to stay for, and I lost interest, then there is no reason for the roleplay to keep going.

The first one was a chat roleplay, and there was no site to deal with. Everything was in e-mail or on my computer. I kept what I felt was important, for my own sake. Beyond that, I don't know what the others did.

With the second, we suffered from the whole issue with AvidGames, AcornRack, then Spleafnet. Honestly, by the time we closed, we had very little to show for all those years. :mad: We had ended up going to another multi-roleplay site, so what was there was archived.

 

Yeah. Though it is a joy to see a site that I recognize from there. There are probably (hopefully) more out there that I don't recognize.

 

My first board had trouble getting off the ground as my coder was a little bit of a slacker and whenever I'd ask for her help, she'd promise she'd do it and then a month later she wouldn't have even started on it. I tried to learn a bit of code to get everything done but her skills were way beyond mine and I couldn't figure out what she had done so it was hard for me to try and continue on with that. She had these big plans of grandeur for the site and what she would do, interactive map and stuff like that but in the end it all fell through and I just said forget it and closed it up, let the hosting lapse and just let it fade.

 

Coder Skill Levels are part of why I went with Mediawiki for CoSC's current incarnation. The coding is less complicated and much more frontend oriented using the Mediawiki Coding methods. It's a really underutilized software.

 

I voted "Members left" and "Other", mainly because I think it was a combination of issues.

Ruins of Fenris (Wolf RPG) — closed 10+ years ago — I closed because I just didn't have the time/interest to maintain it anymore, and IIRC, it was struggling to survive anyway. It's a shame because it could have been really awesome; it was heavily Norse-based and we were talking about introducing shamanism and minor shifting.

Wolf! — closed in 2007 — ... the original, hah. I ran this in 2007 when I first went to college, and it was really "innovative" in terms of forum features. A now-ex boyfriend did most of the coding to make those features happened, and was my co-admin. I broke up with him and the board was closed.

Wyldernis — closed May? 2013 — This was pretty recent, and was meant to be Wolf! version two. It was the first time in a VERY long time that I tried to create/admin a game on my own, and while I think I had some good ideas, they ultimately failed. I really wanted it to be open and player created, but there didn't seem to be a whole lot of interest in that. I also let myself get caught up in some pointless drama (and probably exasperated said drama), and it sort of ruined my interest. ALSO, I think my plans for it were too large/lofty to really start with. It was slowly being abandoned by members, felt really unfinished (because the world building just wasn't happening/working), and it just felt like time to pull the plug. It was a good learning experience either way, and I feel really good about the game I'm currently running. :)

I should also mention that when I really felt like I couldn't run Wyldernis any longer, I did try to give it to others to manage... but nothing really came of that, and since I was still in charge of hosting & costs it just was time to get rid of it.

 

I closed my site due to my own lack of time - and money. I had run my site on a paid host (Ipb) for five years - and that meant five years of paying monthly for the site to stay ad-free and having awesome tech support. When I was able to do that, it ran swimmingly, I had tech support and help with things that I couldn't understand because I was no genius about running a forum and working all the coding.

Then, they got more technical, advanced their board and I was less and less able to keep up with it due to time, and eventually money. Paying per month for a site when you can barely feed yourself is stupid - no matter how much you love it - and even though I had some members chipping in from time to time, I couldn't.

So I switched to a free site. And lost half my memberbase in the shuffle - they not happy about losing their archives even though I gave them two-three months of notice to back up their stuff if they wanted - even offering to help.

Then I realized, even with the free site, I couldn't do it on my own, as I had been the solo admin for a few years by then. I just didn't have the time to put all the work into a site by myself. I FIRMLY BELIEVE that if a site is to be active, the staff has to be the most active, and when you're the only staff and have no one else to be active with you and share plots and whatnot . . .

So I closed the site. I left it in maintenance mode so that I could put a notice up as to why since I felt my members deserved that. I had three members contact me after that, apologizing for their own inactivity and wanting me to let them know if I ever opened a site up again. That was kind of nice. ^^

But yeah, lack of time and money. Really, that site had been originally a joint venture between myself and my husband - and then when he left the site (not ME, just the site - got bored with it), it wound up being me and a good friend of mine, and when she left the site due to irl issues including lack of internets because of lack of money irl - me as a solo admin could only do so much.