No Feedback on Another Proboard Forrum as well?

[Radrook]

Forum URL: varietygalore.boards.net

 Not only do I get zero feedback to thousands my posts on my forum. But I get zero feedback on my posts on other Proboard forums as well?  How statistically probable is that without it having to be conspirational? 

    Even a message to the forum's administrator is ignored. 

     Here is the Proboard website where I posted two short stories, and tried to communicate with the webmaster to no avail.

theliteratureclub.proboards.com/

theliteratureclub.proboards.com/thread/1834/abominable-rat-brain-experiment

     If indeed the forum is dead, then why have it listed as if it were active? It only serves to waste an interested person's valuable time and effort.  

[bigballofyarn]

Apr 23, 2024 3:08:46 GMT -8 Radrook said:

Forum URL: varietygalore.boards.net

 Not only do I get zero feedback to thousands my posts on my forum. But I get zero feedback on my posts on other Proboard forums as well?  How statistically probable is that without it having to be conspirational? 

    Even a message to the forum's administrator is ignored. 

     Here is the Proboard website where I posted two short stories, and tried to communicate with the webmaster to no avail.

theliteratureclub.proboards.com/

theliteratureclub.proboards.com/thread/1834/abominable-rat-brain-experiment

     If indeed the forum is dead, then why have it listed as if it were active? It only serves to waste an interested person's valuable time and effort.  

The thread you linked to is private. From what I can see as a guest, it appears that the forum doesn't have much activity. Honestly, this is something you should assess before joining a community. ProBoards doesn't just delete a forum for having a low level of activity compared to others. I wouldn't say there's any conspiracy against you or your forum. Respectfully, your forum is also fairly quiet. You are the only member who logged in within the past 24 hours. There won't be any replies from other members if no one else has logged in. 

[Radrook]

Very Respectfully:

      Thank for the advice. Yes, true, I should have checked to see if the website was active or not. My mistake.

Differences between my Forum and that forum: 

  I  have been posting approx. four new threads per day year after year for for more than ten years now.  In contrast, the website you are comparing it with has long stretches of no activity at all for years.

     Also, if someone communicates or posts on my forum, the person will immediately receive a response and will definitely not be unceremoniously ignored. Especially if the person's contribution has been significant. . 

    About the link I provided leading to a private forum,. Yes, I noticed.  But strangely, it doesn't do that when I use it as a link from my computer WordPad.  It only does it when posted here.

Strangely, those who are responding to my forum posts do so on Twitter by posting a LIKE. Which further compounds the mystery since the "LIKE" option is right in front of them at the forum. Yet they refuse to click it. 

Yes, I am aware that no member can respond if responses are limited to members and the member doesn't log in. However, my board had been open to responses from guests as well as members for the last ten years. Responses have been restricted to members only for the last two months.   


BTW

     The reason I mentioned inactivity as a basis to delete a forum to prevent wasting a member's time,  is because I once read that it was a Proboard policy. So it was more of a reminder than a demand. Nothing more.  If indeed I gave that erroneous impression then I am sorry. 

[bigballofyarn]

ProBoards may delete a forum that has been 100% inactive for a certain period of time. I do not know the exact qualifications for that to happen. It could be something like no posts at all for 10 years. The forum to which you linked does have scattered posts that are recent and I would speculate that ProBoards would keep it online for that reason.

I can assure you that I don't hate you and I see no reason for anyone else to hate you or conspire against you. We live in an era though where people live in the mindset of "too long, didn't read." Some people will open longer threads and realize they don't have the patience to read and respond. If you are sharing long stories, this could be why people are not replying. You could test my theory by creating shorter topics and seeing if people respond.

[Lynx]

As a side note: If memory serves me correctly, I believe PB has only deleted inactive forums twice in their 20+ years of existence - so it's not something that happens annually, for example.

[Radrook]

Apr 23, 2024 4:20:15 GMT -8 Lynx said:

As a side note: If memory serves me correctly, I believe PB has only deleted inactive forums twice in their 20+ years of existence - so it's not something that happens annually, for example.

   
   Well, whether it does or doesn't is OK by me. No big deal.  I just had high hopes of having found a forum where I could interact with other writers for a valuable exchange of literary ideas and felt frustrated. 

     Thanks for the advice.  Well, most of my fiction stories and articles are short. They are  usually what is called Flash Fiction which is limited to  the 1000 words or less. 

     As for hating someone without having a logical basis for it. Thanks for the advice. However,, unfortunately,  I grew up in Newark NJ among Irish and Italians who hated us based on our ethnic identity.  For example, I was chased and had to hide to avoid getting beaten to a pulp.  I was also left left pinned with my pelvic bone against the edge of a school basement stairway step, while with dozens of kids were piling on top. 

     The Teacher, this Nordic looking woman, just stood there  giving me a hate-look and refused to extend me a helping hand and mercifully free me from my agony. Then she very calmly turned her back ignoring my extended hand and expression of pleading agony, and very slowly walked away.

     Also, just recently, a Latino had  battery acid splashed on his face and told to go home by a fellow who was doing MAGA. 

     So in an ideal world, or the New World God promises to establish on Earth, such things will not happen. But in this one, unfortunately they do and they can  take many varied forms.

[bigballofyarn]

Newark is not very far from me, but the general culture of that city doesn't represent the entire world or even all of New Jersey. I'm sorry for whatever pain you experienced in the past, but please try not to let it affect your present or future. Not all people are like that. I do hope you find a forum you can call home where you can share your stories and receive positive feedback. You deserve the best.

Edit:
The bad parts of Newark don't even represent all of Newark. I know that the Northeast can be extremely intimidating, but not everyone is like that. Again, I'm sorry for the bad experiences you've had. You didn't deserve them.

[Kami]

Ah, Newark (affectionate). Haven't been to Jersey in years but I lived there for a time...

In any case, I just wanted to mention a few things to (hopefully) levelset expectations regarding forum activity.

1. Lynx already mentioned that PB has only deleted inactive forums twice in the last 20 years. I want to add the additional information of what the trigger was: six months or longer without a single page view. Not posts, not member engagement, just 1 page view (and it could have come from anywhere). Compared to the total number of forums PB hosted at the time, the number of forums that fit the above criteria was incredibly small and not a lot of forums were removed. In fact, one of the forums I used to be active on had been dead for years as a community, but managed to escape deletion as people occasionally logged in For The Memories.

2. There seems to be the impression on your end that guests = individuals who intend to view and genuinely engage with your content. To be absolutely clear, on PB, the word "guest" is simply a distinguishing term between "user who is logged in" and "user who is not logged in". Even a legitimate member is counted as a guest up until they log into their account. Guests can also be non-human users, as well as non-legitimate human users (ie: spammers). Yes, human spammers exist, and yes they can and do post on forums irrespective of any messages or rules addressed to them. It's a lousy marketing tactic, to increase SEO hits to whatever site or sites they're spamming about, and they are absolutely human users — but they will never respond to you or engage with the community genuinely.

3. Kind of related, in a way, but there seems to be expectations here that if you create posts and things to engage with, that users will just sort of... appear, and be compelled to join and engage. While that may have been true once upon a time, the fact is now that forum admins have an uphill battle against other kinds of online communities, like social media and discord. Creating content and bumping advertisement threads, quite simply, doesn't have the same amount of power as it once did. On top of that, you have so many more websites and potential results in search engines to compete against now versus when forums were in the height of their popularity — a single google search for your basic keywords returns thousands of results in a fraction of a fraction of a second, some of which are websites twice the age of your forum, others of which have been promoted with a lot of financial investment. Unfortunately, unless you got really lucky and were able to come up with the perfect URL that also included your keyword(s) AND had the perfect storm of organic content from legitimate members AND had the right amount of indexing bot traffic at the right time, this will always be an uphill battle for forums that are either new, or have been established for a while but fell inactive or had a lull in new members / content.

4. I really think you should alter your thinking with regards to people liking posts from your forum on twitter versus them not engaging on your forum. Firstly, guests cannot "like" posts on PB; the option doesn't even appear for them. Even if we assume the people engaging on twitter with a "like" are real people, who actually read your content, they literally cannot do what you expect them to do. Secondly, getting someone on a platform like twitter to join a forum is like pulling teeth. The reason people like to use twitter (and other social media) is because they only need ONE account to access a plethora of communities and can curate their experience to match their interests. Unless they are specifically looking to join a forum community, you will have an exceedingly difficult time turning twitter / social media engagement into active, long-term forum members. it's not impossible, but you have to really stick to your guns and also levelset your expectations on success better. Lastly, twitter / social media has bots too. There are your standard product spammers, your run-of-the-mill NSFW spammers, but you also have "likes" spammers, service scam spammers, account recovery spammers... the list goes on. "Likes" on a tweet do not always mean genuine engagement. I have a few thousand followers on twitter and at least a handful of my likes on any given post are from either suspect accounts, or lurkers (folks who "like" stuff but never engage fully).

I don't say any of this to discourage you; I love forums and I honestly kind of wish we could return to the era of internet where forums were the go-to place for interest-based communities with social media focused more on personal connections.

But in the last few threads you've created, I've noticed a worrying train of thought that there's some sort of conspiracy or disingenuous presentation of information from support helpers because you can't believe that you can get [insert engagement type here] without it being genuine or converting into long-term, reliable membership, and that there is some secret, hidden reason or magical thing you're missing or something is otherwise "wrong". Unfortunately, the reality is that is absolutely possible, and very common. It's an uphill battle for all forum admins in this day and age (my forum will be turning 20 next year and this is still a struggle for us), but especially more so for forums that are ~5 years old or younger.

There's really nothing weird or unusual about what you're facing. The truth of the matter is that forums, quite simply, aren't as popular as they used to be + the activities of bots and human spammers to approximate "genuine" engagement has increased. That's it, that's genuinely it.

People with successful forums tend to have been at it much longer, have a topic that people are really passionate about / engaged with, hit a niche where they're one of the only communities for that topic, were super lucky in their SEO setup, or some combination of the above. Otherwise, we all struggle to find members in this era of the internet, and that's simply something we have to accept as a price of sticking with forums versus creating communities elsewhere.