Here's something a friend of mine online was telling me about one of the boards she manages. For the past two years, she and another admin had been managing a SW board, which is now planning to close its doors until its members protested. They are now going to close it, revamp it, then restart it as a fresh new roleplay, complete with new timeline but the same characters. Unfortunately for the members, all of their past roleplays and hard work they put into writing their characters have been shelved away into an archive, never to be resurrected again.

In my opinion, this is just poor management. Not only do you discourage your members to develop your characters and their storylines, you also kill their motivation to write. If you were a member, would you write a roleplay knowing that one day, everything you were working on was suddenly declared irrelevent and archived away? I don't think that is fair to their members and quite frankly, it is just wrong. Worse of all, the owners pretty much declared, "if you don't like it, you can all ****-off."

As I said. Poor management skills.

I know for a fact, this third attempt at restarting their board is going to end up as another failure. There was already a lax attitude there and the owner discouraged everyone to post anything OOC, because it deterred from the roleplays, hence he declared, "we are not here to socialize, we are here to write roleplays." And yet, he complains there is no community on his board. Gee, I wonder why? Moron. You also wonder why you have poor membership, too?

The owner now has established an RPG network on his website and is attempting to force all of his members to join each and every one of his boards, based on several genres. I think this is unfair as well. If I was a member, you are not going to force me to write on a vampire RPG board, just because I joined one of your SW RPG boards on your network. Not going to happen. He claims he is not a fascist dictator, but his actions speaks otherwise.

Anyway, I better stop, as I could write 60 pages worth on this trainwreck he created.