I've run a big text adventure for thirteen years (at one point briefly it was the biggest text adventure!) and if there's one thing I've about managing a big online community in that time that I'd choose to pass on as a warning to others, it's this: remove the people who don't like being there.
Some folks just don't like the place, or they liked it once and they don't anymore, and that's fine.
You'd think they'd just go somewhere else, and most do, but some don't, and those folks are AWFUL.
Some folks can come in, have fun for a month or so then stop having fun but keep coming back for YEARS. They're always negative enough that nobody likes them, and they'll complain about being so unliked on this awful website that used to be great for two weeks in 2009, and everyone wants them to leave and they hate it here but they JUST. WON'T. LEAVE.
Ban them! It sounds straightforward but it's really shockingly easy to roll your eyes and move on and not ban them, but you've gotta ban them!
Bucause if you DON'T ban them, then they find each other! They set up gross unhealthy little quicksand cliques of misery, and they try to suck others in too!
I don't have any of these players on Improbable Island right now, they've all migrated to a Discord server devoted to being unhealthily obsessed with the game that they don't like, but I was just reminded of this weird mestastisized social failure state by /r/watchredditdie, which is probably the most miserable place I've ever seen
The worst part of this horrible dynamic is you have people using your site to immiserate themselves. And you probably made the site with the intention of helping people have fun and make new friends.
Seeing people use your creations to hurt others is a thing that devs have to be on guard against because lots of people are awful and we all know about that already - but watching someone use your creation to hurt *themselves* is a novel sort of heartbreak.
It really hurts, watching someone torture themselves with your creation, and the kind thing to do for yourself and for them and for everyone around them is to just bloody stop it.
Banning someone for your own mental health is fine and healthy and frees up your emotional resources to care for the community.
Moar thoughts on online community management: every online community goes through a cycle of inception, establishment, maturity and decline, and this is natural and fine.
There are a finite number of people in the world. Of those finite number of people, a finite number are interested in your site's topic. Of those finite number of people, some will die, some will get distracted and go look at something else, whatever, nobody stays on one website 5eva.
@ifixcoinops in some ways, although it does not host user-generated content, this has happened with the website for the 1996 movie Space Jam.
Which is still online, in its original form, the only concession being that it is now a folder within the domain www.spacejam.com because that domain got used for the sequel.
Every few years, someone stumbles across it and it goes viral with headlines like "this is what websites looked like in 1996" and it's glorious
Dan moved, see pinned toot
PsyMar aka Sam