The worst thing you've ever done with your forum-site.

i regret the rp site we all met on and loved being shut down because of drama. everything started there - it's where i fell in love with my characters and others'. every site since has just been trying to reclaim that magic we lost through our own short-sightedness

 

Running my own server would easily be number one on my list of horrible crap I've done to my site. I had two hardware failures within weeks of one another. The first time, I was fairly new as a SysAdmin, so I didn't have regular backups being run yet. Had to restart everything. Then a few weeks later, somebody broke into the basement of my apartment building and set a fire down there. Because the fire was located directly under where I lived, and I was on the first floor, my server (an old PC) suffered catastrophic damage, and I had to build a new machine from scratch (back in 2011).

The second thing I would say was going completely dormant on my forum. I'd get so demotivated because there's nobody posting that I'd just forget about my own site and distract myself with other hobbies. That's probably done a lot of damage to the reputation of my site, but I'm doing much better now, and I'm trying to post at least something once a day. Getting back into watching anime has helped, as I now have some conversational questions to ask (the void).

I did this once. After nearly a year of decent posting and everything, I wanted to take some of my admin load off my shoulders and he volunteered. All was good for a couple weeks, and then it wasn't. He locked me out of the Admin panel and started doing all sorts of destructive things to the forum. Luckily, I self hosted at the time, so all I had to do was issue the command service apache --stop and then I went into the database and removed his admin status, and restored mine. It took me a couple of days to restore everything -- I should have just restored from a back up, but I wasn't thinking straight because I was so angry.

I'd say that's probably the most awkward event that I'd read about (real life based). I'm glad that things seemingly worked out for your site?

This is a double edged sword, because I've had the opposite happen. I gladly accepted people just because they'd post. Unfortunately, most of them would just post to the General Topics or Bored Games boards and in my opinion, didn't truly add meaningful content to the site.