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The Apathetic Administrator
Is that you? Do you care what happens on your forums? An apathetic administrator isn’t a good administrator, that much is for certain. Forums put out what is put into them. If you don’t post, enforce rules, or improve your forum, you should find a new hobby.
In my previous post, I expressed how important it is for the forum owner to personally post. I would like to stress this yet again - it’s vital. The form owner should post daily and should actively be promoting his forum.
Rules are important in any forum. IF you don’t have a set of boundaries, you can’t fairly punish or ban users when they do something you didn’t like, because you didn’t tell them it was wrong to do. A set of rules tell the members what they can and can’t do. If you let them do what they want, you’re going to have frequent pissing matches. Moreover, no rules basically tell the users its okay to spam, curse, and display adult content.
If you care about your forum, you’ll actively be trying to find new ways to improve it. I make improvements to my forum almost daily - major upgrades every three or four months. I think the feeling that the administrator is actively improving the forums shows the users that the administrator cares - and an admin who cares about the forum is the type of admin that most users desire. In addition to this, constant improvements can also give you an edge on the competition, providing they don’t copy you, which can prove invaluable.
To summarize, be active, have rules, and improve your forum. Doing this shows you care as the forum owner. If you don’t care about your forum, success is unlikely.
But… sometimes forum admins make the mistake of posting too much and come across as being desperate for activity. It’s not a good sign if the admin has more posts than other highly-active members. politicalforum.com is a very nice active forum and the admin there only posts once in a few years nearly.
You do have a good point. An excellent point, in fact - one I should have touched on in this post. Admins posting all the time hurts the forum as well, and if your forum’s still new, “latest post by __admin” won’t pull in too many users.
You’re right in your example that the admin doesn’t have to post, but that’s an established forum. My post was more directed at new, starting forums instead of forums with nearly half a million posts.