After giving it a couple of hours thought, I have decided that if a site like ThoughtCafe does happen again, I am not going to be directly involved in it.
When people have written to me recently asking if there was ever a chance of it’s return, it impressed me that people had held the site in such high regard. Apparently there are very few sites around that have the same kind of warm community atmosphere that ThoughtCafe had. But there’s the point - it lost it all. It’s amusing how people remember the good times more than the bad, and for a while this afternoon I did too.
At the time I closed ThoughtCafe down, the reason cited was to move on to pastures new. The site had grown beyond all expectations, and was taking over our lives. The funny thing is that I never originally set out to create and run a website - I was learning about various web technologies and it made sense to write a website to try things out. A writing site was the obvious “simple” application; it only deals with text, and databases are good at that.
In the end we had lost the will to want to run a great website. We had been worn down by the workload, politics, arguments, and any number of other issues. Once you lose that drive to push things forward and get things done, you may as well pack your bags - in hindsight, we probably let the site run for too long.
Of course it didn’t help that a small but vocal minority within the website started making all kinds of personal and legal threats; with the most amazing thing being that this minority were supposedly mature adults.
After the fourth or fifth time somebody threatens that they will sue you to kingdom come for something somebody else supposedly did to them, you start to wonder if it’s all worth it.
So - I find myself in the strange position of knowing a LOT about designing, building, and running community websites, and yet I wouldn’t get involved in running a community website again if I was paid.
Strange place to be.