Hmm, well from past experience, I have learned that too much popularity has a horrible effect on forums. Before I became such an active member of this forum, I was administrating a forum for a Flash, Super Mario game with it's own level editor. Now when I originally joined said forum, it was quiet, peacefully, and a rather easy going forum. If I remember the conversation I had with the mods about banning correctly, their was only two people on the ban list. Now the creator of the game was french, and his understanding of the English language was adequate, but not fluent enough for a full understanding. As time passed, my overall attitude, personality, work ethics, and other things got me different staff positions, eventually leading up to Global Mod. Now, as time past, and more sites discovered Super Mario Flash, the forum became more popular. Overtime, it was realized that the forum was way too busy for Pouetpu to handle, even though he rarely handled anything himself in the first place, because he was never online. Roughly a year after I joined that forum (I had been a member here since about May), I, along with another user named Landon, became Admins. Things were fine for awhile, and we kept it under control, but the forum was getting bigger, the ban list had got progressively bigger, and Landon was running out of patience for the constant waves of new users. He then began making decisions on his own without talking with Pouetpu, or I, and before it was all over, he ended up flipping out on some people, and quit the forum. This left me by myself to do all the work, and even though I could handle, it was impossible for all the mods and I to control the sections such as "General Chat" and "Questions" even before Landon left, but we couldn't delete them because Pouetpu wanted them. The Level Portals eventually became flooded with useless, spam levels. Certain trouble making members would receive a ban, find a different IP, and sign up again and do the same stuff. The maturity level dropped with the rapid increase of members, which was somewhere over 5300. Well one day Pouetpu decided we was going to create his own level Portal and bought server space. He created the site, but it was extremely flawed, and had many errors, such as the ability to rate your own levels, Rate your own levels as Guests, etc. because there were no IP checks involved, and your dealing with a partially younger, less mature crowd. Well almost all the more mature users didn't like the new portal, and even some of the less mature didn't like how things worked. They tried to warn Pouetpu of his mistake and tried to give suggestions on how to fix them. He ignored them. Then the mods did the same. He ignored them. Before it was all said and done, I, myself, stepped up, and told Pouetpu that the mistakes he was making was going to cost him his forum, but he didn't care at all. All he was thinking about was his website, not his... whats the word... followers, if you will. The more I tried to get through to him that the forum members were growing to hate him, the more fed up he got with me. One morning I wake up, and I had been demoted to a regular mod. I wasn't angry, just disappointed, because I knew exactly what was going to happen. He claimed he was completely removing levels from the forum, and that he was going to run the forum himself. I'll give you an except directly from his Level Portal site,
I have restarted to work on my other game which, i repeat, has nothing related to Mario. My priority is to finish it as soon as possible, pouetpu-games need more games 
. But, that's not mean that i will stop working on the site. I will continue adjust things and add features. For example, i plan to add a feature in the level portal that allow users to make a list of their favorite levels makers in their profile. You may have noticed that i removed the forum link, im not sure what i will do with the forum, i have no time to administrate it right now. So the forum is on stand-by...
By Pouetpu 04/12/2009 04:50 am
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http://www.pouetpu-games.com/index.php)
The forum still stand non-existent, and almost all the members his site has are members I have never heard of. For Pouetpu to take away the forum like he did was a very irrational thing to do, because most of the active users there had been there for a extremely long time, and everyone had become friends. When he took the forum away it severed a lot of ties, and most lost communication. Some members, however, regrouped on a separate forum that somewhat mirrored the old forum when it was in it's glory, and is doing rather good. I was a Admin there too, along with Glitchblaster555, and Gaurd, and before I kinda lost contact due to this forum, and everyday life, it reminded me of the "good ol' days", so to speak.
I'm basically making two points with that extremely long story,
#1. Popularity and increased activity somewhat degrade the quality of a forum, no matter what you do. If you simply look at GameFAQ's forum, that ridiculous amount of users makes talking about anything in a cat area near impossible.
and,
#2. The forum itself relies on it's members. The members can survive on their own without the forum, but that statement isn't true the other way around. To have a happy forum, you need happy members, and to have happy members you need to listen to them. Now there is a difference between having a few stubborn users that don't accept change very well, and having a problem that everyone on the outside looking in can see. Though it may seem like a change for the better, sometimes... the change is more costly then what we had to start with.
(You'll have to bare with me, Most of my motivation for typing this came from this comment,
Indeed, it was quite good a while ago, but it's deteriorated quite a bit after the release of Knytt Stories, which I assume is due to the influx of newer members and the effect that had on administration and existing members.
EDIT: Of course, I do not mean to say all of the newer members are bad, at all. I simply mean that with such a community-oriented game being released, changes were necessary, and some of them, or the lack thereof, may have adversely effected the forum.
but between cooking and typing this, 10 messages have been posted. "sprkuneldunel" or however you type it.)
(Scratch that, 12 now.
)