[deanhills]

There are a lot of expectations this type of community has and they are severely out of the norm. I see a lot of you hopping around to different communities and posting the bare minimum for your containers. This is to be expected, but its a little worse with this crowd. When a community loses any type of sponsorship, or a big poster like Ignis stops posting, members lose their mind and go flock somewhere else. Lots of this community is usually all on board when the forum maintainers ask members to step up and help, also known as "becoming staff", until there is actual work to be done with the community and then it's like crickets. You all like to blame someone else for your communities problems but the problem lies with the members. You shouldn't have to see regular staff postings in the forums to be interested or to help your community, that's not how these online communities have ever worked since the beginning of the internet. You all want your staff title and containers with no effort on your end, and that is why these niche communities will eventually die. /peace

With respect @coreyman  When last have you posted at FreeVPS?  And here at post4vps?  And you're an expert on Ignis's posts at FreeVPS?  And also an expert on the membership?  I was posting my heart out at FreeVPS and was online a number of times day and night.  I was completely dedicated to FreeVPS way beyond the number of posts that were needed for my container.  I really liked the community there. They were very special.  Like there were some amazing characters posting there. I wasn't the only one feeling that way - there were a very large number of regular members who were logging in all the time however not posting as there were no threads to post to.  I had to battle to find materials to post to myself. I made suggestions to the staff how we could get some activity going, but there was no response to the suggestions - they must have already given up on FreeVPS and they weren't really interested in the members' views.  SLC and Monad (Hidden Refuge) were trying to get traffic going, but they were the only ones. 

I can't understand what you mean about Ignis not making a large number of posts any longer - like can you explain that to me.  I've never seen him as a high quality or a volume poster.  Maybe average and occasionally above average if he put his mind to it but since he became Mod mostly moderator type posts and when he became Admin only staff related posts with the odd contribution now and then. I've never seen him as a main player in making posts in the Forum.  Hidden Refuge and SLC were.  They posted right to the very end. 

When Ignis became a Giveaway Manager FreeVPS suffered for it  Right from the very beginning we heard excuse after excuse why he couldn't do this that and the other - not as an exception but as the rule.  You weren't there.  I was there. I marvelled at how understanding the membership were when he was slow to respond to their support requests.  And the staff were even protective of him.  But for me it showed lack of integrity.  If you say you're going to do a job, you have to have the time to do it.  If you don't, you should give someone else the opportunity to do it. SLC would have been a much better candidate for the Giveaway Manager.  For me he was completely wasted as a Moderator. His technical contribution to the Forum testifies to that.  As well as his level of energy.  He'd have blown us away I know.

What irks me the most is that I was still posting when the staff must have known what they were going to do. They knew a long time before the Announcement what they were going to do - the Announcement was just a mere formality on a to-do list.  You can't imagine how much it hurt when I realized FreeVPS is no more. I invested hours of my time and so did many of the other members who had been part of the community many more years than I'd been.   I personally don't see any good reason why the Forum should have closed.  Maybe FreeVPS could have worked out a different way of posting for hosting - it was a great opportunity to reinvent everything instead of just giving up.  A good start would have been for the staff to come down from their Ivory Tower and bond with the membership for a change. They could have posted an announcement for assistance to help them with the theme of the Forum, another announcement to donate to the upkeep of the Forum, they could have put up an announcement about sponsors - they could have talked to us.  They never did.  They only talked to one another and never asked us for our feedback. We weren't included in the decision to pull the plug on FreeVPS.  We didn't count.