I've seen this for quite awhile already, tons of communities that were only created, with no posts at all, no description, not even set rules, or communities that were created did get some members who post, in some even actively, but when you see that the last time a post was featured is months ago, I tend to wonder if the owner even cares about that community at all.

Take it from me folks, I've been on the internet since the 1990s, so I can consider myself an internet veteran, I've been moderator and administrator on many large community sites by now, and I do know one thing, setting up a system allowing to start your own community in any shape or form, whether it be in a kind of blog collection, like here on Game Jolt, or as a chat place, like Discord, or just complete forums, or a combination of such, when communities don't get attention by their owners/moderators at all, they will just die out, and be there for... who knows what purpose. And yet, sometimes people will still join not realizing the place is deserted only to meet disappointment to see nobody is replying to their posts.

I'm a former World of Warcraft player and I've seen many guilds where the guildmasters were no longer active only to the annoyance of people. On IMGFLIP I've seen many streams no longer taken care of. And self-moderation, as I understand why it was brought up... "too little staff members to look after the place", can easily lead to situations like those (that's why I am not a fan of that), and the thing is also that people are not always clever enough to realize that the moderation and maintenance of communities is not done by the Game Jolt staff, but by mere users who use the place to set up their own groups, this can lead people to think that Game Jolt is a site poorly administrated and leave while the staff itself was never to blame. The fact that a community has many members does also not mean that the place is still actively administrated. One community I'm a member of (I won't mention its name nor who owns it) hasn't seen featured posts for 5 months now, and when I check the owners bio I even see that their last bio post is also 5 months old, and none of their games even having DevLog updates for 5 months or less, I think it's almost save to assume they haven't been on-line for 5 months. Yet the community itself still has new posts every week. However the lack of proper administration should sooner or alter come out.

Now what I wonder is, did you guys foresee this could happen, and if so have you ever set up a proper plan to deal with such situations? I know that World of Warcraft has for guilds treated like that a "dethrone" feature, which activates once the guildmaster hasn't been on-line in a guild for a long time, allowing the most active members to dethrone the guildmaster and become the new guildmaster in stead gaining all privileges the title provides within that guild in order to keep the guild going on and giving the guild a chance for a "2nd life". And perhaps it could also be a good idea that communities being created and never getting any attention by anybody ever since to be automatically deleted or something like that.

I am not speaking of "shitty communities", or communities having a moderation style I don't like, I am speaking of communities not getting any attention by their owners/moderators at all, or communities which were created but never being used at all. I mean for some subjects I may be able to start my own community when there's no attention, but what am I supposed to do then? Put messages on the existing communities saying this community is abandoned and to visit mine in stead? If you'd ban me for that practice I'd say you did give the only right reaction you could give for something like that, really... So that is not really a solution...

It seems obvious to sort communities by their number of members or the number of posts being made on a weekly basis, but that doesn't tell anything about how the owner moderates the place, or if they moderate it at all. And posts getting featured in a community whether this be only on a small community which is only a portion of the site, or being featured on the gj site on the front page, we all know that is a big honor. And we also know that "shitty posts" without much content are an annoyance and that posts like those not being removed from a community well drive people away. In an unattended community neither actions take place.

So that brings us to the point, what to do with communities that are there, but serve no purpose and only make things messy? And which also push communities that DO have a dedicated owner and maybe even a dedicated moderation team out of sight? I did state before that a community with much of posts does not automatically mean the place is properly administrated, but the opposite is also true, a community with little posts, may still have a dedicated owner, how may wonder what the point is to keep things going when nobody posts anyway (maybe because their community is invisible due to many neglected communities).