Time spent was a lot of hours, but I don't know how much. I pretty much spent ALL my free time on the project for a couple of months, just hyperfocused on getting it set up and working with two others to get it ready. But to be honest, a decent amount of the time was spent trail and error with learning sysadmin type stuff, figuring out which platforms were best (finally settling on nodeBB and MediaWiki), and then a decent amount of time actually setting up the platforms.

The most difficult and time consuming was probably setting up the MediaWiki, since I ended up doing a decent amount of scripts and plugins to get the functionality where I wanted it (after a lot of redoing my efforts with trial and error if how we wanted the layout to work). Then of course the actual page content on a lot of the wiki pages like our vision, ethics, etc.

I'm just going to copy paste a reply to another post for why I gave up:

"I (sort of) explained it a bit on the actual forum, but mostly it's just a personal limitation:

• I don't have the time or desire to spend the required amount of time to manage the server, promote and grow the community, and maintain the various little extra things that come with it.
• the community never took off to get enough members/traction - mostly because no of us were/are good at promoting and sharing the community consistently and efficiently.
• technically speaking, I think I'm in a bit over my head, and I was learning as I went, but little issues would require a lot of time and effort to learn to fix, and mostly just lead to burn out.
• I simply am not one that does well well with the long term commitments, and was hoping to build a community that was largely self managing after it started to grow, but 1. The community never actually got enough members 2. I bit off more than I could chew with sysadmin so it required more maintenance in the long term than I initially expected.

So in short, it's mostly just a personal shortcoming. It might also be that the community never grew simply because the idea/implementation was poor, but I like to think that if I had done enough diligence in promoting and finding members it would have eventually gotten some traction."