I would note appealing to a larger audience tends to be almost essential here, so that often splits into popular characters and their fandoms or very universal, very generic character pairings. As a whole, partners disappearing unexpectedly and not returning messages is not uncommon for the hobby now it seems. I believe this is a greater issue than just that facing any one roleplaying community, which I suspect has quite a bit to deal with the divergence from old groups and messengers and boards of old.

Persistence is another matter, in that a player with an interest check need keep trying to "bump" their topic to the first page, thus the focus, and often need do so daily in the hopes that they receive attention by anyone browsing. Essentially, success is not guaranteed, odds can only ever be shaped favorably to reach the goal, so one must approach it from many different angles to hedge their bets.