Buying old forums to merge the database in your forum

[Cedric]

I’ve seen this happening a couple of times. The board administrator has an existing (somewhat active) community. They buy old and dead forums for the sake of merging the database into their current community. Some databases are almost 10 years old.

I personally never understood the logic and reasoning behind this. It’s likely the funds spent are lost since the old forums have nothing valuable except maybe a few interesting posts.

What do you think of this strategy? Have you done it before? This is not to be confused with buying a recent forum, but really an old dead community. Do you think it can work out?

 

[fords8]

I have done this when I was buying up forums. I did it in the end so I wouldn't have so many forums to run. I was out of hand. lol

 

[Nomad]

If you want your forum to be really big (a lot of members and topics/posts) this can be really good but if you want an active community, this mighjt noyt help because the members of that forum might not be active on your forum.

 

[Arantor]

I think this has a place if you're buying up rivals/adjacent forums to bring in members; I don't think I'd ever have consciously registered at TAZ back in the day - but since AAF got bought and merged in, I ended up with an account... so I ended up posting.

Sometimes it's just about discovery and getting your site to new eyeballs, as they say.

 

[Cory]

I'd imagine there would be a lot of duplicate topics on the exact same subjects if you were to merge multiple forums together. It's nice for a stats boost, but if the forum that you want to merge with hasn't been touched in years, then I don't really see the point in bringing the dead back to life, so to speak.

 

[Arantor]

I've seen merges that do just the members and merges that do all the content too, sometimes into its own board(s) to keep it separate. It's interesting to see the different ways people do things.

 

[Cory]

I suppose if there was a bulk email feature of the forum then you could try bringing in previous members of the dead forum back to the new forum. That's one way to reach out.

 

[Kale]

Sounds like a certain person I know from another forum... I have seen this done before, but it never ever works out in the end. Bulk emailing and all could perhaps work, but not always.

 

[Heatman]

Personally, I would rather invest their money into my current active community in order to add better value to the growth of my forum instead of using it to buy up old forums that are not going to add anything relevant to the growth of my forum simply because of its database.

 

[Reverie]

I remember seeing this a lot and I never understood because it just made their forum look even more dead because all of those posts, but no real new ones. If they were to do a merge like that, they should make sure they have an active community already as well as maybe using a posting serivce/trade to bring in some newer topics. I personally don't think I would want to add those posts and etc. If I see some topics I liked maybe I would repost them. Member wise may be useful to send an email to them and maybe get them to the new forum.