Have you ever merged another community with yours?

[Cedric]

Have you ever merged another community with yours? Why do you think people do that? Have you seen it work or fail before ? I have merged mine with a competitor back in the day, to combine forces and become better. That was back in the day on ZetaBoards where we couldn't take our database and merge the two forums. So members of the closed / merged forum had to re-register and come to the new board. Which often resulted in them not bothering.

 

[Shortie]

I once did it way back not long after I started out my general chat forum, both sites were doing well and we felt like merging would help both of us in the process so we gave it a shot. Unfortunately, it didn't go as well as planned and it did flop we both ended up having to go separate ways again and pull back on the activity and we stayed as separate forums rather than as a merged forum. My forum thrived for a further 6 years after that until I had to close it due to lack of funds and the hosting increasing considerably.

 

[Cory]

I don't believe I have and I generally don't like the thought of it. I like to be the primary visionary behind my forum and merging it with another forum could cause a conflict of interest. I have been offered multiple times to merge forums, however.

 

[Heatman]

At the moment, I don't think there's any cause for me to merge with another community. I see some forum owners doing it and most likely down to not being able to do it all alone by themselves, so they needed the help which comes with a merger.

 

[Reverie]

I've never done a merge - I've had where a forum died/closed and majority joined to one forum because it was one of the only other big ones at the time. I personally don't always think mergers go well because they could have some very different personalities and may not mesh well. Sometimes though they are great - guess it depends on why there is a merger.

 

[Ravenfreak]

I've only merged a few of mine before, mainly just for testing purposes. I have been meaning to merge a couple of my current ones, but haven't had that much time to test things out yet.