buying and merging

[Demon_skeith]

I'm curious if anyone here has bought other forums or websites for the sole purpose of merging their data with your current site for boost in stats and hopefully activity and any other benefits.

If you have done it, was it worth the price and effort?

 

[KMRock]

I have had forums I owned done this to, but never done it myself. I need help with this on my new forum actually.

 

[Luke]

I've always seen this as "cheating" since most people do it to make their stats look good. I've never seen a successful merge where you gain all the members from the other forums.

 

[CM30]

I would do this, but my site's in such a niche subject that very few of the competitors seem to be interested in selling and those that do put far too high a value on their inactive sites.

 

[Venom]

Im against merging of forums for the same reasons as above.

 

[Yoda]

It is just a way to make your forum look good, but actually ends up back firing because the stats look good but there is no activity.

 

[VirusZero]

I've never merged forum databases to boost stats and I very likely wouldn't.

I have no idea what a fair price for a forum would be. Most people aren't exactly going to want to let go of their forums for very cheap either. I mean they worked hard to build them up so they don't want that work to go for nothing.

From a technical standpoint, merging databases is a pain and there is always a lot of room for errors to crop up. Plus it means downtime for your forum/site while the new database is installed. (And you want to only have downtime only when you absolutely can't avoid it. Like if your host has to do maintenance or if your host goes off due to poor weather or etc...)

And if you're buying active forums that opens up a whole other bout of problems. Supposing you merged sites just fine, you now have a lot of extra users who may not even stick around. Like discussed in this topic. Which can make your forum look even worse if all these members with sizeable post counts vanish.

Overall if you want to improve your forum's stats, just keep:
- Posting.
- Getting packages done.
- Doing post exchanges.
- Advertising.
- Looking into new methods/ways to advertise.