When should you call it quits with a forum?
While some people create several forums & then delete after a short time, I was wondering when do you personally think it’s time to just delete your forum? Perhaps you have had great success, active members, but then those members dwindled. Or you just don’t have it in you any longer to maintain it.
Have you called it quits on a forum? Why did you decide on that? How long did you have it? Did you close it down or have someone else take over?
Back when InvisionFree was the thing, I was far too young to have a game plan and had a mildly successful forum called The Great Zone. It was basically an off-topic forum that thrived only due to the golden days of forums where basically anything worked. Eventually, teenager me decided to "overtake the forum world" and converted it into a custom phpbb3 forum as that was brand new and my mild forum success convinced me that I could manage a full server now with my admin skills. So, as a poor teenager, I partnered with some guy that ran a server out of his closest and lacking any education in server skills, I jumped in and purchased some $5 a year plan and began my new Abyssal Forum.
Not sure if the name was a solid choice, but it certainly described things well as basically nothing went right after that point. The forum oddly did well but was a potato powered by a second potato and put together with random HTML coding to make things work. Overall, it started to encounter issues and tech support was not a thing. So eventually it became time to pull the plug and the burning community came to an end once the server failed to renew after a year.
I've deleted a few forums throughout the years, whether it's because I didn't have the time to maintain them or lack of activity. I also deleted old forums from when I wasn't really sure what I was doing. Sometimes I want to bring those forums back from the dead, but then I tell myself that I need to move forward and work on the forums I have right now.
Why should you delete a forum that you worked hard to build it? Why not sell the forum? You can at least make some money out of it. If you cannot sell and if you no longer have interest in running it, you can offer it to someone who is willing to take the charge.
I have not closed or removed Forums, I have open and closed sites that I was playing around with that never even open the public. I used to have an Ejin site back in the old days before 2015 (it's a free site) and I ended up closing it however the forums index is still there and whatnot, At times I go back and read the old topics.
End of the day, I rather have someone else taken it over or buy it from me so that they or the site can keep on running as long as it can be right 🙂
I just did the other day. I been running the forum since before Switch was revealed. I bought a Nintendo Forum to add to it. Didn't work.
Usually, Social Media fixes the issue, but each time I used Social Media for the site, I get cold feet.
So I merged the site into another general forum I run. I tried to keep it running, but I've not been able to grow it. Its a tough market to crack into.
It was losing me money every month I hosted it. I swallowed the pain and closed it.
giving it a year is a good idea, that being said it's going to be harder if you use paid forum software and pay a huge amount and only ended up keeping it alive for 6 to 12 months.
giving it a year is a good idea, that being said it's going to be harder if you use paid forum software and pay a huge amount and only ended up keeping it alive for 6 to 12 months.
That's all I use for forums - xenforo. But I can always try a different forum if the last one doesn't work out.
I blog too so that kind of justifies the VPS costs. But they are also paying for that, too. I'm finally getting out of the paying out of my pocket phase 🙂
I had a general chat forum from 2009 - 2017 that I worked so hard on over those years. It became really active and it was one of my most successful forums to date if I am honest. Unfortunately, the hosting went up to a price I was no longer able to afford and I made the decision to close the forum when the price went up. I did have a backup of the forum but when my laptop packed up on me, I lost the backup and everything else including the logo which did upset me. I would love to maybe bring the forum back one day when the time is right though, I do miss the place.
I’ve ended a few forums over the years. Ultimately I love managing a forum but I’m more of a lurker rather than an active poster so getting a community engaged just isn’t my thing so once it’s set up I get bored. Besides, forums just ain’t what they used to be.
