I am thinking of buying the Xenforo forum and thinking of combining all my 9 forums into one?
So it will look something like this for example:
The first section will be chatting.
The second section will be about Music.
The third Section will be Gaming.
The fourth section will be Entertainment
The Fifth section will be Wrestling.
The Sixth Section will be Advertising.
Will this be a good or foolish decision and why please?
as long as your new community is unique while compared to other forums, you should be fine. It would look like a General Forum with a webmaster section.
Option 1 - Are you planning on getting Xenforo, closing all your other forums and incorporating all their section on your Xenforo site?
This could work.
Though like any new site, start off slow and make only a very small number of sections. You can expand and add more sections later when you need them (when you have actual posts to go in those sections).
Option 2 - Or are you planning on acquiring the database of each site, merging them together into one and uploading it into Xenforo?
If you're thinking about merging, I think it'd be a very difficult to accomplish feat. Merging two sites into a single forum is somewhat difficult. Since firstly you have to factor in converting from other software type to another. Then the sheer amount of conflict resolution tends to be staggering. (I mean if you have 1000 posts and 50 members on 2 sites that means duplicates of a lot of data to be sorted though. And it only gets worse the more posts/members that get added.)
Plus even on a single merger there is always the risk of data loss. Posts sometimes get deleted/lost or garbled beyond recognition. (Which can also happen for member accounts too. Though it seems to be a bit rarer.)
And things would get exponentially more difficult the more forums you try to merge. (More steps to take and more places things could go wrong. And at the end of it all, you still might not end up with a usable database. One glitch somewhere in one of the mergers could cause your end result to be unusable.)
And on top of that there is the issue of if you can even get your database for some of those sites. I mean if they're zetaboards, you can't get a copy of your database easily. (They don't provide you with a method to acquire it.)
And methods like crawlers are apt to get yourself banned from zetaboards and/or site deleted. (Since crawlers fall under ToS violations since they put a rather large strain on the server. They visit pages far faster than a human can which makes them also very easy to detect and respond to.)
So for trying to merge everything... I'd say abandon this idea right now. It's going to be extremely difficult to nigh impossible to actually accomplish.
I tried having an advertisement section on my old forum, but it didn't work out. We had a limit as to how many posts you could make before bumping up your ad and stuff, but people would post spam crap to try reach the quota, or they would just ditch the rule all together. In the end, we decided not to have an advert section. I've been asked to add one this time around too with this forum, but it won't be happening because we had too many issues the last time.
Are they all active forums? If so, how do your members feel about it? If they are not active, and its possible to merge all of your sites (I have no idea if it is possible) then it would be less work. If you do have at least a few active members on each forum and they don't protest the merge then it might help with some posting in other sections.
Thats a lot of ifs. But unless it isn't possible to merge them all together and or you have a very active forum and they don't want to lose there name then I can't see the issue.
I would check on xenForo's forum to find out if that is even possible. If it is, I wonder if you can have a domain name point to a section of the forum? Then when they go to that site they are sent to the new one but into the section for that forum?
As far as I know Zetaboards won't allow us to ask for our database if we want to move out, much like Forumotion. I used crawlers few years ago but nowadays their forums are getting more secured...
To me personally, I can't afford running that many forums at once. I prefer to have one big forum covering all topics if possible than having so many of them. But I agree with Flexin, you should always consider your community. If by moving out you'll make them uncomfortable, you may want to consider merging very inactive ones or closing them, focusing your effort on forums which actually have community to support. Forum software tends to be a matter of preference, it doesn't affect your decision much. If you want to spend some money then go ahead, if not you can always use free software.
