Does migrating forums help or hurt your forum?

[Dotgician]

I have always wonder if migrating forums help or hurt your forums.
Can you still claim a accomplishments of having xxx amount of posts or xxx amount of users even if you just purchased the DB and migrating it to your forum.
IMO after I have did a couple of migration to a forum i realized that the community isn't going to comeback and post in the new forum specially if it was paid posting. Then youre just stuck with a forum that has 1,000+ posts 500 members and not a single active user...
After the migration and reading how other people were so excited to have 50 members on their forum I started to sit back and think man did i just ruin this forum... I did not feel the accomplishment that I was building a community with xxx amount of people because many were either paid posts or members that are not going to return.

Does the content show as copy and spam from google?

Has any one else experience this similar feeling?

 

[Cam]

I assume you’re referring to situations where you would acquire another forum and then take that database and merge it into your own forum? I’m not really sure what type of impact it would have on SEO. So long as the content within that database is not live on that other domain anymore, I would think it would be fine.

As far as determining when to do this type of thing, it has to be the right situation. You definitely want the database you’re merging to be in the same niche. For example, it would make zero sense to merge my old sports forum database into FP one day. Then you also want to do this within reason. You don’t want to have that forum with 5-6 different databases that merged together. I’d say that leaves your forum with no identity.

In general, there’s plenty of potential benefits though.

 

[meetdilip]

Change in URL hurts, no matter what.

 

[Dotgician]

Yeah i understand that however... is it cheating saying your forum has xxx amount of members or posts but in reality there is 1 user and like 10 real posts?

 

[Deleted member 50656]

I wouldn't call it cheating, though an acqusition has to be time-sensitive and properly enacted imo. I've never been fond of webmasters purchasing databases a few months (or in some cases years) old and then trying to claim the posts as theirs: Whereas fresh databases and meaingful merges can be pulled off successfully.

Acquisitions and merges should also try and keep downtime to a minimum

 

[TopSilver]

I think it depends how long you've been on the previous software and how long you've waited to migrate. A forum on vbulletin 4 for 20 years wanting to move to Xenforo 2 would be a good move. However a forum on IPB moving to vBulletin 5 after a year isn't the smartest decision.

It can hurt your forum but in my opinion if someone was moving to Xenforo 2 it's worth it

 

[meetdilip]

XF is good in features. But the impact will be more or less the same even if the end point software is XF.