Please read the following article that I wrote and provide any feedback or thoughts. That'd be great. I am currently in Australia at the moment in the library (for the free wifi).
Forum Merges Proposal
Simply put, mostly everything in existence has a presence on the internet. A lot of the time that presence is taken mostly by a sole forum or website, leaving not much room for competition. Furthermore, it is very hard for forums to gain traction when they are somewhat small, or small in the sense that they don't compare to the huger forums that there are out there.
However, perhaps the forums WOULD have a chance if they were to all come together and merge. Thus, bringing all of their members together and all of their posts, topics etc. It would be tricky to do, but I think it would be a great idea because it would mean that with all the merges, the result would be one giant forum that could pick up new members so easily that it could easily be the best and most active forum for the category it concerns.
I just think that if these merges do not happen then forums will continue to just come and go. Anyways that's my thoughts on it. What do you all think?
Great in theory, but lets say you merge 10 gaming forums. You now have 10 people that want to be admins, and 10 people that want full access to FTP, and host files.
I think the better bet would be find the struggling forums, evaluate their worth, then make the admin an offer. And keep the former owners on as Mods if they want.
If all forums in existence on the internet merged into one massive giant global single forum, it would be no fun to be at. It would be so active that any topic you post would be burried pages back in a matter of seconds. When you try to have a conversation in a thread, there would be hundreds of replies to read through every few seconds. You would feel lost and like your posts don't matter.
I can see why there could be troubles, especially with getting members to come however, one could say that that is an issue with how the merge was done.
As far as every admin wanting to also be an admin at the new forum (where all the forums are merged to) I think it would take some work, but it would really just come down to this: Either you understand that you will not hold a full admin spot, or you will be on your own and your forum will die out.
With the whole argument about the forum getting too big for its own good, then obviously enough people don't mind that some of their posts get lost because if they did care enough then the forum would never be able to get too big for its own good.
Sure, the homely feeling is gone, but one could say that a forum that recieves so many posts that it is hard to get attention for your own is quite successful. Furthermore, it eliminates the 'stupid threads' and naturally the threads that are worth something come to the top.
Brilliant idea! Let's do it with the world too. I propose that we merge all countries together and then all the current leaders can play rocks rolling papers scissors shoot to see who controls the world!
1. No one merges with another site if they have a GOOD active forum. Ask me to merge with your site and see my reaction 😀
2. Most of the members who are on such sites WILL NOT come into the new site (reasons: the site that was merged with a bigger site was actually pretty dead, the members feel betrayed etc.)
3. You can't have more midwives birthing the baby or it won't get birth anymore. Don't start 'teams' if you don't have an experience in this setting or are really trusting those strangers.
I don't merge with any site. I don't want to buy any site, I don't care. Had one merge 6 years ago with a woman forum I used to run *another site got inactive and I got the database. Took me 1 week to make the merge (not so many tools back then) and I got maybe 4 members from hundreds, 20K posts that were mostly bad or duplicates of what I had etc. Not worth the time.
Just stick to your forums and grow them. I really can't understand this rush for better stats. Big numbers mean NOTHING if you have 4 posts a day and none of the tens of thousands of members you acquired don't care about your forums 😀
I don't see a problem with it if the communities being merged are still bringing in daily content and the forum is somewhat related to the one it's being merged into because I don't see a point in say, merging a general discussion forum into a promotion forum and moving all the posts into general discussion as that is what most forum owners don't want to see.
I've never seen a point in importing old databases into sites as the chances are most of the users will be inactive and have forgotten about the old site and another reason would be that most of the posts would end up in the trash bin/archive and it's certainly no use having a 20,000 post forum with 15,000 of them being in the trash area for no one to see or contribute to.
