I own a gaming forum, and I got really busy with school, had a car wreck, and went on a trip for fall break. While all of this happened, my forum died. It was starting to reach it's highest activity level ever since it started. However, know it's dead and I have no clue how to revive it. Any ideas?
Don't do the fake account gig because if a regular member realizes it's you, they'll lose faith in your forum and won't trust you nearly as much. Just keep advertising and doing post exchanges 🙂
I've never bothered. I believe once a forum dies, there's a stigma attached to it. Start again and try and lure your old members back - along with new names.
Send out one mass mail to all your current members. After that, let them go (you'll only be annoying them after that). It'll be like a fresh start, except you have 1/3 of the work done for you. You have some content and a few regulars. It should be easier to attract new members.
I am trying to have the forum ready by taking the past suggestions and indirect feedback about the forum structure and skin. So check what could have bothered in the first place and try to correct it.
Once I do that I will do post exchanges, ask for packagers all while setting some contest or features.
Then i will mass email about the new skin, feature contests, and hopefully with the post spurs they will feel up to start posting again.
Also, I have 'seen' packagers become regular members as they are asked to be the one filling the requests for the same community. If you like how some packager worked and it seemed he enjoyed their stay, you could try asking for her or him again from time to time to have that member feeling. Do that in three or four promotion communities and you have a few posters helping your place looks a bit active while you work in bringing new and some of the old blood back.
For posts exchanges I am up to any deal that involves an account with at at least 20 posts attached to it. If you already posted ten times at my forums, ten posts deals would do. What I want is to have few one-login impression accounts so my forum looks more appealing. XD
I am trying to revive it so I am open for deals, we can help each other out. Well, good luck.
I had this problem in the past, I re-branded and placed up a few incentives, but when I was hacked way back I had to start again.
I think the important thing to remember is that your former forum members find new places when a forum dies a bad death., The trick is to go look for them. Remember that if you associate your forum with twitter - FB and the like and you get your members to follow your tweets etc then you should be able to notify them in future of any changes. They should come back.
It's kind of sad- you build up a forum, think all is going well then it just dies when you leave it for a little while. Try getting your forum launched, on some admin site.
