If a forum has been dead for years

[Beverly]

If a forum has been dead or inactive for several years, is it worth trying to revive? Could you simply take the databases and merge them into a more active forum? What would your options be in this situation?

 

[RH-Calvin]

Yes, it is a good choice to go with. That will give a new database resource to a new forum and that will also help to popularize it fast.

 

[CM30]

Not sure to be honest. On the one hand, if the original forum was active, it does make the revival look more active than it'd be with no posts or members. But on the other... I've seen a lot of forums 'revived' after years of inactivity that never took off again. Which makes me suspect there's some 'ghost town' style effect that drives people away from what they see as past failures.

 

[THF_Martin]

Wrote an article on this for The Online Money Box. Feel free to check it out if you want but I will detail a little bit of what I said here.

Basically my take is this: if the content from the old forum is still relevant to this date, the forum has maintained a good reputation (E.G. your forum went inactive on 'good' terms) and if the forum is less than a year old, then I would say go for it and reopen if you are dedicated to it.

If a year has passed and it went inactive on bad terms then I wouldn't bother because it would be very, very hard.

 

[Shawn Gossman]

If a forum has been dead or inactive for several years, is it worth trying to revive? Could you simply take the databases and merge them into a more active forum? What would your options be in this situation?

Of course it can. However, if one of my communities go over a year of nothing, then I usually close and start from scratch. But if you want to continue, then my suggestion is that you get into research mode. Find out when the community actually 'died' and look back from there, discover when the peak activities were and why it was so active and then work on making the forum like it was back in those days.

 

[Migi]

I'm not sure what good it will do to merge the database of an inactive/dead forum into an active/new one. I imagine members may feel discouraged to start new topics or too lazy to make replies on old threads. If the forum died before, I prefer not to bring it to the new community as probably something was wrong there and I guess it'll be better to start fresh after considering the mistakes on the old one.

 

[Hotspot]

I had made an advertising forum in 2007 and it died shortly after... I actually picked it up again in 2010 and it was actually active.
But, it started dying and I decided to just close it down.

 

[User500]

How many members/posts does the database have?