Massive Merge (Thoughts & Opinions GREATLY welcomed)

[Xyphien]

I just made a post asking if anyone has done this, but now I'd like your opinions on this as it's a huge merge and is a real high risk.

I'm merging all of my websites into one singular website. A massive general forum with topics from all of my other websites. It sounds good in theory, however... my one website is less than 500 away from reaching 40k members. All of my other forums I'm merging have less than 5k members. So this is one issue, another issue is it's build around a game development program, though all of my other forums tie into this by either being game related, or website related, which game developers need, it's still going to take away from the overall program. The domain will also be changed to Xyphien.com/forums instead of rmmv.co One thing to note though, RMMV has been dying itself and becoming rapidly less active as the days go. From originally 500k views a month to around 20k views a month.

I'm super nervous, but it's something I've decided will be better for me in the long run. This way I can promote one website, and worry about being active on only one website rather than 10 websites of varying niches. It's a high risk high reward type situation. If all goes well, it could quite possibly be one of the largest General Discussion forums active, or it could completely die out and become a wasteland.

I want your opinions on this merge, be as honest as possible

 

[/foogle]

Merge, merge, merge! =)

 

[meetdilip]

I have seen a lot of forums still using vB3. Why ? Shifting, migrating could seriously go wrong. Unless you have a very solid tech and SEO plan in waiting, I will say "bad idea "

 

[Deleted member 8254]

If you are confident enough you can give a try, but i feel it is a bad idea and promote projects individually.

 

[Joshua Farrell]

I see it potentially as a good move, but I am worried a little about the merge, as it would be quite a few that you would be merging together. What if there is a user on there that just happens to have the same username as someone else on one of the other forums?

Though one has to ask, if you are serious enough about the merges, will you be sending off an email to each of the userbase, to tell them where to expect to be able to go to and login? I feel that if the initial email from the merge doesn't come from each forum you are merging, some of the users might not come to the new forum, because they aren't expecting an email about the merge to come from the forum you are merging into.

 

[Xyphien]

I see it potentially as a good move, but I am worried a little about the merge, as it would be quite a few that you would be merging together. What if there is a user on there that just happens to have the same username as someone else on one of the other forums?

Though one has to ask, if you are serious enough about the merges, will you be sending off an email to each of the userbase, to tell them where to expect to be able to go to and login? I feel that if the initial email from the merge doesn't come from each forum you are merging, some of the users might not come to the new forum, because they aren't expecting an email about the merge to come from the forum you are merging into.

I was planning on sending out emails on every website before the initial merge. This way everyone will understand that the old website will be redirecting to a new url as well as everything else. This way they're not blindsighted by a random email sending them a message.

As for the names, I was thinking about potentially just merging the rmmv site to the new domain, and sending out emails to all the other members of the old sites as well a private messages. Waiting a week, and then redirecting everything over. As stated, the common names could cause a lot of problems. It won't reach as much people as doing a full on merge, but it will stop any conflicts that might be involved

 

[Xyphien]

I have seen a lot of forums still using vB3. Why ? Shifting, migrating could seriously go wrong. Unless you have a very solid tech and SEO plan in waiting, I will say "bad idea "

The original domains are still linked to the new domain, so I'm pretty sure the seo will be kept (not 100%) sure though. If not, I'll be dropping a few hundred in seo a month for a few months to try and get it back to the first page like a few are now.

 

[Katrina]

I think you should go for it. In the long run won't it be less work to manage one site instead of many as well as all the staff that are on the other forums? Less upgrades to worry about too since it's one site now? Plus, all your members now can see the many resources in one location instead of logging into multiple forums so that's going to be a huge plus.

 

[Xyphien]

Here's an update. I've been working with my hosting to make sure everything goes smoothly. Turns out they misunderstood me and merged all of my rmmv.co files over to xyphien.com 's service (I have like 5 services with them). The problem is, rmmv.co has like 5 million files on record and a lot of stuff on the database. Needless to say everything is broken. However, rmmv.co is still up as they didn't do anything with that.

Soooo, now I'm hoping to just go ahead and merge Xyphien.com over, transfer all of the files to /forums and call it a day.

 

[Page]

I got the email 🙂

 

[Xyphien]

Alrighty, the merge has finished. There were some hiccups here and there but as far as I can tell everything merged decently well. The forum is now completely set up as https://Xyphien.com/forums and all content from rpgmakermv.co has been transfered. I'm going to go ahead and go an easier route and simply transfer content from one site to another via copy and paste to prevent duplicate users, etc. However, as of now the site itself is up and running.

If everyone wouldn't mind checking it out and letting me know how you think everything went and if there's any errors, etc. from the merge

 

[LeakZone]

I like the style of the theme on the website, good luck with your forum!

 

[Page]

Glad that it went smooth, it's not always easy and at times you do expect things to go wrong. All things never go good lol. All it needs that the members become active more and get used to the new site. SO what made you go with that theme and what's the future plane for the site now

 

[Xyphien]

Glad that it went smooth, it's not always easy and at times you do expect things to go wrong. All things never go good lol. All it needs that the members become active more and get used to the new site. SO what made you go with that theme and what's the future plane for the site now

The theme has a lot of built in core features that I loved and thought was unique. For example, you're able to change the theme from dark to light with the click of a button. On top of that you can make it a fixed width or full width, turn off special effects, and change the backgrounds to three pre-defined ones. This makes it so each person can customize it to their own personal liking.

As for the background and everything, I spent good money to have this customized background drawn out specifically for me. It's apart of my branding and goes with the whole Phoenix theme Xyphien is built around.