How much have you rebranded? Some rebrands may be as simple as a new logo and look while others may be focus more on a narrowed down niche. In rare cases, a complete pivot can occur and the whole forum topic is changed altogether.
I've done this when I decided to merge three communities together if that counts. One was a video game related forum, one was based around entertainment and the other was based around a specific show so I just merged the three together and created one large general discussion forum.
I guess I've kind of done that with my former wildlife forum.
Closed for 9 years, always a possibility it could re-open one day, and now I've narrowed it right down to more cat related content. Athough you can still discuss wilife stuff, enviromental and nature stuff too. New banner, new name, new look, marganilised theme. It's too early to say how it's gone as we've only been re-open a month now,
I've purchased forums where I thought the forum's name/domain was ridiculous, so I've rebranded the forums to resolve that. I bought a forum 10-15 years ago that had like a 20 character .com domain. At that point, I figured it made sense to use a different extension (.net or .org preferably) and have a much shorter domain name.
I have rebraned a community once. It was multi topics forum with focus on sports, I rebranded to exclusive sports forum, I changed the name and the domain as well. I have rebranded my blogs multiple times.
I didn't rebrand my forum by changing the name, but I have removed forums/sections to focus on the main sections because I believe it'd be better for the longevity of my community. I made a mistake by starting my forum with too many sections.
I haven’t gone through a complete forum rebranding myself, so I don’t have firsthand experience with all the steps involved. From what I understand, it usually requires updating the visual identity, restructuring categories, refreshing content, and communicating changes clearly to members to avoid confusion or disengagement.
