What would you do if you were going to close your site?

[Jerlene]

Too often we visit sites we visited once upon a time and see that it is no longer there. So what if the shoe was on the other foot?
Would you redirect it to another site? Would you send out an email to your users? Would you give it to someone else who had interest in keeping your site alive?

 

[Page]

I would sell the site to another person who is willing to take it on and keep it alive as best as I can. Rather then see it die try and keep it gonging as much as you can. If not then more likely that you can sell the domain or keep the domain just in case that person want to open and restart the site again.

 

[overcast]

I have closed around 3 forums which ran for min. 4 years. The reason I closed it is because I could not make revenue out of it. And I had to give up the domain and the existing content. I could not even sold the site. I wish I could have but tech topics usually don't have much buyers.

 

[Bryn]

When I closed my oldest forum (well, I actually deleted it), I went MIA for personal reasons. It happened again three years later.

For the forum I have currently, I'd probably pass the baton but, I would notify all my members of this first.

 

[Lee]

I'd like to think I would offer it to a user of whom I trust to look after things while I am gone 🙂

 

[Page]

Has anyone just gave am site away that's worth something?

 

[Jerlene]

Has anyone just gave am site away that's worth something?

I haven't. But I'm not against it. If I knew the site would be taken care of I would totally give it away.

 

[segru]

Write a mail to the members, they've been a part of the journey and deserve it. I'd probably have a notice page as the new index until everything expires.

 

[MeganChan]

If I were, for my forum I’d probably let the members know, and then close it. My blog I’d just close it.

 

[Shannon Apple]

Sadly, we didn't have a choice with anime-forumsdotcom. I won't even give them a link since they have some shitty blog up there now. They must've sold the url. The people who bought our forum from it's previous owner just wrecked the place. They didn't give a toss about the members, called them hostile when they went nuts over porn links on the front page, among other things. They had every reason to be hostile. The site was down 70% of it's time I'd say and a couple of hundred of us were using a Facebook group to communicate in between the downtimes.

Anyway more than 2 years on, people are still finding their way back to us. We've had people pop in saying "gosh you guys were hard to find." We had a membership of over 100,000. Maybe 2-3k active. So many people left long before the new site was dreamed up because the new owners were THAT bad. Because they left and the old site was demolished, there was no way to let them know where the staff had set up camp. All of us were volunteer staff on the old site and some of us had been running the forum for the previous owner for more than 10 years.

Unfortunately, I think ours is not the only community that went through this kind of BS. It's often a similar story that has seen some of the big old forums from the early 00s disappear without a trace.

The current forum will be kept open through thick and thin for as long as it has active members. They deserve no less after all they went through. It's 100% not for profit, it's purely a home for the community.

 

[Nomad]

I have closed a couple of sites. The sites I shut down did not have a lot of content or members. Therefore, closing these sites did not really matter. However, if I want to close a site that already has a lot of content and members, I would consider selling it instead of shutting it down. By selling the site, I will at least recover the investment.

 

[Alexandoy]

When the forum that I was managing experienced the doldrums, my boss said that it was better to close it than to let it run without activity. What I did was to make a backup of the data and I observed for 2 weeks before I removed the forum from the internet. It was a forum of a non-profit organization and it would have been good if we could sell it but we didn't. By the way, the reason for the lack of activity was the trolling of some members that most of the active members left the forum.

 

[Azareal]

Sites usually cost me approximately $4 per month to run.
$3/month for the host and $1/month for the domain.

Even with scale, it wouldn't get that much more expensive, unless it swells to 60 million posts.
If it's completely dead, then it'll probably get torn down eventually, but otherwise, it doesn't really matter so much whether it's that active or not.

 

[Page]

I think that in 5 or more years forums aren't going to worth that much

 

[Deleted member 44219]

I think that in 5 or more years forums aren't going to worth that much

I do agree with that. Forums boomed around the beginning of the 2000's, then I'd say started to decline in the early 2010's. The rise of Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and all of the other Social Media's out there is what's killing forums. Nobody want's to find a forum just for 1 certain topic. Everybody wants to talk about anything.

I have started a General Discussion before(But I kept shutting it down) and if I were to start one again, I'd make sure I let user's talk about as much as they want. That's what General Discussion forums are for, right?

But yeah. Forums won't be worth as much in the next 10 years. Unless we start a revolution or something, I dunno.
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But back to the thread's question, I'm not sure what I'd do if I were to shut down my forum. I'd probably do what everybody's doing. Send emails, write an announcement or sell it to some other person. I'd probably host a 14 days event which is essentially the countdown timer until the forum closes. I'd cut staff off, one by one. I'd also start removing features as they won't be useful anymore seeing as the forum is closing.

 

[Page]

Even then regards selling it, you might as well give it away to an person who is active on the forum as you not going to get much for it. Depends on the site