When I say 'long-dead forum,' I’m talking about one that’s been mostly dormant for months or even years, with no consistent userbase.
Do you think it's easier to breathe life back into one of those, or would it be simpler to just launch a brand-new forum on the same topic?
Personally, I lean toward the latter. There’s often more excitement around a fresh start than reviving something that’s been stagnant. People tend to be drawn to the buzz of a new community rather than rejoining one that faded out.
What’s your take? Would you rather help revive an old space or dive into something entirely new?
Personally I find it easier to start fresh, given that you have some sort of audience to start off with. I see some admins merging old forums or trying to breathe new life into old ones which often doesn't give the wanted results. I think that is mostly due that audience being gone. I could see it work if you have closed down the forum due unforeseen circumstances and try to revive it within the year. Anything past that year, is lost effort in my opinion.
If you ever managed a community more than two years, you know that a community constantly evolves and it's never the same as a year ago.
I prefer starting fresh because you can have a lot of old, outdated content when you revive an old board and a mostly inactive user base. Starting fresh, in general, gives me a sense of satisfaction knowing that I have created something new and perhaps unique.
My son and I started a forum in 2015. 2 weeks after we started it his wife told him she was pregnant with his first daughter. I took over the site by myself. A week later I had my first stroke. I left all the sited dormant for a couple years. The new site got off to a good start in the 3 weeks it was online.
Fast forward almost 20 years. I for the most part am healthy, still some effects of the last stroke I had 4 years ago, and my son has 3 daughters and a son. We are in the process of reopening the site. The domain was available so we decided to open it.
Will it work? I think so. The soft opening, after emailing the users, has brought back some of the original users and we had a couple new signups that became active.
One thing I am doing is leaving the site on xenforo 1.5.24. It was originally on 1.4.6 so I upgraded it to 1.5.24. I like the simplicity of the 1.5.x line. It was what drew me to xenforo in the first place.
Once open I'll post in the directory here so you can check it out. I am working on a pay per post system using Dragonbyte Tech addons. You won't get rich, but, could make a few bucks posting on the site.
I used to have a very large weather-related forum. I lost it due to database issues. I tried to re-create it as a forum I have now. A lot of people join and when I promote it on my Facebook page, I made for it long ago (over 10K followers), I get a few memberships each time.
But no one is talking and I'm posting topics they can relate to.
The domain expires in September of this year. I'm giving it until then to determine whether I want to abort or not.
I have a few forums as some of your may know but here lately, I'm trying to manage my life better and wind down my projects a bit. I've closed three other forums that were just wasting space. I'm evaluating a few others. I figured if I lighten my load, I can focus more on the ones I want to grow like AAF and OTF and a few others.
I think it's easier to try and bring back a dead forum from the grave than starting from scratch. You already have things laid out and set up if you're bringing back one from the dead. Though I've tried this recently, and even though I sent out a mass email no one came back. I'm debating on if I'm going to keep the forum up or not, the subreddit is already dead and it's for a game that was mediocre when it finally came out after being delayed multiple times. I even posted a link on the subreddit, but I made the mistake of posting it before asking the mods so the thread got deleted and no one seen it. Probably got flagged as spam by their bot. (The link used to be on their sidebar though, but since I didn't pay for the domain name in the past it was removed. I purchased the domain name again last year.)
