Buying a forum! Your views

Its a bit woolly mate. What kind of forum?

Forums are incredibly hard work, and this one wouldn't survive 5 minutes without the behind the scenes work all the mods put in. But they can also be very satisfying and good fun. From a commercial point of view, if your aim is to make money, I'd run a mile

You need to pick something that you enjoy talking about, and can commit to. Too many forums start off as a good idea, then disappear 6 - 12 months later as unloved projects.

Buying a forum is an interesting point. You would only buy a forum because it has an active membership base and is established, and think you can take over its direction, without upsetting its members.

In the business forum world, remember UKBF when it was sold by Ozzy to Sift Media. Many people (me included) think the quality of that forum declined after the sale. Others will argue it was enhanced by Sift and became even more popular.

It's a tight rope between direction and keeping your regular posters happy which are your forums lifeblood.

I'd have thought investing your time in something more directly geared towards paying customers would work better.

I'm not persoanlly on about buying one, I just remeber when I owned UKBDF I was asked to sell that and declined on the basis I didn't want people been annoyed I had effectivly sold there details to a new forum!

So did you sell your forum, or are you asking whether you think you should sell your forum?

Bit confused?

I was just making some convo

Just wanted to see if people thought buying a forum to make a forum bigge was a good idea for example

I know a forum that has over 19000 memebers but the forum is dead because no convesation is been made.

So then comes the idea would you buy it and combine it or not?

ahh I see where your coming from.

I think people get hung up on membership numbers. It's great to see we've now got over 2700 members on MLF, buts it pure vanity. The majority are single posters, looking for a quick link dump.

The actual community and soul of the forum is the 160 odd members who have contributed. That said, there are plenty of people who also like to lurk and have a read, and I do that myself with a couple of forums, as opposed to getting involved.

A1BF was an interesting case recently. It was taken over by Kashflow and decked out in their colours, and became the Kashflow business forum. Apart from a few grumbles from a few members who didn't want to part of the new forum, overall, the old A1BF has now been transformed and updated. If the new owner can get the conversations going, he now has a nicely established forum branded in his companies colour scheme.

I tried to do exactly the same thing with a different biz forum, but they didn't want to sell, so decided to start one from scratch If an opportunity arose now, I'm not so sure, would I want to merge say a 19,000 member forum into MLF? Probably not.

This is the thing, Allot of people do think numbers matter and of course they do becuase say you had 5 members its less percent of genuine posters.. if that makes sence

So with more members the average would increase of good memebers sticking around.

I know the other forum hasnt had new posts for days and people are grumbling about not wanting to go onto UKBF for the exact reason stated earlier.

buying a forum would be a great idea but only if that forum is of high high PR with a lot of traffic on it otherwise it is better to make you own

You hit on a good point,