Starting over?

Have you ever decided to start your community over - with better forum software, better content, sef urls, and a lot more?

Well, if so - what did you do to help boast the new community?

Because, I'm going to be starting over my gaming community in a few days - due to the fact that I had no backups, and managed to deleted 3,000 pages of forum topics, which sucks bad, and I can't fix it all.

So, my plan is to switch to VB, where I'm currently running IPB - have some of my friends post 20+ topics in each forum on the new site - with more forum topics than the first community, then after we have an unique design, an arcade, search-engine friendly urls, and a lot of other things, we open.

What do you guys think?

 

I also run a gaming community and we just switched to a new forum. If you simply explain to the members what is going to happen and why then most of them will understand. In all honesty most of them do not read the old threads anyways and the only real issue is in terms of search engine results when specific keywords are searched for and your pages are no longer available. This can be rebuilt with a little bit of time a good member base.

Good Luck

 

Ya - search engine friendly urls will help a lot, and that's what I plan to have; open with at least 100+ topics, then open to the public.

 

vB is the way to go for sure,

Also if you have the database with all of the old users email them when you are ready to re-open. That will remind all of the old active members to sign up again in the new place, and any non-active members, well it may jog their memory about your place.

Better yet, if you have the user table, insert it into the vb user table. Not sure how to do that myself but I am sure that someone here would know

 

Ya, I'll email the old members, but I won't insert them into the vb user table - I'd rather start fresh, a lot of problems occured during the current age of the forums and I hope I cna wipe that state clean.

 

I use both IPB and VB for my forums. Both have features that make them good. For commercial use though I believe that VB is a much better forums.

 

Ya, that's the main reason why I want to move to VB - I think its faster, and can handle more posts, but I'm not sure.

 

Build your forum structure correctly from the start, otherwise it can cause issues down the track.

VB is a great option and definately worth paying for. Wish you all the best with your new forum-relaunch.

Are you keeping the same domain name?

You could do a re-direct from your old pages to your new ones if you want to save some of your traffic and what not.

Brad

 

So glad you asked the question. I used to run All Things Ex, the most successful exploitation film forum around. We had been hosting on IPBFree, under the constant risk of being shut down, with tons of horrid forced ads and laughable software. I closed it down and gave up on the data within.

In a few weeks, it will be relaunched from scratch. We'll have a proper domain, vBulletin software, and high-end paid hosting that allows adult content.

To get the name out there, I intend to snag members from rivals we'd defeated in the past, as well as work on SEO, get involved in link exchanges, and use tools like Myspace to get the word out.

How do I intend to make it succeed? I'll be offering the complete package: Ads-free, premium software with few rules and tons of mods. Some of our features include 24/7/365 A/V chat, blog hosting, an arcade, a gallery, and much more. Plus, we'll be streaming weekly movies.

As to regaining the activity, I expect my promotional activities and the great new features should help. And it certainly doesn't hurt that my moderator is a post-a-holic.

 

Yup, I forgot about this thread - the new forums are doing well, 5k posts in 6 days.

 

Holy Jesus! That's awesome!

My #1 forum currently says "Our users have posted a total of 4613 articles."

 

That's HUGE

Congrats on the transfer, I am glad it went smoothly

 

Thanks, I'm quite happy as well, I thought the community would die because of the reset, guess not.

Not bad, keep working on it!

 

I need to hire a forum expert.

 

Just sell and start new

 

Sell what? I'm not a sell-out. I don't sell my babies.