Closed Forums

I have come across many forums that have been shut down but are still live with the forum closed message up. Usually it is some kind of thank you message, "there has been too much spam and so we have decided to close", or a "we cannot afford server costs" message.

It is a shame that they went down like this. Is this something you have ever done or come across? What are your thoughts on this?

 

Yes, I had members spamming my forums with silly "thankyous" and one word jargon based replies so I threatened to close the forum down for a month. That continued, so I closed the forum for 3 months and remained inactive for a further 3 months before posting again.

 

If I ever got close to the point where I was considering shutting down the place, I would ask the members for money or help first. If that didn't work, I'd look for someone who could take care of it.

 

I shut down one of my forums yesterday. It was rather depressing in a way since it was a fun side project for two years. Although as time went on, members went more and more inactive, I gave it less and less time and ultimately I found that even my real life friends who helped me through hard times didn't want to visit. The niche was highly competitive, I could easily find similar forums that exceeded my own by leaps and bounds. I did extensive work building up backlinks, ran an AdWords campaign and reached out to similar sites for exchanges. Just didn't work out for probably a large number of reasons.

 

I actually can't say I've come across a site that is closed down but still has the board message up. I guess it's good to let their visitors know where they went and is better than mysteriously closing down and never coming back.

 

I would never shut down any one of our forums, shutting them off keeps the spiders out and of course is detrimental to your SERPs and also member/thread/post count. Paying for hosting to host a forum and closing it is just foolish.

Fair enough you may need to go away and shut it down for a while as you have no one to look after it but I would rather shut down users perms than turn off the boards.