Has anyone ever merged with another forum?

Have you guys ever merged with another forum? Was the experience good or bad?
Did you merge with them or did they merge their site in yours?

Recently, my forum underwent a merge and a name-change. Overall, the merge has potential and it has only been a few weeks but i worry that the merge won't be successful because as it stands now, the site we have merged with hasn't really been that involved.

In fact there are some specific forums that I added to the site that related to their old site and my members are actually the dominant ones posting in that forum. Which really doesn't make sense to me.

I renamed the site to reflect an equal name and I have more or less brought all their forums to our site but as it stands today it more or less two sites just sharing one space so I am not sure how to bring in a more unified site.

Not ready to say it is a failure(again the merge is only less than a month old) but it doesn't look good when my members are the actual dominant posters in forums that you'd think the other site would be more active in.

Any suggestions?

 

Sort of.

Years ago I lead an online gaming team and we had our own forum; I found out a small group of my friends had started their own team with their forum and asked them to merge with us. As a result of the merge I had additional staff (inc one administrator) and more forum sections. It proved successful.

I guess that doesn't really count though. *shrug*

 

Not really i would love to i think it would be a great experience to have like 2 admins and merch like technology to football or something i don't know but i won't do it most probably but i think it would be quite cool to do it.

 

As long as your members are still posting it's not a failure.

 

Oh it was an absolute failure

 

What type of community did you merge onto yours and it was a failure? What went wrong?

 

When my employer bought another IT company we merged forums.

 

At the time of me writing that post, it was a site that was specialized around this guy's Ebook series. I was a big fan(still am, despite all that crap that went down) . His forums were crap(i think he was using some wordpress type forum) and i reached out and i was like "Hey why don't we work together? I have a growing community dedicated to various book series and authors and would love to add a section for your Series and have you on as admin."

It lasted all of 3 weeks i believe simply because in the end, I am 18 years old(Well I was 17 at the time) and the guy we were working with seemed to have issues with working on an equal level with me, someone half his age and he wanted to be "top dog"(his words not mine).

Get the kicker....He didn't even break the merge with me in a respectful way. I discovered the merge was over on my own when I went and looked at his site(Stormverse.com) and discovered that all mentions of MY SITE's name were essentially removed and there was a post that was announcing a new partnership he had with a new site.

And i was told, that while he no longer wanted to merge with my site, I could just as easily merge my site with his new forum(which nearly a year later are dead and full of spam). So essentially, we could still merge sites, except he wanted it to be on his terms where he had full control vs working together as equals. So you wanted me to take my already established site and move it to your BRAND NEW site? k THEN....Makes sense. Not.

I later tried to merge again with another site(A friend's RPG site) and it went okay at first but it too imploded because he and his staff disliked the way I do things because they wanted me to be the admin to hold their hands and tell them what to do all the time and i am more of "Do what you see needs to be done and be independent but if you need my help, I am here."

Two failed merges in a year's time xD But at least the second merge was a full merge and i managed to get some posts from it ha

 

Damn, I'm sorry you had to grow through that crap. All learning lessons though, right?

 

Hah ayes indeed

 

I have merged only once was about ISP's and how to improve services to the customers because the company merged we merged with the forums. The first few months everything was fine but the people of the other forum did not show up anymore after 6 months so we demoted them back to registered user we never saw them again, they never logged in again.