My Forum Lost All Its Members - Now What?

I have a relatively new forum that I started in December 2012. I had 5-7 members that posted on a regular basis for a while, but as of late, they have all left. One of the 7 members I had decided to start his own forum and now they have all gone there

My forum now has me and my only moderator scratching our heads as to what happened. The forum they all left to go to looks terrible (and mine is beautiful) and it was brand new while mine was a few months established.

I feel like I got stabbed in the back and now I don't know what to do to recruit more members.

 

did they have any complaints about your forum? (before they left)


it sounds like a clique decided they could run their own forum instead of growing yours.

 

No complaints. In fact, everyone was really happy that if they asked for a chat room or other new feature, there was one there within an hour or so. I was on top of everything!

I sent a really sarcastic message to the guy who started his own forum saying that since he's so interested in stealing my members, he might as well take the whole forum. Offered him my XenForo license, domain name, theme, and all forum content for $200.

I'm PMing you my forum URL. I have no idea why people would leave...

 

That is unfortunate, Sorry to hear that..
Would you mind sending me a link to?
I might be able to pitch in some suggestions if I knew the content type.

 

Sent it!

 

While you have probably moved on thought I'd share this for others who may be in a similar situation (I see this a lot!)

You should always keep posting new content on your forums yourself especially when you are starting. If you are not posting new content then why should your users? You really need to give them a reason to come back otherwise your forum will die down very quickly.