Taking over another forum

Have you bought, received, or been handed an established and active community before? If so, what was the transition like? What steps were taken to make the transition of management/ownership smooth and not disruptive to the community and members?

In the end, how did the community react? How have things gone ever since you took over?

I've never taken over an active forum before, but I assume that it would require extreme care and precision so as not to harm the community.

 

I suppose this sort of applies to me.

I joined as an admin of these forums that had been down for several months. Once they were back-up the owner of the web hosting said he'd just like to be a mod as there are too many admins.

It all went smoothly, i think most of the members are happy as the forums are back up.

 

been there, done that . As a matter of fact more than once. First time went very smoothly may be because I'd been a member there for a long time and I knew almost all active members ( some still are close friends) but the second time was a total disaster.
in the end I guess it depends on members (unfortunately sometimes ).

 

This is definitely something I'd like to experience one day! Seems really cool, providing you merge with the correct type of site

 

I'd been down this road before. I've been handed a community.

Back when I was 16 a community was bought out by a guy that none of us knew. At the time the forum was running vB 2.3. We knew about that founder was planning on upgrading to vB3. Well when this guy that none of us knew bought the site he when through with the plans to upgrade to vB3, however it wasn't the version that we were told about for months. The founder hand coded his own scripts and the new owner ended up installing mods you can find on vBulletin.org. The whole site ended up going into a fit (we were all teenagers). Well the owner was 22 and I guess he just couldn't handle these teen coming at him the way we did (me being one of them). So one day I log on and see I have a new PM. Well it was the new owner, he was offering me a chance to run the site managing day to day operations. I took his offer and started getting the forum back on track. As time when on the owner gave me server access and I was free to do what I wanted.

About 4 years later he sells the forum to some older guy who just happens to live 15 mins away from me. Well I thought this would work out great, we ended up meeting up at Starbucks and talked about ways to improve the site. We came up with a huge list of ideas. I started work on it and then he changed the password on the server and I lost access. Then he goes missing, can't reach him at his phone number or email :shrug:. Well two years later I still can't find him and the forum is running a version of vBulletin that's old as dirt 3.6.5. One day I go the check on the site and boom database errors all over the place. By this point I ended up becoming really annoyed and was going to say "oh well all good things come to an end" Well members from the site started IMing me asking to start my own site. So I started a site under my ownership and members ended up joining it. So I'm 22 and not only do I manage a teen forum but also own it.

Over all it was a good experience, other then losing years worth of data .

I've personally bought some forums but most of them were dead and I ended up re-booting them so the ownership change wasn't a big deal.

 

How many posts does it have now? How long has your community been opened?

 

I opened it on 03-29-2009. 15,905 posts, 995 threads, 1,931 members. Things have gotten a little slow so I plan on giving it a little boost this month.

 

I have taken over 4 forums in my experience.

All three, I merged with my site. I don't want to keep them and work on them.

Out of all 4, one went real well. The other three were dead and I got a few members. One turned ugly because the admin didn't fully understand that I was merging even though he gave me the database and such. Oh well..

 

I've taken over a few; some went downhill afterwards, some stayed the same, one only took off after I took over. (The previous owner had neglected the site, so they were happy to see someone take an active interest and start working on improving things.)

If you're going to take over an existing forum, I advise you ask the long-term members what they'd like to see done, and make a post spelling out your intentions as the new owner. And then keep your promises, or the members will defect.

 

Cool stats. What are you going to do to boost it?

 

Members like to see an active forum and the group that my site is dedicated to won't post if they don't see someone else posting. I don't have the time to do it myself, so I'm going to contact with a forum posting service to help jump-start the forum again. I'll also invest sometime advertising the forum. I've done this in the past and it worked out so good. When I did this with one site it started on a VPS account in Sept 2005 and by Feb 2006 it had to be moved to a dedicated server. Hopefully it works out like this again.