Ever shutdown a forum? What were your reasons?

Have you ever shutdown a forum? So what were your reasons for it? Im sure many of you have, be sure to explain why.

 

If you're talking about closing a forum for good, I've had this happen. I had a forum that was going pretty strong, I then had to close it because of life. School got in the way and I didn't have enough time to do anything, so I just got rid of it.

 

Yes for good. I have replaced closed with Shutdown, should reflect better.

 

I have shutdown a thriving Sports Forum because of school and basketball practice and some other various reasons.

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My last forum was actually a fairly active Nintendo forum. We had a strong launch, but activity started to decline after the first year or so. A lot of Nintendo fans (myself included) got discouraged after the embarrasment that was E3 2008 and lost their spark for Nintendo. Eventually activity and interest declined to the point that, combined with the fact I was really bogged down with my senior year of college, I closed the forum down.

I really regret doing it now, because I think I could have built it back up and maybe even transformed it seamlessly into 4P, rather than starting new with 4P and struggling to get it off the ground like I am now.

 

Yes I have: one got closed due to being hacked and the damage being too severe to repair, another got closed due to not having the time/passion to run it any more, and the last one got closed because no-one wanted to be there any more and the DB got badly messed up due to too much back stabbing going on between staff/owners/previous management, etc.

 

I've shutdown forums for inactivity, thats the only reason.

 

How come you didn't give it to an admin to run or sell it? How many members did you have before you closed it?

 

Yes, loads of times. Nine times out of ten, I was immature and didn't completely realize how much time it took to actually run a forum. It was always an open/shut case and it was pathetic. Sometimes I was lucky if my forum even stayed up for a month. But now I am proud to say that I must have matured by alot, because my current forum is almost a year old, and I am very proud of it. Sure, i still have my days where I want to close it and be done, but I have an awesome staff team keeping me level and sane and helping me understand why I'm running a forum at all.

 

The last forum of mine that I shutdown was PlanetGamers.org, it was the forum I had right before AdminBB. The reason I closed it was because I soon opened AdminBB and I just didn't feel like running two forums because my time would be divided up between two forums, and I rather give my time to just one forum. So I decided to close it as I saw alot more potential in AdminBB, and good thing I did that as AdminBB has been doing great.

PlanetGamers.org was a very active community as well, alot of people ask me why didn't I just sell it. But thats not me, I dont like selling my work, I rather just close it for good as my work to me is priceless, I could have gotten a good amount for it. And anyways not to mention I lost interest as I hadn't been gaming for awhile when I closed it. Now I am not gamer at all, dont have time for it.

 

I just closed down a forum a little over 2+ months ago. When I was running the forum I thought the only thing that mattered was post counts and soon before I knew it the forum was over run with short spam replies.

When I finally snapped out of have to have high post count trance. The forum was 50% short spam replies. There was no real way to save the forum. It would have been butchered if I would have tried to clean it up. So I closed it down and took 2 months off forums.

 

I done it many times, Closing never shutting down; GamingIsland soon turned into a site then lost its members.

 

Here are some various reasons why I closed off forums over the years.

- The yearly vBulletin license expired, wasn't going to convert to my IPB (which was being used at that time) or to free software.
- Literally had no time running it, and didn't seem like it'd sell, but it did not.
- I closed one cause a forum conversion screwed up everything.

 

I don't really know. I guess I didn't really want anybody to screw around with it or anything, mess up what I did.

 

I have closed a technology forum due to it being an overcrowded niche, and a lack of time on my part.

 

I recently closed my site due to several reasons:

a) Activity had declined massively
b) I wasn't as interested in the niche anymore (gaming)
c) I didn't have a large amount of free time.

I do regret it though. We merged with another site, but most of my members haven't logged in since the merge - kind of tells you that they weren't loyal to the forum in itself.

 

When forums merge, old members from the merged DB tend to leave as they usually don't end up being felt welcome

 

I'm sure they felt welcome enough. The site was originally slowly losing activity, so I reckon people just took the merge as their chance to leave.

 

Well if they were active before the merge then I wouldn't say they weren't loyal as as Ashley.S. mentioned members tend to leave after a merge or after an ownership change.

Nice, I see that we both closed our previous forums due to the fact of losing interest in Gaming. Haven't been gaming since. No need to keep running a forum if you lose interest, because then there isn't the passion behind running it.

 

Exactly. I do still game a little bit (an likely will even more once my exams are over), but gaming forums are usually very hard to make a success anyway and require a lot of effort.