Can general chat/off topic forums still succeed?

I know a couple years ago, my partner and I started offtopicbb - as a competitor to offtopic.com, but we didn't last that long because we decided to merge our two communtiies(Virtualpetlist and offtopicbb) into one after about 7 months.

But, we had a lot of luck, and fun with our general chat forum - but I was wodnering, do you guys think there's room for general chat forums, or are they hard to grow these days?

 

Not without significant investment, no.

 

Why do you think it takes an investment to do it? When we owned our off-topic forums, we managed to get to 40k posts in less than 7 months without advertising.

 

As long as it contains something unique and has great content, then I don't see any reason why it should fail...

 

All forums have a potential of succeeding, no matter what the genera or how much in demand they are. I run a general chat forum myself, but I picked it because it is the easiest genera to run, and I enjoy being able to discuss whatever I want without worrying about what the other guy will think. I've been a member of some successful general chat forums before, and again, they can succeed just like any other genera of forums... you don't always have to invest money into it either. Yes, a little extra cash can go a long way, especially if you want things customized specifically and you don't know jack about coding or CSS, but like Ashley.S. said, as long as you have interesting content/things to talk about, there should be no problems at all. In fact, one of the most successful general chat communities I was on was none other than Ashley.S.'s a couple years ago! I can't remember how many posts they had or whatever, but it was a nice forum and it was fairly active for a few months as well. Yes, these are hard to get off the ground, and I'm still trying to promote mine like heck, but at the same time the effort is all worth it!

 

In the long run yes. Because all forums aside from promotion/admin turn into off topic.

Take for instance a game forum. When the game stops to producing or no more new news comes. The activty rate goes down signifcantly. Long time members will always stay but the talk will mostly be directed towards off topic/general discussions.

In the here and now it can't suceed much. Because you want to talk about something your intrested in not random stuff.

 

I guess it really depends, they might do good for a feww months or even weeks, then members might just get bored and leave. Majority of them dont do well. I guess you have to make a really unique forum that sets you apart from the billion others out there.