The "Get Big Quick" Admin

Ive done it before and have no problem if someone has a goal or objective by doing so, whether it be to "try" harness a dead communities members into becoming active again, having more unique content which stands a good chance of being indexed better on a better platform or in my case if i see a community which is dead but is still holding good search positions. If all 301's are in place then any backlinks with anchor text will also 301 to the merged site giving it indirect authority, over time after all pages are reindexed it DOES help with SEO, whether it be indirectly in just gaining domain authority or whether it be directly through anchored , aged backlinks.

I have a couple of sites that get a large amount of traffic from redirected keywords , keywords which the original site did not rank for before merging with a site that ranked very well for it, Combining the two and a little extra work propelled it to number 1 for some seriously good terms.

If you are clever you can also use the same techniques with dropped domains with a bit of tinkering.

That's the problem: MOST MEMBERS WON'T POST in the new forums. I merged a women forum years ago. Another fellow admin was tired of running her board and offered me her database. It took me 2 weeks to merge the forums and from hundreds of members she once had I could retain 5 maybe. Not worth the hassle. Of course, if you're not expecting the other members to come in huge numbers into their new communities, then having thousands more posts won't hurt.

There have been a few offers over the years to purchase our site, to which the owner always declined. Now that I'm the owner, cook, bottle washer, etc., I intend to keep that mindset as I make some additional changes.

We all have dreams of becoming the next huge site, but when we loose sight of what our original goal was, it's just not worth it. I'd much rather have a smaller site with an active membership that actually IS a community, than try to ramp up the size and loose that community feel. We do it for the love of the site, regardless of how active it is. You don't need thousands of posts each day to get that satisfaction.

Have never purchased a database (or even a community for that matter), and don't intend to start anytime soon. I mirror your first post, the forum would be built on false foundations, misleading visitors with the amount of activity (or lack of). Administrators such as this, or those who spam the crap out of everything to promote their forum should not be in the web development industry. Leave it to the big boys (and girls Az, and girls!).

I'm not sure I agree with the huge conglomerates like Internet Brands snapping up sites, either. Those sites quickly become something completely different with the wrong type of feel to them. There was a truck site that I was active on a few years ago and they sold out to IB. The feel of the site today is completely different than it was in the early days.

Personally, I'm not sure what I would do if I were to receive such an offer. Lord knows, after being unemployed for over 3 years, I could use the cash (thank gawd for retirement income!). But the need to retain the original roots of the site is strong, too. And those roots don't include the meddling of a large conglomerate dictating the direction of the site.

I will say this though... On one forum in particular, I didn't buy a single DB (well one but I never merged it, just redirected the domain) and it made me feel and still makes me feel quite good about myself that I have built it up as big as it has got in such a short time. That alone makes me never want to purchase other related forums to merge into it I really enjoy doing it all naturally and I got tons of ideas to make it even better

I find it odd that no-one looks at this topic from the point of view of the members either - rarely ever are the members consulted on an impending sale, and usually the only warning they get is when one day they get an email out of the blue from some random site that bought their details - I'm sure you can understand why some feel a bit put out, even angry about that. It seems strange that it's not considered OK to buy mailing lists in polite circles, but buying database dumps from established forums to spam... er, integrate... is considered OK.

Why should the membership be consulted? To see if one of them wants to buy it? If not, they don't have a say.

Yes they do - it's their details you're selling. That's exactly the mindset I'm pointing out is completely wrong.

No. They don't. Do they pay for the server? Do they maintain the forum? And if the forum is being sold, they apparently didn't care enough to ensure the forum stayed self sufficient and active.

A heads up would be courteous, but to think they should have a say in whether the forum is sold or not is ridiculous.

Were the myspace members notified the site is being sold WITH THEIR CONTENT THERE? And it wasn't just an email address. Was any other site people rushed in with everything about their lives notifying members 'please let us know if you're ok with us selling the site?'. I have hundreds of accounts on forums (am not active in all, you can guess that). Many sites were sold, closed etc. With MY POSTS and my email address. did I care? No, it's not my place. When registering for a site you should think that one day that site can be sold, closed, redirected etc. That's why it's not a good idea to give too much info about yourself and use an email address you don't care if gets spammed

How much say the membership has is a matter of how much say you as a owner/operator of the forum permit them to have.

On the one hand, forums-as-democracy and forums-as-committee setups rarely go anywhere productive fast. After all, democracy is what happens when two wolves and a sheep decide to sit down to discuss what's for dinner. Gauging public interest in your decisions is a very different process from putting everything up to a vote.

On the other hand, forum owners that treat their membership and their contributions as expendable probably don't get a lot of repeat business (unless your audience is rather trollish and you simply provide bridges for them to sit under).

Forum users indeed can get that feeling of being a stakeholder based on their contributions. Whether that feeling has any bearing or not is up to you, the person logging into the admin panel.

There is certainly no legal basis for membership getting a say in such things as a buy-out, though, only a sense of entitlement which may or may not be fostered by the owner. Our site has an entire content page "Privacy Statement" which spells out our right to disclose information in the case of a sale/merger of the site among other things (in other words, pretty boiler-plate in this day and age). The content and user data is property of our mother non-profit we created as the legal "owner" of the site.

Opinions can definitely vary on this, but the law does not. I certainly wouldn't follow around a forum owner/creator who kept selling off the sites I was contributing to, but I most certainly do not think I'm entitled to a say in the matter when they do so. As in many cases in capitalistic societies, the only right in such cases is the right to vote with your feet.

You say you declare the possibility you might onsell the forum in your privacy policy - that's good, it means that it's not actually a surprise when the members start getting contact from the new owners because (presuming they read the terms they agreed to, a reasonable assumption if I do say so myself!) then it's not exactly an out of the blue thing. The problem is that in most cases, forum owners do not declare that it might happen, then they go on to sell the forum - possibly even to someone that the members may not be all that pleased about (the perennial favourite is of course Internet Brands acquisitions). I would hardly call it ethical to do so without informing the user base and giving them the opportunity to exit prior to the transfer, and in some countries it isn't even legal (I know I could be prosecuted for such as sale, and anyone in Europe risks massive fines doing so).

your evaluation if based or morale, but there is the main problem Morale,
Whats not right for you may be right for the other, what sounds bad to you may sound good for others,
there are admins who wont mind using any tricks at all to get their forums big and on the first pages of google,
where some choose to take one path others choose the other, where some choose to build their empires themselves others just take smaller ones and make their bigger,
if someone ask them about all this they simply reply according to their natures, the human nature is thebase of morality, now for some admins their forums are their homes for some they are just another buniess,
now who is wrong pratically No One