Reviving A Forum That Has Been Down

**brandondrury** · 05-13-2008, 02:35 PM

Well, after Lunarpages gave me the equivalent of one of the less desireable aspects of prison last week, I've been making a mad dash to move onto a new server. Long story short, it looks like my vbulletin forum is going to be back up and running after a being down for 6 days. AHHH!

I am furious, but that's another story. Now I'm in the mode of getting back on the horse.

I've been keeping my member's updated with the progress via my Aweber mailing list (which sits at around 6,000 members so far), but I'm afraid that it may be slow going for a while once we get back up.

Any ideas as far as how to revive this thing?

Brandon

**Brandon Sheley** · 05-13-2008, 03:51 PM

emailing is what I would do as well, how many members does the forum have? or is that the 6k list you've been using.
Have everything up and ready for the members when they come back, try and make some new post and threads with the according content.

**brandondrury** · 05-13-2008, 04:14 PM

Well obviously the newsletter is going out. That one is a given. The forum has about 12,000 members. I think 1,200 of those were active in the past 30 days.

Quote:

Have everything up and ready for the members when they come back, try and make some new post and threads with the according content.

Yeah, that's pretty much a given all the time. I was just curious if anyone has been in a similar situation and if there were any specific tricks a person could utilize to get the site back to normal quicker.

I guess it comes down to conventional marketing tricks.

Brandon

**Brandon Sheley** · 05-13-2008, 10:56 PM

I've helped bring a number of dead forums back to life with the crowdgather network.
For example, this forum Eternal Allegiance - Celebrity Gossip went months without new post.. We are getting new post almost every day and new threads and new members every week. We haven't sent out an email to those old members yet, we are building up a few thousand new post or close to 1,000 new post for any old member to login and see the forums.

**bdude** · 05-14-2008, 12:32 AM

I would make sure that the site is 100% working before you send a mass mail to all members apologising for the downtime, also I'd make a heap of posts so members have something to read/respond to when they come back.

**Magnumutz** · 05-14-2008, 04:01 AM

My forum is pretty deserted too... except for the members that come to play the arcade games, i haven't got some posts in quite a while. Looks like only the staff started posting anything.

But i'll be sure to bring it back to life and improve it by the end of the exams

**bdude** · 05-16-2008, 12:20 AM

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But i'll be sure to bring it back to life and improve it by the end of the exams

This is my school holiday project too, to rejuvinate my site.

**Magnumutz** · 05-16-2008, 04:10 AM

Well... this is going to be my NEXT project as i'm graduating in about 6 weeks... and then i'll be able to dedicate more time to the vB stuff

**Soliloquy** · 07-09-2008, 11:18 AM

How did the resuscitation go? Is posting back up to former levels?

**brandondrury** · 07-09-2008, 11:49 AM

I was worried sick that my "baby" had died. I had been working my butt on this stupid forum/site since October 05 and I really thought I had a severe setback.

After check my stats, even though I was down for about 9 days in May, it ended up being my second highest most active month (in terms of # of posts). June was my best month to date by over 20% and I expect July will be even higher.

I was very pleased to see that not only were my forum members loyal, they were willing to donate cash to help with the expenses of the dedicated server.

I've been building this forum up the old fashioned way in an topic that had plenty of other forums, but none of them were ran properly where they could really be of help to the beginners in the home recording world. (That was my opinion anyway). While the pay has been very low and the hours long, it appears that paying your dues and posting constantly, going out of your way to help people, and being generally passionate about creating a forum that really helps people can build the kind of community where being down for 9 days doesn't tear it apart.

I'm actually convinced that the site being down made it stronger because of scarcity and my member's wanting to help in any way they could. Of course, I kept all of them updated each step of the way via Aweber newsletters. Without a 3rd party newsletter system I would have been screwed.

Just 2 months after the forum got back up, my problem is now finding the time to respond to all the posts and finding time to work on the products I want to sell to my community.

Brandon

**Soliloquy** · 07-09-2008, 11:44 PM

That's great news Brandon, hope now that the community is strong it will bring in more for you

Your story made me think I'd better download a copy of the email addresses in case the site ever goes south...