That is true to some extent.

The merger was closer to 9 sites into 1 mega autosite.

It was a complete failure. Unfortunately for some people I know, but alas they sold their sites to said company, took the money and ran.

Regarding killing the communities. I know of 3 that died within days of doing what they did. 2 are getting back to an image of what they were back in the first year of operation. The other, well it is pretty dead.

Shame on the new owners and Kudos to the former owners for getting their money.

Heya Typhon,

I am actually deciding on the same thing at this time, only I am deciding whether I want to start new sites or add them into my existing. I run UltimateMetal.com and have a few "sister sites" I want to start up, such as UltimateHardRock, UltimateProg, etc. - I was going to make them individual sites, but the only reason I haven't yet is I know a lot of the users will use multiple sites, and I was trying to find a way they could have a global user account across all the sites. Only thing I have seen is major hacking to accomplish that, a road I won't go down.

If you look at my Metal site, I already have a lot of individual forums (bands) - if I had the same amount for Hard Rock, Prog, this thing would be more of a monster than it already is. Wasn't sure what I would do from a server standpoint. Currently I just upgraded to quad core Xeon, 4 GB ram, 2 73 GB 15k drives (one for MySQL). Not sure how far that will take me.