The pro's and con's of absorbing other boards.
 

My board has been going pretty well and growing steadily. For some reason, admins of several other sites are offering their forums to me. If I want I can absorb them. Merge them into my board. It is coincidence that the offers come around the same time. One board is free and two cost a little.
I run a very strict policy and keep my board very clean, so this may cause some problems with new members. But other than this, the offers sound tempting.

I am not concerned with the technical side, but I would like to know what your experiences are with absorbing other forums. What tips can you give me?

Uh... I am still waiting for the first offer. ;)

At the first Step I would tell the Users in Both Forums that they should change ther eMail-Adress to the Same in both Forums to merge the Users.

Test it in a Demo-Forum and - important - think first how to change the structure.

i already absorbed 3 old forums into mine lately, just to have content... the members are not re-visiting, it was too long between the closing and the merge...

i like the idea btw... updating forums without breaking everything... old users have to receive their privileges btw, you can't just move along...

btw it is hard to find parenting sites interested to merge with others, there is always that competition among them... lol

Did you have any trouble with members from imported board adjusting to your atmosphere? Or didn't any of their members revisit?

I wasn't there at the time, but the effects of two different boards merging wasn't good. Neither board was keen on the idea and in the end, everything was closed down.

If you're thinking of merging, make sure the overall opinion of all parties concerned is positive!

on my side, as it is always long term plans, the members are aware of the move in long periods, and they do not loose their own atmosphere... because when i merge a forum, before merging the content, i put the whole thing in their own section, a seperate forum, where they find themselves in the same forum structure for a time, and then they decide if they want to split or fix it...

this is what we will have in the next week... a 3 years old forum with a lot of mouvements... great deal for my new main site.

All links to threads, forums, and posts from the boards getting imported will be broken if you do it. Members will tend to complain about this. They can use search (assuming you let them) but for example if you have FAQ threads that point to the old thread IDs, they will not work. It will also take Google forever to figure out where the imported content is, even if you are using vBSEO Sitemap Generator & handing it directly to them.

You'll be needing a subforum for moaners. Would it be so hard for them to join traditionally?

When we merged with another board, our two cultures had no clashing. Granted, at this point in time, both boards only had about 20 members. This was a year ago. Now, we have over 580 members, and 107,000+ posts. Some times mergers work out. Most of the time, they do not.