MyBB Community Forums

So how does one go about trying to revive their community forum that was once thriving with members and activity? 

I've been in the forum scene since around 2010 when I was only about eleven or twelve years old, and I was very into the Pokémon franchise. So I when I was on my first couple of Pokémon community forums, I had wanted to make my very own. So going through a couple of free forums that I had made myself, I finally decided to be serious about being a forum administrator and decided to actually invest in making one. So in January 2012, at the age of fourteen, I opened up my first official Pokémon forum, PokéSun. 

It's now been five+ years since being open (turning six years old in a couple of months), and since the grand reopening back in March 2017, it's been pretty much the same. We don't get much activity, nor do we get rarely anybody new joining the forum. We have our close-knit family on the forum, about seven or eight of us on frequently since the forum being back.

Now being nineteen (turning twenty next month), I find it quite hard trying to figure out how to revive my forum more to make it thrive with new faces and activity. I'm not much into the Pokémon franchise as I once was, but I always make an attempt to contribute and try to engage in the franchise. I'm not sure if anybody else has noticed it, or maybe it's just me, but I feel like the forum scene in general has slowly declined over the past few years. With all the social media community's that everybody is on, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. etc., I feel like forums are not really anybody's cup of tea as it use to be.

So I'm just trying to figure out ways to try to revive and make my forum thrive a little bit more. If anybody has any types of suggestions or comments, feel free to comment down below!

Adwords, Facebook ads are effective in some cases.

And actually much good content, not only old content. And a monologe between 3or5 moderators looks every time bad. Use other accounts for post in conversations or remove the ranks until you can count 1 mod for 100 member.
Otherwise conversations only between special ranks looks not atraktive to new users.

Definitely advertise it on Facebook, or any other good platforms for your niche. Consider the first time you launched your site a "campaign", you should do more of those to revive the activity.

For Forums, maintaining is a little complicated and I am sure lots of forum owners have faced similar situations. Three things I will suggest :-

1. Interesting content on your forum, which should be highlighted in some way (Popular threads etc)
2. Encourage guest to register and allow rewards to your users who join. There are lots of ways to do this.
3. For above things to happen, you need genuine traffic so advertise on social, do SEO, target forums similar to your niche and advertise your forum(if they allow) in non spammy way.

By the way, it is better to start fresh and throw that old junk as it is of no use I am sure.

Write to your registered members about the new planned activities. If it was a busy forum with once having a lot of active members, there is a good chance they might come back.

I'd work on marketing it instead of trying to bring back inactive users. What are you doing at the moment to market the forum? There's been a lot of Pokemon releases since 2012 it would have been wise to grab those users during that time. The recent Pokemon/Switch announcements could be a good opportunity to bring new users.

If you get old enough, you will see fads come and go. Interests change as time marches on. Don't waste too much time on something that "has been" wildly popular. Kicking a dead horse won't make it go. Use your skills wisely.

Sucks you missed the pokemon Go phase. Could have been some real growth there. I'd go on YouTube. Reach out to some users making pokemon videos. See if you can offer them some incentive to promote your site.

(2017-10-26, 12:49 AM)TaylorCTU Wrote: [ -> ]Sucks you missed the pokemon Go phase. Could have been some real growth there. I'd go on YouTube. Reach out to some users making pokemon videos. See if you can offer them some incentive to promote your site.

Ya when Pokemon Go was trending that would have been an amazing opportunity. The craze for that game was insane, everyone was talking about it but I feel its died down now.

If you have $100+ to spend on marketing you could try some influencer marketing (working with popular social network influencers). I found success in influencer marketing but now I'm focusing more on link building.