Reviving An Old Forum

I've been working on bringing one of my old forums back to life recently! It was a fan forum dedicated to Mighty No. 9, a video game made by Comcept and Keiji Inafune, the creator of Mega Man. I was the first person online to create a fan forum dedicated to the game once it launched on Kickstarter. I had over 200 members by the time the forum just faded away. (Long story short, I couldn't keep paying for the monthly Jcink fee so it went offline.) The past week I've been working on bringing it to self hosting. I have it up and running but there's lots of broken quotes and posts that I need to fix. Then I have to look and see which members were in what membergroups, and if I still have most of the images saved. Then I have to install a theme, set up the SMTP correctly so I can send a mass email to everyone, log into the social media accounts I made for the website and post there, then post on r/mightyno9 and then I think I'm good lol. I did manage to repurchase the domain name! Unsurprisingly, no one managed to buy it so it was available.

Quote from ZandraJoi

Best of luck in reviving your old forum! Why couldn't you combine it with this one?

I wanted to keep it separate from this one. It's got history and I just wanted to keep it as a standalone community like it was back in 2016 when it was last active.

Quote from ZandraJoi

That's how some people like to do it. Are you going to link both forums together though so people who go to one will know about the other one?

Unfortunately no one can see the posts on the Jcink forum since I didn't have the funds to pay for their premium service. The forum has an adult themed sub forum and per Jcink's rule I had to pay for premium. I ended up sending a mass email to everyone, but no one else has seemed to log in. I sort of expected that since the forum was last active in 2016 and many people probably don't even have access to their old email addresses anymore. Ah well, at least it's back online and open to the public just in case anyone does want to join or log back in.

Quote from ZandraJoi

That's too bad! I'm a member of some forums on Jcink but I never had it as my own forum.

If nobody logs in, what would you do with it eventually?

I'll probably put it in read only mode and not allow new registrations. I tried making a post on the subreddit announcing the return, however it seems the mods deleted the post since I didn't see it on the subreddit. :\ I still need to figure out how to get back into my Twitter account for the website since I think more traffic will come from that site and perhaps those who followed the account still follow it and will see that the site is back online.

Quote from ZandraJoi

Best of luck with this! Do you have other social media accounts that would help spread the word?

Yep I do have a Facebook page for the community, however I didn't really get anyone to log back into the forum when I shared the link on the page. I did get some traffic but I'm sure they were bots though lol. I haven't tried Youtube yet though!