I recently acquired a webmaster discussion forum that had been semi-dormant for a period of time ie. it was like a wild garden where the weeds had been left unattended.
Looking back over the archives you can see that it once was quite a vibrant community, but that after the founder left to move onto other projects, or possibly a more demanding dayjob, the quality of the site declined.
Rebuilding a community on a site like that is not an easy job and I don’t expect to see tangible results for quite some time.
Over the last year or so the forum had been attacked by a lot of spammers who were posting content that drove away potentially valuable members of the community.
After moving the site and its contents to a server I controlled the first job was upgrading the forum software to the most recent version. While Vbulletin has a pretty good security track record I wouldn’t like to leave an old version “in the wild” for too long, as there are plenty of nasty little hacks that people can try.
The next thing was to install VBSeo, which is a very nice plugin for vbulletin. It helps with making “pretty” URLs and rejigs a lot of the other parts of a site’s display to make it that bit more attractive to search engine spiders.
Over the next few weeks I expect there will be quite a bit of work to be done in trying to attract new members and retain them, but it can be worth the effort. (At least I hope so!)
Another thing that will be addressed, of course, is the site’s look and feel.
Personally I can’t stand graphic heavy forums with loads of flashing icons etc., I’m much happier with a clean and simple look and feel. James from ForbairtMedia has been working on tweaking the site’s layout and design and given it a nice new logo – nothing crazy, but something quite simple and elegant.
The next big job is to see about regaining the search engines’ trust of the site. The amount of spammy junk that was there would have led to the site being heavily penalised and judging by the lack of longtail referrals my suspicions are that the site wasn’t being taken seriously by the likes of Google et al.
If anyone has any experience of rebuilding a community and would like to lend a hand please let me know 🙂
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