If you are trying to reopen a forum project that has become inactive for a long period of time it may be hard to try and get it active again as people may be scared of it closing again or people may no longer be interested for whatever reasons they may choose. My guide today is to help you reopen an inactive forum. Firstly what i would do is email all old staff and give them 7 days to come back to the forums. If they do not then you should remove them and go to a promotion or admin forum and ask for members of staff (they will get your forum with new posts and help you with other things that need changing. My second tip to you would be to go through the forums and remove all spam and other worthless or out-of-date topics that may have no use to the forums when they reopen. Thirdly I would change themes and graphics and maybe even the forum areas, you must try to get the wow factor back into the forum again if you wish for it to be active once again. You must, and this is one of the biggest things you need to do. You and your staff members must make a load of posts and topics so it will give the old and new members something to discuss in that is newly active. If this isn't done you wont get any activity as all the posts will be too old. Finally, you have to promote the forum as you would do with a new forum this includes; Buying, exchanging, services and just general promotion. I hope this guide helps you reopen a forum if you ever wish to, Written By GAF
1. I don't believe recruiting staff from other forums works. I need DEDICATED members and these need to be for a while in the community. Anyway, since the forum is quasi-dead, you don't need staff, you can manage it on your own. 2. come up with something nice: create a new design, add features, make the members see IMPROVEMENTS. So we agree on this. It will make members happy to see changes and it will 're-align' the community with the latest design trends. 3. as you mentioned, create many new threads and try to engage people in them. Promotion is also VERY important. See your forum as almost a new one, since your traffic is surely small. So you need to make it look great, add new content and features, see what's wrong in your SEO and traffic solutions and promote like crazy. Then be CONSISTENT and not lose passion after 2 weeks of inactivity
