Should you ever bring a site back?

If there's an audience for what you're doing, it's worth bringing back--provided that you don't have drama waiting in the wings, and you still have passion for the concept you were nurturing to begin with. Chances are, you shut that site down for a reason. Beating a dead horse might not bring you back to loving that place again, nor your members, old or new. If anything, it might be a better idea to take that old concept, trim away the fat, throw something refreshing and inviting on it, and repost it under new pretenses and a new name.

Even then, though, you might as well just come up with an entirely new concept to play with.

 

In my experience, if you close a site and try and bring it back, any members you try and invite back will likely be skeptical about the longevity of things, even if they don't say so. Usually they've moved on from the world you've created and can feel like the opposite of closure to go back.

 

I'm unsure. I haven't ever tried it, personally, but I wonder if it's the nostalgia factor that makes people try again. I mean, I've seen other sites do it, but I'm unsure whether they've ever been successful in the revival. I can think of a few sites I've seen try, and fail again over and over.

 

The site I am currently running is something I brought back. It was made many, many years ago on a different host than I am using now.

I think there’s nothing at all wrong with bringing an old site back but as many suggested in this thread, it’s important to work out why it closed the first time.

If you’re had closed due to a member issue, I’d address what exactly happened with those particular members in the rules or the sites premise.

If it was certain behaviours or etiquette that you didn’t vibe with at the time I would try and craft the sites documents to determine what it is you do want or what isn’t allowed.

 

Wow this is an old thread but honestly I think there's nothing wrong with trying your concept again. I think everything's already been hashed out in here about figuring out why it failed before but I also think that it's really easy to get discouraged if a site starts looking like it's dying. The attitude is often like "how can I bring more people here and keep them here?" rather than "how can we as a community keep what we have now engaging?" - so many sites go stale and drop off. IMO sometimes it can be to do with a fear of change.

Not to get super wordy lol but I do think addressing change and necessary change at that could help when bringing a site back, and then being open to further changes down the line. And being open to challenges, I think. If anything my mush brain is coming up with makes sense lmao.

 

No. Unless a site died from inactivity, if there were other issues that was the reason it shut down, it should stay down. At least the same premise of the site.

 

I've brought X-Men: After the Chaos back multiple times, mainly because of the new X-Men releases. It started with being about the first X-Men movie, then X2, then we jumped ahead and made it about The Last Stand.. I think we were going to make it about Dark Phoenix at one point, but it never happened.

 

Time is a factor. A year or two? Probably not. Several years down the line I'd say give it a try. Time tends to fix some things and get rid of some things.

 

It looks like I've had the opposite experience to many of you. I'm shocked by the responses here! I can understand if an RP shut down because of an ooc explosion or if it's been repeatedly shut down due to admin inactivity, but ... huh! I've seen a number of reboots work out, where the RP comes back and stays strong (or even becomes stronger than its initial iteration, but the RP landscape has changed drastically in the last decade, so it really depends on how big of an audience you have).

Definitely agree that if your RP shut down because of a problem member (whether staff or not), mismanagement, or anything in that vein, it's best to acknowledge those issues and write out a plan to prevent them from happening again. I've never shut down an RP because of a problem person before, but I have handed one off to a moderator and stepped back from my place as an admin because of a problem person. I regret it to this day -- not because the mod ran it poorly, but because that RP was lightning in a bottle and I loved it dearly and should not have allowed that person's behavior to impact my emotional state so much that I gave up something I adored to get away from them. I wouldn't know where to start on rebooting that one, honestly.

However, I have rebooted a different RP -- the first one I ever made. Its initial run was from 2011 to 2015. Shut it down because I was struggling to connect with the user base, as I was getting older and many of our new members were younger, and because I was dealing with the death of a family member for the first time and didn't know how to handle that along with my responsibilities as an admin (being 16 was hard, okay?).

Over the years, I ran other RP forums, but none of them had the same lasting impact on me that my first one did.

In 2020, an old mod from that site created a Discord server for people to reconvene and chat. It was great seeing familiar names pop in! Since most of us were teenagers during the forum's run, many people had gone to college, started careers, or even gotten married by 2020.

Last year I was bored one weekend and made a hypothetical map detailing how the RP factions' territories could've shifted over time. One t hing led to another, and a few weeks later I mentioned in the Discord server that I was toying with the idea of rebooting the forum.

People were, by and large, ecstatic. Many of them had tried to join other forums after our closure but never quite felt "at home" in any of them. Others stopped RPing entirely. A few had made their own sites or found RP homes elsewhere.

I worked with them on developing a reboot. Laid out what I wanted to keep and what I wanted to scrap from the original. We spent a few months putting it together and then went public.

It's been a year today since we officially reopened and it's been amazing! Writing with old friends, making new friends who've joined along the way -- a lot of fun, and I'm so glad I did it.