...what to do about it.

I've seen a number of other sites whose community quality has improved via Facebook and Twitter, who have closed down their existing forums as a result of them becoming redundant.

Our forum - once great, and which almost always managed to avoid the shit slinging of so many others - has for at least 6 months been almost completely dead. And, (i) despite the technical enhancements to the forum over the last couple of years; (ii) despite the relaunch and renaming of the main site and other site expansions in October last year; (iii), perhaps, reflecting our own development of a Facebook and Twitter presence); and (iv) perhaps also because all our sites have full commenting enabled since the major relaunch, this forum is now simply an archive of six years of user topics -- and no longer an active forum for discussion... about anything.

Right now I can't think of many ways to try and engage existing, old-timer users and definitely can't think how to engage new users in the forum, in a manner that makes any commercial sense.

So I guess this message is a last ditch effort to see if there are any lurkers here who may have some thoughts on this matter.

While it makes sense to keep all the archived content in place, since it's all indexed on Google and that creates page impressions for us by people searching for content of relevance, if there's no compelling reason to keep the forum active on an ongoing basis I think it would make more sense to shut down registration and the ability to post new messages, keep the archives in place but redirect the forum landing pages to our Facebook page instead.

It would be a shame, considering how the forum was in its heyday, and considering some of the blood, sweat and tears that went into developing/integrating the forum... (in hindsight we should probably have opted for a PHP solution rather than this ASP alternative but that's a whole other story). But having a dead forum looks pretty bad and it could be more logical to direct interested users to a separate medium that engages them more effectively -- even it we don't get to display advertising on the pages where that happens! On the other hand, maybe we should wait it out as our new sites continue to grow in popularity and maybe this place will begin to attract new community once again. Maybe we should do a combination of both these things. I don't know.

Let me know what you guys think.

If you didn't know, our FB is at http://facebook.com/kikizo and our Twitter's at http://twitter.com/kikizo

Cheers
Adam