I purchased a diet forum from flippa, it has a solid history and huge amount of posts, but it’s been quiet in the past two years, without dramatic changes, I think it will be fading away. I’m also running a health forum, solid ranking, beautiful design, better software, active. From all the information I gathered, a merge seems to be a great move.
Everything went well with the merge until a formal mod showed up, she complained publicly at the beginning, and got more and more aggressive, even started a free forum and asked other members to follow, anyway, it got very ugly several days later.
The protest got very severe but still didn’t change my mind, but somehow, I suddenly feel those diet posts don’t fit in my health forum at all, they are hurting my forum. Then I reversed the merge two weeks after it happened. The formal members seemed very happy, which is a bit shocking to me, I always thought only one member hated it. It’s practically dead after all, why should they care? It seems to be a happy ending, though!
My lesson: don’t merge forums if not 100% sure, people may get very upset and will defend their community (even a small one) very aggressively.