Should you ever bring a site back?

I'm curious because I keep considering bringing Sizael back, and there's mostly member-related causes for not bringing it back. So have you ever considered or brought a site back from being turned offline etc? What do you think people should consider and ask themselves when trying to decide if they should or not?

 

I have considered bringing back a site I shut down... But then I keep remembering why I shut it down in the first place. (Behind the scenes drama which killed my passion for the place and being busy with other sites/responsibilities.) So I stop considering a revival and just focused on my existing site.

Plus revivals tend to be rather hard. New players are often skeptical because they may have heard the site shut down and fear it will again.
Old members may not be interested in returning (for better in some cases where players that leave were problematic and worse in cases where there were good players).

I think if someone were considering trying to revive a site they should ask themselves:
- Why do I want to do this?
- What caused it to close before?
- Can I fix any issues from before?
- Do I have the time/energy/compassion to run that site again?
- Do I have the time/energy/compassion to play on that site again?
- What changes do I want to make? (Either in the site or my own behaviour.)

 

No, since the reasons you originally closed it are probably unresolved.

 

Thanks @VirusZero you've helped me a lot. :) I'll keep Skz on the back burner for now.

 

I'm in agreement with VirusZero. I've also considered bringing back older sites but remembering the causes of the shutdown is all I need to stop myself from doing something stupid. It really is tougher to bring back an old site, since older members may have been problematic and they may come back. There could be issues if you try to keep them from coming back to the site. Then there are new members, as VirusZero said, who may have heard of the site and how it closed. If it closed once, who's going to say it won't close again? I feel like the past is in the past. Don't we all think to ourselves sometimes how we want to revisit the past? But it's just a fleeting thought and we really need to just move forward.

If you ever do decide to bring back an old game, I would say revamp, restart, and rename. Bring back the aspects you liked and that worked and leave out the rest.

 

If you revive it, probably best to do a overhaul to a attract a fresh crowd if you're confident that the concept was good but it just happened that the particular community didn't embrace it too well.

 

I have gone through the process of trying to bring back a site and it didn't go well. We closed because life hit all of us really hard all at once and the members started dwindling so we started doing other things. I thought that bringing it back would be super fun, but I didn't imagine any of the original members would show up. The problem I ran into was that all the characters I loved from the site had been so rooted in all of the other players from the start that when most of them didn't return, I had gaping plot holes and no desire to fill them with newer characters. The site had a really slow start and never seemed to pick up because people saw the few members we had with the 5 or so characters they had made over time, and they may have felt overwhelmed or perhaps just didn't realize that we had been open for two years prior to the relaunch and thought we were all just serial character creators. Who knows. In the end, we decided to shut her back down and make our peace with the fact that it had it's hay day and it was time to move on. If anything, I agree with the recommendation above to revamp and launch it as something new. I chose to leave my plot behind and move on to another genre all together, but if I had to do it again, I would give it a complete face lift and start over.

 

I honestly created my most current board in the spirit of the one I made previous to it. I wasn't happy with the old one no matter what I did and shut it down, and left roleplaying for a year. But I still wanted that setting and the mechanics so I got some friends from the old board and we revamped it. It's somewhat similar now but not enough that people would immediately make the connection. But we spent a great deal of time, like 8 + months, working on and perfecting the ideas and mechanics, and even now we're tweaking and editing them. I don't regret rehauling it.

 

My community has never been officially shut down...but we've been around in one form or another for a very long time (2005!!) and it has come with many 'dead' periods where almost no one is around or posting. We tend to either be super active or super dead, and it's always hard bouncing back to the former when stuck in the latter...usually shaking things up with contests or shuffling things around on the board helps, but we most recently came off a very lengthy dead period and many of the few loyal members were questioning if it was finally our time to go.

But we persevered and have now moved to a brand-new forum on Jcink, hoping a fresh start at a new location, with a new style and sense of direction, would help - and it seems to be working quite well so far, with a lot of members who had presumably lost interest coming back out of the woodwork. While as I said, we never officially 'closed' before, this last time was particularly close, and our move to the new forum is something of a grand reopening for us. So I think you should never completely give up hope on a site if you think it still has potential - if the potential to go to new places with your setting and characters dies, and people begin to drift away, that's one thing...but if you feel like there's a chance to salvage your universe then stick with it!! Maybe you need to step back for a period of a few months, maybe longer, before attempting to bring it back. But if you still have even a few players who might be interested in coming back and reviving your story, and there's potential to entice new players to join you, then don't give up hope.

 

We (my current RP) decided that our community of people was good enough that we'd move en masse to another type/idea of roleplaying while keeping the group intact. It is working fairly well although we are struggling to bring in new members. I guess that's partially why I'm here :P Anyhow, to finish my point, I think that it can be hard to bring RP's back exactly as they were. Sometimes there's just too much history to use the old characters and storylines again.

 

I think it can be done, but restructured and revamped instead of revived. I've actually just opened a restructure of an old concept for a game and so far things are doing okay! But we're just opening up recruitment now, so we'll see.

Even the word revival admits that the concept was defeated once. I believe that with analysis of the problems of the initial community (was the setting unattractive, was the character system too difficult, was the overplot not strong enough, was there extreme drama all the time, etc) an old concept can be brought back to life. Sometimes the first run is a test-- and then you can iron out the kinks and present a near perfect game the second time around.

 

I think that you just made a much more cogent response that echoes the point I wanted to make, Nen. Thanks for that xP

 

glad i could help! ;D

 

I've done it a few times but really the site went basically inactive for a year or so because real life happened as it rudely does. Children being born, moving and jobs changed. However the drive is still there to create and do things so we are currently working on fixing that and gaining new members.

 

Real life is a pain in the ass huh?

 

I've brought sites back before, and I've taken sites that I've closed and worked them into the site I have now (adding lion prides and wolf packs, for example). But it all really depends on the reason behind your site closing. Right now, I'm working on a huge revamp alongside my co-admin, but otherwise my site is closed/offline. I will be bringing it back! But it's fully recoverable. Other sites may not be so much.

 

I have brought several sites back after closing them, mostly because they were only closed because I no longer had time to run them.

 

If you lost the feel of the old one, then probably not, if you still feel it has some traction and are prepared to put as much effort into it as a brand new game, then definitely.
The only issue with bringing a site back I can see is trying to recapture something gone rather than reboot. New players, new stories will make the place different, fighting against that doesn't help anyone.

 

VirusZero said it best, pretty much.

I've been watching a site that was re-opened because old members missed it and it really should have just stayed down because all the pre-existing issues it had before were inherited into the new group and it's just really not a good atmosphere. If you're unable to root out the core issues it's best to just leave it, especially if it was well known.