Buying and importing from another forum

[karll]

I've managed to make contact with the owner of a now closed forum, with an unknown number of posts, but they have been online for ages (since 2003 it seems). They closed down last year. The forum runs on an exotic forum software.

What is a reasonable price to offer for such a thing?

Does anyone here have experience with buying another forum and importing it into your own? What did you pay for it? How many posts did it have? Does it improve search engine ranking?

What are things to consider when buying a forum like this, transferring ownership etc?

I have some SQL and database skillz, so the plan so far is to buy the forum, then write an import script (exotic format -> Xenforo) and import the threads into an archive part of my forum. Possibly the users as well, but not sure how easy that will be with passwords and such probably stored with some obscure encryption. I had an account there myself, with a password I remember, so I should be able to test if my migration works.

I will be buying the domain as well as the database. So I can set up redirect scripts from the old domain to mine.

Edit: The forum seems to have around 240,000 posts. So not a fantastic size, but still bigger than my own forum.

 

[nrep]

Which forum software do they use? There may be a way to convert it a little easier with an intermediate forum script - should save you some time if it's supported!

 

[karll]

Which forum software do they use? There may be a way to convert it a little easier with an intermediate forum script - should save you some time if it's supported!

Thank you, that is a good idea. The forum software is Gossamer Forum v1.2.3. Apparently, vBulletin can import it?
http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/foru...ex-import-system/253526-import-gossamer-forum
Looks like this ImpEx thing can do it. Is ImpEx part of vBulletin, or is it an add-on? Or a separate script?

If anyone knows of a different route, please let me know.

 

[nrep]

You'd need to have a full vBulletin license to do the conversion, or you may be able to get someone here to do the conversion for you - I've seen quite a few people advertise their services and they most likely use ImpEx as an intermediate.