What might be considered a big site

A couple of years ago I thought forums that had 100,000 - 500,000 post were BIG. But once I broke the 500,000 post mark, I started thinking that 1 million post is big.

Now that my forum broke 800,000, I no longer consider 1 million pot "big".

It seems like my viewpoint on things depends on where I'am at at the time.

Where I used to consider 100,000 big, now I look at 5 - 10 million post as being big.

I figure once my forum hits 5 million post, I may no longer consider that number big.

I guess its all how "you" look at things.

 

I rigorously prune posts that are not contributing info or entertainment. So that makes it even more relative.

 

Though www.boardreader.com I find brings fair traffic and ranks well.

I'd consider a big board a heavily active one to be honest. You can find old boards with very little useful content with more than 1 mil posts. But if they existed 10 years ago it doesn't mean they're 'big' as such now.

I know of a few forums that I'd consider very big, but they even have less than 500k posts. But every post is related to the perpose of the forum, and you wont find a word association thread or a general chat forum on them encouraging high post counts for no reason but the figure.

In my own forum we've often stopped posts in useless forum being counted in the main post count. I don't do that now as that sort of makes you concious of the figure just as much as somebody with the word association threads and what-not. And I'm not.

We have in-house milestones and that's for us. I couldn't care less what a big board is in post count or whatever. A big board in my eyes is one that's 'made news' (done well at least) in its industry.

 

I've got things down to a science with my 100,000 + posts forum, and though I would love to see it hit 500,000 I know if it gets larger than that I'm going to need an entirely new skillset to handle it.

 

I just had to look. My biggest has 217,000 posts. I'd still not really consider it big in that sense. But there isn't a bigger one in every other way.

It's only time that gets "big boards".

 

thats 217,285, now..

 

Most people consider 500,000 posts to be a big forum. Really though it depends on the source of information. I could set up a forum today that would have at least 500,000 posts in 6 months but the information wouldn't be very good. It would simply be a collection of RSS feeds stuffed into categories.

People really need to quit focusing on size and look at quality. A site with 100,000 quality posts is a much better site than one with 10 million posts of drivel.

 

Different people have different measurements and ideas when considering a forum as "big".

I think a site is large when it is a helpful and informative resource for anybody and everybody that needs assistance. When I get new members on my forum, they always comment on how much information (relevant and helpful) we have on the forum, and that they find themselves spending hours digging through all of the wonderful content.
If they have a question and can't find the answer, they ask -- and get a response rather quickly.

In my opinion, that is big. The forum only has 40,000 posts and just over 800 members, so it isn't big statistically... but in regards to resourcefulness, it is big enough to satisfy members and visitors.

 

I would personally say whether a forum is a big forum depends on the subject area of the site in question, since in a more general topic like general discussion, webmaster, gaming or sports, a forum has more potential in general to be huge under 'Big Board' standards, while in various sub niches of these kinds of topic areas, I have personally found that the biggest forums are quite small by any standards (200 000-300 000 posts or less), even after having been running for a number of years. I don't particularly also like those guidelines some people use to classify a board as big in general, such as '500 000 posts', '1 million posts' or, in one case, '10 000 members after a year'.

 

What counts as quality or drivel ? The same post could be either depending on the purpose/subject of the forum.

 

I have seen the RSS Feeds thing done before and it is really stupid to the extent I have witnessed.

I consider any forum big that has reached 100k posts in under one year.

 

Well that would depend on the topic of the site itself.

If you have a site focused on teen girls hanging out at the local mall, than having threads full of studies from the latest science journals would be considered drivel. On a forum dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge and publicizing critical work, they would be quality posts.

Of course, this is an extreme example. The example is in no way meant to portray teenage girls or scientific studies in a negative light. Nor state that teenage girls wouldn't enjoy a good scientific study once in a while.

 

To be honest, just having your posts mainly coming from RSS feeds would be considered drivel no matter what the site, at least if not backed up with actual posts by people and original content. I've actually seen a couple of people online testing out whether that alone could build a decent community, and while the forums did all reach the hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of posts, hardly any of those came from actual people, and there was certainly no form of community as so to speak.

Oh, and the reposting of my recent article made me think of another good point about when a website is considered a big site; daily/weekly/monthly activity. It's no good having a website that got four thousand posts a day for a few months then laid dead with three posts a week for four years. Despite possibly being above the five hundred thousand or million posts mark, no one would consider such a site big, more like a ghost town. Similarly, a site which has over a million posts due to getting less than a hundred posts a day for sixteen years is a lot different to a site that's got two thousand posts a day and reached the same total much sooner; the former is pretty much still a small (albeit extremely long running and dedicated) community, the latter is more like a big forum and active community in itself.

 

I have seen this done along with a member generating script and theyre still doing it to this day

 

You mean with one of those scripts that steals stuff from Yahoo Answers? Yeah, I've seen those, and they've never been good for an actual community, just some people's attempts to get rich quick.

 

One of my forums is relatively small compared to most other successful forums, but it's a big deal to the really really small niche it serves. I seriously doubt it will ever hit 1,000 posts a day as there probably just aren't enough people in the world who would be interested.

 

Out of curiosity, which forum of the four in your signature is that anyway?

 

This is a forums that is big, the guy who owns this forums has made a lot of money from this site and also is sponsored by MLG in Las Vegas (Major League Gaming) and also Fanta which are 2 HUGE companies and he also has over 2 million posts in his attached forums.

Heres the link GameBattles

:EDIT: Actually your right its a total of 24,132,888 and has over 2 million members...Lol

 

Looks like over 24 million posts to me, which is definitely a huge forum.

 

It's not among the links there cheatmaster