How long did it take your community to hit 20k posts?

For those forum owners that are seeing much success thus far, how long did it take your community/forum to hit 20k posts? Did it take 6 months? A couple months? Talk about your forum hitting 20k posts here, and what you did to celebrate it.

 

I don't really remember. Maybe 6 months but didn't do anything to celebrate it.

One of my moderators joking agreed to dress up in a chicken suit and dance around if we reached 1k members by the end of the year (I think it was 2008). We didn't make it but I really wanted to see him dance around in a chicken suit.

 

A little less then 4 months. Opened on March 3, 2004... post #20000 was on June 30, 2004.

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=519&page=4#post20000

Did nothing to celebrate it (seems like a rather arbitrary number to celebrate). Probably would have been more inclined to celebrate 1M or 10M posts, except we are constantly trying to figure out how to ultimately have LESS posts (cut all the crap out), so by the time we were that big, we stopped seeing it as a reason to celebrate. lol

 

I tend to agree with you. We are at 4,045,859 posts (at the time of this message) and the focus now days is definitely geared more towards quality rather than quantity. I think the pitfall lots of administrators face is the mind-set of bulk number crunching vs. their competitors and lose touch with why people keep coming back in the first place. Quality information is worth it's weight in gold no matter how you dice it up. Refining content and trying to steer user bases of 200k+ to think along the same lines and only post quality is a whole different ball game though.

It's really a never ending battle. I think once a community reaches the 1m+ mark, the administrative team should take a few steps back, review the Basics again, and gear back up for public relations. Otherwise they can find them self in a downward spiral pretty quick. I still see large communities crashing and burning every day because someone lost track of the basic fundamentals, failed to adapt to market changes, were blind to suggestions for improvement, they over moderated, or they lacked the motivational drive to follow through with what was on their check-lists.

Numbers are fun to crunch, but as you already pointed out, there's a time and a place for it.

Eric Lyon