Ok, how does one loose 9 million posts?

About 3 days ago they had 97 million posts for the total. Now it is 88 million.

The Something Awful Forums



I cannot fathom those numbers, or how that software can be managed with that many posts.

This thread could go anywhere, or delete, whatever. I'm just stunned at the size of that forum. 135,000 users online.

 

That's odd, to say the least - unless there was some sort of unresolved issue or a mass organizational cleanup, I fail to see how those posts could disappear like that.

 

Either they had to restore a backup (afterall, with that big of a community, 9 million posts may be the loss of one week's worth of activity ) or they did some sort of mass-pruning of messages.

Regardless though, that's a huge board. Maybe even the biggest one I've seen.

Do you know how many new members they get per day? They charge $9.95 for registration, and I'm curious to know how that's working out for them...

 

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Love that interstitial ad!


Even if 10,000 people signed up at $10 each that would only be $100,000. Not that much. The server monthly fee alone is almost $40K/year not including all the other costs like servers.

They do seem to charge for avatars, I think to get rid of the baby pic that says 'noob' you need to buy an avatar ($5), I don't know for sure. I don't spend much time there.

Of the 135,000 people online there were only 5,000 members.

 

Yeah, it isn't that much when considering their bills, but I don't think I would ever pay $10 to join a forum, so I wanted to know how many people actually do that there...

 

Oo Wierd forums, and wierd thing that happened...

 

I haven't taken a look, but have they announced the loss of these posts?

 

Uhh, nope, none that I saw.

 

What makes you guys think they 'lost' them instead of just going through and pruning them? That's a HUGE forum. I know I'd probably prune posts if I had a forum that large. In fact, about a month ago, I went through and pruned about 10k threads from my site and didn't blink an eye. What's the big deal or am I missing something?

 

I mentioned that as a possibility above.

 

They moved them to the archive.

Active: 2,781,061 total threads. 88,167,373 total posts.

Archived: 2,750,061 archived threads. 79,595,865 archived posts.

Yes, they have over 5.5 Million threads and almost 170 million posts altogether.

They are using a highly customized copy of vBulletin 2.2.9. In fact its so customized they cannot upgrade without spending thousands of dollars on custom programming. Here is the list of changes that they have made: http://forums.somethingawful.com/CHANGES

As far as making money... They charge for everything. $9.95 to register. $9.95 to access the archives. $9.95 to restore your banned account. $5.00 for a custom title. $5.00 for an Avatar. $4.95 to remove the ads. $7.95 to change your username. $29.95 to upload your own smilie. $5.00/day to have a thread stuck/pinned. $7.95/month for a non-profit ad. $29.95/month for a profit ad.

 

Tbh.

If they did prune 9 million posts, that makes my forum the needle in the hay stack compared to "Oh let's remove 9 million posts"

 

That is what I've seen done on similar sized forums. Then you have to be a paid member in order to view the archives.

Now there is an idea

 

I have been wrong many times before but think they had 87M archived posts a few days ago.

:lol:

 

If I were charging money for every aspect of using the forum, I would charge a heck of a lot more to restore a banned account.

 

Interface:
- Cleaned up templates while praying for death; reduced number of templates from
1397 to less than 250

:lol:

 

Hm, I guess you have never seen this one: Offtopic.com. Go to the bottom where their stats are and refresh the page. Look at the changes in the stats from that one refresh, and the new user registrations... all in a few seconds.

 

Threads: 4,237,954, Posts: 117,646,056, Members: 207,373

I do not envy being the head admin there, at all. Must take a staff the size of a small business just to barely maintain order there.

 

The amounts increase with each and every refresh. :lol:

 

HA! I refreshed once and there was no new members! But the members on and guests were changing~