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Joining the Big Boards group
- Thread starter The Sandman
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- Jan 18, 2015
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Without input from the Big Board owners on what they would like from the section, we can't address the needs they have
TAZ is the biggest forum I could find that directly relates to forum management. Originally I was looking around to see if anyone had better ideas on managing really large privately run forum communities (business run are a different story as they can hire/use actual employees) - one specific thing was better methods for choosing staff. We've long since exhausted the list of members the staff actually know well and would want to offer a moderator position to - they've all been considered/offered/part of the staff. I didn't really find anything even here that wasn't already the same thing we were already doing. Though at this point I think we've come up with a good way for pulling in new mods from the user base that aren't necessarily well known by any of the staff.
There isn't a lot of information even here on ways to manage forums the size Xon1 and I run. Spacebattles is going to hit 20 million posts this month. We see 18-22 million hits/month (with a crazy high retention/return rate. 80%+ according to Google analytics.) A lot of the suggestions I've seen for "big boards" have been things that don't work on our scale (where the big board owners were making suggestions based on a forum with 1-2 million posts, for example.) Most of the Big Board group here are just too small compared to ours. Then again, from what I can tell, there's not very many of us at all (we're nearing the top 10 biggest XF boards based on the list at the official XF forums, most of the ones above us are huge mass appeal/business run forums.)
Edit: Actually, we are in the top 10 already
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I will feel Accomplished if I can meet thisIf your not a member of the Big Boards group but you meet the criteria for joining please contact me for instructions on how to gain access. If you can't send me a PC then reply to this thread and I'll contact you.
Qualifications
You qualify to join the discussions in TAZ Big Board Zone if your forum:
- Has 500,000+ posts OR
- Has 350,000+ posts AND
- Has been online for 3+ years.
- Contains significant content in your niche.
- Demonstrates a commitment towards community growth.
- Joined
- Oct 26, 2011
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- 242
Mind dropping 100k off the recommended figure ...
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I often wonder who originally defined what a big board is?
I consider my Skywarn Forum somewhat of a big board. There are 6,600+ members and nearly 100,000 posts, maybe not millions like some forums but we are the largest forum in the niche, too.
I consider my Skywarn Forum somewhat of a big board. There are 6,600+ members and nearly 100,000 posts, maybe not millions like some forums but we are the largest forum in the niche, too.
- Thread starter
- #86
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- Jan 1, 2004
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- 29,165
Back in the days of old, a Big Board was considered to be a forum with at least 1 million posts.
On TAZ, we'll consider any forum with at least 350,000 posts for inclusion in the group: https://theadminzone.com/pages/big-board-access/
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It was a term that got made up around 2000 or so. At that time a lot of people were converting large forums over to things like vBulletin from software that didn't have a true database running behind it (like UBB and its flat files). Wasn't really possible to have a "big board" on UBB or a similar set-up without re-writing all the I/O stuff yourself which was a major undertaking. Can't remember which forum it was but one guy converted his UBB.classic 6.x forum to run on Sybase, claimed he got great speed out of it but it was a smaller forum so he couldn't really prove it'd hold up under load.
Anyway eventually a few forums started getting up there to the 1 million post mark and that became the milestone everyone else wanted to reach.
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Well, even to our surprise SB's growth has been on a consistent climb for nearly 2 years now. I posted back in January that we were about to hit 20 million, and we're now at 22.5 million. Daily active members has jumped to over 10k. Now I usually find there are 3k+ users online, 400k+ monthly posts, 2 TB of monthly bandwidth, etc.
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What niche does the site cover?
We dont have any niche , we are just a general forum that covers anything under the sun in our country
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2TB? That's an awful lot of data.
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All compressible assets are gz'ed to some level too! (css/js is also minified).
- Thread starter
- #94
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pm? i cant like The Sandman tag him?
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No, send him a pm, there is instructions he will give you to follow up on.
- Thread starter
- #99
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In Pierce's case no instructions were necessary, since he was already registered using an email with the domain of his Big Board!No, send him a pm, there is instructions he will give you to follow up on.
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- Jan 18, 2015
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The creative writing section exploded, lots of people making fairly large posts, and very active threads with people mashing that refresh button for their latest fix.