Big Boards

[Cedric]

We all know that running a successful forum takes a lot of time and effort, and for some webmasters, that effort has paid off in the form of a large and thriving community.

But what exactly qualifies as a "big board"? Is it a certain number of registered users or posts? Or is it more about the level of engagement and activity on the site?

And what are the challenges and benefits of running a big board? On the one hand, a large community can bring in more traffic, generate more ad revenue, and offer more diverse perspectives and discussions. On the other hand, managing a big board can be a full-time job in and of itself, with challenges like moderating content, dealing with conflicts and trolls, and maintaining a positive and engaged community.

So, do you run a big board? What has been your experience, and what advice do you have for others looking to build and manage a large and successful forum? And if you don't run a big board, what are your thoughts on the pros and cons of doing so? Let's discuss our different perspectives and experiences with big boards!

There used to be a website about big boards, but that has vanished a while ago.

 

[Matt C.]

I don’t even want to know what it takes to run sites like ResetEra, NeoGAF, IGNBoards, SomethingAweful…

It sounds nice to have a site that huge, but I imagine it’s a giant headache unless you have a large amount of volunteers.

 

[Cedric]

I don’t even want to know what it takes to run sites like ResetEra, NeoGAF, IGNBoards, SomethingAweful…

It sounds nice to have a site that huge, but I imagine it’s a giant headache unless you have a large amount of volunteers.

I agree. It can be a full time job. Although with decent monetization I imagine it could replace your job. And maybe this could be living the dream? Wouldn't anyone want to make their job from their forum? Could be wrong.

 

[Arantor]

The usual requirement for 'big board' is something in the bracket of 250k to 500k posts - the point at which you start floundering under the weight of the application without proper tuning and where you start running into needing specialist advice for hosting, maintenance and management.

I don't run my own sites like that but my own sites historically were never hugely about making vast profits, that's just not how I work, so I'd never be able to make a career out of running my own. In any case I'd want to diversify and run several sites across several niches to diversify my risk portfolio. Consider, for example, LinusTechTips and the mess made of their YouTube presence today.

 

[Cory]

About a decade ago there was actually a site dedicated to listing these types of boards: https://web.archive.org/web/20130430123527/http://www.big-boards.com/

Unless I made it my full-time job to make money off of such a forum and had enough volunteers to help run it, I would never want to have to deal with a "big board". If you have a life outside of forums, I imagine the forum itself would try and take up quite a bit of that time. I also don't like the thought of so many topics/posts being made at once that you cannot even keep up with everything.

 

[Arantor]

I have the same thought about this as I have about the RP directories - do people sign up and register their site or can notionally anyone add a site to the listing even if they don't own it?

I have issues with the ways that RPG-D, CTTW etc. choose to set up their directories. I won't get into it here, it's not relevant but I've often thought about making a directory of my own with some features and thoughts that the others can't offer, and do so in a way that discourages certain kinds of behaviours that I think harm rather than help the community at large. But I think I'd struggle to get traction with signups for it.

Mind you I've also had thoughts about building out a forum comparison tool with lots of detail about each of the forum platforms - but then I'd only have to maintain it ahahah. Time isn't even my problem, entirely, there's the fact it would be a significant investment of time for what feels like not enough reward to justify it, same problem with the big boards, really.

 

[Ravenfreak]

Deep down I've always wanted to have a big forum, but the amount of work and time to be put into the board would be overwhelming. When I think of big boards, I think of very active forums with at least 25 members online at once engaging in conversations throughout the board.

 

[Cedric]

Does this mean that we have adjusted our goals generally speaking? There used to be a time where everyone’s goal was to expand their forum to a big board. Because .. bigger is better right? Or is it? Are we nowadays satisfied with some activity rather than big booming forums?

 

[Arantor]

I think there's been some shift towards having some activity rather than all the activity, knowing that we're competing with more and more other sites for activity. But I also think that people, having been exposed to not just a 'big community' in the big board sense but a hyper-sized community (in the Facebook or Twitter sense) have realised that perhaps they'd rather have a smaller place where they know a larger percentage of the people.

It's like back in the day we all wanted to be... I dunno, in the UK I'd suggest Wetherspoons. A large establishment where you only know one or two people, if you know anyone at all, and you turn up, get what you came for and go. And then we realised we all wanted it to be the bar from Cheers instead: the place where everyone knows your name because we stopped building 'forums' and started building 'communities'.

 

[Xilia]

I think if your board as 30+ unique members (not just sub-accounts of the same profile), it's a testament to how much positive attention the board as attracted who regularly visit and aren't just "hello" one time and disappear never to be seen again.

 

[Heatman]

Deep down I've always wanted to have a big forum, but the amount of work and time to be put into the board would be overwhelming. When I think of big boards, I think of very active forums with at least 25 members online at once engaging in conversations throughout the board.

Seriously, it's not an easy work. It's not something one can say, let me work on it all by myself. You will definitely need a lot of staff to be very active in holding everything in place because you will be getting lots of activities. Imagine having to manage a community with over 5k actively posting members. It's going to be a very crazy day always.

 

[Reverie]

I feel like a big board can be considered a big board by the amount of active members per day and quality posts are being made daily. A forum can have 5000 members, but only 10 active members... in that sense I wouldn't think of it as a big board, perhaps a retired big board. Big boards require team work, communication, and for the forum to be able to expand if needed or condense in areas as needed.

 

[joelr]

I think there's been some shift towards having some activity rather than all the activity, knowing that we're competing with more and more other sites for activity. But I also think that people, having been exposed to not just a 'big community' in the big board sense but a hyper-sized community (in the Facebook or Twitter sense) have realised that perhaps they'd rather have a smaller place where they know a larger percentage of the people.

It's like back in the day we all wanted to be... I dunno, in the UK I'd suggest Wetherspoons. A large establishment where you only know one or two people, if you know anyone at all, and you turn up, get what you came for and go. And then we realised we all wanted it to be the bar from Cheers instead: the place where everyone knows your name because we stopped building 'forums' and started building 'communities'.

We need to attract the right kind of activity. Are you a place for specialists in a community of practice, with high barriers to entry but a very tight knit group and highly specialized discussion? Or are you an open community of interest, where many people can join but discussion is broader and shallower?

We need to also think deeply about what it means for users to contribute in context of your community. Do you emphasize members whom provide authoritative or thought leadership, or are members among a peer group of mutual respect?

 

[Arantor]

Yes, this is definitely a thing - not enough thought about the kind of community we want to build, and what kind of personality types we want.

This place, for example, is finding its feet - in that it has a number of people who were, and are, forum admins but the earlier discussion skewed much more heavily in favour of the broader and shallower topics, with a gradual move towards 'now we have some regulars, let's start talking about more complicated topics'. I don't think here will ever veer into the 'specialists in a community of practice' but there are definitely forums I have been on (and in one case, recently returned to) that lean very firmly that way. And in that one case it wasn't actually particularly intentional on the founder's part that the community would skew quite as hard as it did into the community of practice angle.

There's also not nearly enough thought given, collectively, to the emphasis on authoritative or thought leadership angle, by and large because forums (as opposed to communities) have a much broader any-to-any model than a more authoritative-driven few-to-many (aka the blogging) model. But assuming a forum survives long enough, that process of natural authorities on subjects and thought leadership in general tends to form reasonably organically - unless it's a style of community where it's basically an echo chamber of questions with far fewer answers than questions. That was, in my view, one of the big reasons Stack Overflow proliferated the way it did - it got just enough ahead of the beginner coding forums of the era that were broadly for-beginners-by-beginners and established enough street cred to appeal to slightly less beginner types.

I find it interesting to take that example further: I've very rarely found programming forums that don't irritate me because so many of them over the years are skewed by the power imbalance of people needing help vs people able to provide, and that imbalance destroys any chance of getting authorities in because they end up spending all their time trying to fix the imbalance and burning out - or they never join in the first place.

I think this mostly circles back to your oft-stated (and completely correct) standpoint on understanding who we are building for, building that audience, getting the content together and then launching a place for that audience even if only in fledgling numbers to begin with. Anything else feels like sheer folly and yet we have all done it and many of us will no doubt do it again the next time.

 

[ClicketyKat]

When I had Christianity Haven created, I really had big hopes that the place would just burst into something huge. And that never happened. My members were comfortable keeping the place small and over the past 8 years, I think I prefer it to not be huge. Some reasons why are because I can have a personal touch in being an Admin and I get to participate more instead of just running the place.

What makes a forum big? In my opinion it's having over a thousand users...but also a few hundred of those that are active.