Angry Competition

There is this one forum that I feel a little "bitterness" towards. That community is one of the main reasons why I started my own forum. The reason being, I got tired of being pushed around and bullied by the moderators.

One example - anytime a topic on religion came up, the moderators would be abusive towards the members. Certain moderators would tell the members how "stupid" they were for believing in a GOD. It would get pretty bad sometimes.

So I left and started my own forum. That was about 3 years ago.

As my forum grew, I would compare our stats on a regular basis. I wanted to pass them up in total post, threads and member so bad I could taste it. But I knew it was going to be tough because they had at least a 2 year head start.

When my forum was 1 year old I closed it for a few weeks and converted to vbulletin. During the conversion I lost all of my post. It was not VBs fault that I had to start over, it was my own mistake.

About 20 (+ or - a month or 2) months after opening my forum for a second time I finally passed up that other site.

Here we are, 28 months after restarting my forum that second time - That other forum has 563,430 posts and my forum has 845,231 post.

Victory sure does taste good. When I hit 1,000,000 post I'll probably start posting in that other forum again, just so people see my signature link. I might even post a "yea, take that" thread.

One thing that I learned - being angry at your competition is a good driving factor.

Now I have to figure out how to pass up forums that have 10 million post, as compared to my 845,231 post. And I'am already working on it.

 

This sounds familar.... we have surpassed our competitors as well......Feels GOOD doesn't it..

 

Congratulations :cheers:

Well the chances of me passing my competitors is a million to one...but I love a good challenge I'm just working on the small fish right now.

 

In my niche (Australian sport) I have one other major competitor (apart from the big sites who invest hundreds of thousands if not millions into their sites) and after I launched my website we were catching them quickly on posts, threads, members and they had been around for 2 years and I had achieved this within the first six months due to the freedom of speech I allowed.

However we got hacked and were offline for two weeks trying to rebuild (we got hit by the gumblar virus at the same time) and since then we have struggled - we lost all our posts, threads, members when we were hacked and after coming back the members currently haven't and my mind is at a loss as to what to do.

I do hope to get back up to where we were and hope to one day beat my competition.

 

Congrats Kevin!

 

Even I started my forum after being constantly ignored by one forum admin.

 

Thats awesome. I will develop hatred towards my competitors now~

 

I passed AA about 10-11 months ago, in terms of post count. Of course, I sort of expect Blue Moon to beat AA to the million post mark, all things considered.

I currently measure my landmarks in activity, however. One thousand posts per day, two thousand, three thousand... getting closer to 4kposts/day with each month, it seems : )

 

You should see how some of the weather forums get over new weather forums, I have seen them try to get people fired from their jobs if they dont shut down their forum, LOL.

Not a good way to lead for the sake of Science in my opinion

 

maybe thats why my forum is a lot better than my rival. unless thats cause our main competitor is a forum made up of about 10 trolls that we dont want on our forum.

they have about 5000 posts (yet have somehow made their silly chat thread on a bigger forum they are the nasty little clique on have 31238 posts and the other chat thread they made in the wrong section after the mods moved it down to off topic has 499 posts.....they have another that got locked somewhere, so even more) i think someone has a serious problem with priorities here, as their chat thread on another forum has more posts than their own forum!!!!

i think by now youve guessed that i hate my competitors with a passion

 

The one forum that is truly a direct competitor of mine has a lot of stature, but statistically is far smaller and less active. That is, they have a continuous member presence and posting just as mine does, but not nearly as many or as much. Member comments are that they like the other forum, but it's too heavily moderated, doesn't have as broad a span of topics and doesn't have off-topic. So they visit that forum and live on mine, as it were. (Some need to check that their families recognize more than the backs of their heads ... the view while they are hunched over the keyboard engaging in rapid-fire forum discussion. :p)

My perspective is that there is plenty of room for both forums. A little competition adds incentive for all to pay attention and continue improvements.

 

I never understood why people compare post count. A higher post count does not only mean activity, it can also mean that moderators are less strict / lazy. Its unique visitors, page views and general post quality that counts IMO.

 

Because it's a simple, easily quantifiable indication of activity.

 

True, but it is subject to the amount of posts that are RSS feeds, spam and noise. Its easy to fill up a news forum with a massive amount of RSS feed posts.