Biggest forum owned

How many years in the making are those stats?

 

We just turned 9 a few weeks ago.

 

Congratulations man! Years of hardwork really does pay off, right?

 

I used to run a forum long long long ago (over 10 years ago) and I got it to 1000 members and over 100,000 posts. Its was a spam forum believe it or not... not spam bots type spam, just posts that didn't make any sense LOL, back then it was actually a popular niche. I cant even remember the domain name, haha.

Nowadays my admin forum is doing well for only being a little bit over a year old. My National Skywarn Forum is doing well too but that is because I partnered with the official National Skywarn website

 

Did you close it down or did you sell it?

And what's your stats like on the Skywarn forum? Congratulations on the partnership.

 

This forum here would be the largest one I've owned.

Discussions: 41,062
Messages: 475,796
Members: 6,214

I've worked on some large forums in the past, well over 1 million post forums.

 

I spent more than I could afford back then and lost my job (got laid off) and went offline for a while. Now I still spend quite a bit but I can afford it and I also save into a budget just for this sort of stuff

Skywarn Forum Stats: 4458 Posts in 549 Topics by 291 Members. That is not huge stats at all but for that particular niche, its pretty good and I get new members every week

 

First off, a couple measures are in place for keeping spammers out. We use firewall banning of countries, Nospam and an internal custom app for handling those registrations. Sometimes I tell myself I should let the spammers join to inflate my numbers more but really there is no value to having them other than possibly looking like a 'boss' in a thread like this. :p

So that being said, with regards to some old sites I have sold off:

Largest member-base was Members: 83,952 but only had around 750k posts.
Largest forums for threads / posts was Threads: 358,315, Posts: 2,094,649, Members: 37,899

I keep a list of all the sites we have sold here. I am not sure why exactly other than to remind myself I once had an ok network. LOL

In our current network the largest site is RC Canada , a remote control hobby forum. It stands at about Threads: 113,619, Posts: 755,755, Members: 26,449 and will soon be adding an active forum I am migrating. So tack on another : Threads: 35k , Posts: 270k, Members: 9k. The migration should be exciting.

 

Impression looking forums WEfail I see you probably have made quite a bit of money off of IB over the years

 

2010 & 2012 were good years. A whole lot of luck and hard work got me there. 2012 was certainly more of a cruise control year.

 

I don't want to pry into how much exactly as I know its not kind to ask, however, when selling a forum to IB, do they pay enough usually to where its worth the sell?

 

With the exception of 1 private buyer who I took a hit on, everyone else made it worth it to sell. Of course, I sold for a few other reasons, not just because of the money. I mean, it was mostly because of the money but I was tired of dealing with a lot of the BS. A bad business relationship through 2009 took a lot out of me too.

 

Can honestly this is one of the first times I'm hearing about using a firewall to block certain countries. How much traffic does it block out? Do you know by any chance?

Also, with 2 million posts, how long is that from? A couple years? Also, I'm curious, what type of server you're running on your bigger forums though. What are the specs? Do you have servers just for images and databases?

 

Well, I cant say for certain as to how many people it blocks out, but from time to time I get emails from people asking to get access from Russia and China. Because I know that the sites convert and generate the most money with North American traffic I have no interest in dealing with those places but mostly & mainly it cuts out a whole lot of the mod security alerts, hacking attempts and spam. I don't know if I would block those places if I wasn't running such regional forums now. I should note, I blocked all those countries when I ran the auto network as well. If you were from China and wanted to Turbo your Miata, there was NO access to MiataTurbo.net. LOL

In 2009 I had 13 boxes up in a rack at Peer1. They were bought, not leased. 2 were DB servers with 6 scsi drives, tons of redundancy. Everything was hot swappable. Remote power APC, firewalls, 1u's acting as the front end and backup 1us waiting in reserve incase anything ever went down. Boxes of scsi drives, ram, psu sitting at the side. Those days are long over, I am down to 2 boxes at The Planet. Having your own sys admin does have its benefits.
Sad part is most of that gear I have been giving away or throwing out. Someone picked out one of the 1us out of my trash about a month ago... less hard drives and ram or cpu.

Here is a photo from our first day of setup (or around that time). After that we added more servers. Thankfully that was all the sys admins work I got to stay home.

 

@WEfail

Haha, that's a really good idea though. Oh well, since some of those forums were regional.

Glad you have one. Did you still host with The Planet these days? They were pretty good years ago, but I haven't used them in a while. Liquidweb is nice as well, have you ever used them? Wow, you've had a lot of servers as well.

That's great!

 

I've only owned 2. One of them was a failure, but the other one did pretty good, it had around 90k members when I left. It was not that active, but we got plenty of new posts a day, which is what mattered to me.