What might be considered a big site

Yep, I've seen this a few times as well. It has fooled me multiple times (into thinking the community I am browsing is actually very popular) but once I discover their little trick, I am totally turned off and immediately leave.

 

I've can honestly say I've never come accross this before. I suppose that if your forums is new then you can understand why they try it BUT it's a bad idea.

 

The difference here however is that for say your community, you might use it along with standard posting and such like, while these sites myself and Nick are complaining about use Yahoo Answers for pretty much all their 'content', think 'auto forum' or those automatic RSS feed generated blogs for instance. You'll know one when you see one, they've usually got a ridiculously high member and post count, but no one's actually home, no one responds to the same topic twice, and the most active 'members' are probably spambots.

 

I consider activity to be a vastly superior measure of 'size'. My 'original' competitor had some six hundred thousand posts when Elliquiy was founded. It still hasn't broken a million yet. I don't consider them to be in PrP's league, much less Blue Moon.

Elliquiy's posting rate is currently breaching the million-posts-per-year mark. I think if/when we pass ten thousand posts per day, it would be hard to claim that Elliquiy is 'small'.

Big is relative, though. The top thousand sites are responsible for such a giant share of the Internet's traffic... but only a few forums have that distinction.

 

I found out about this forum yesterday, which I think is huge, especially considering it's age.

BlackBerry Forums at CrackBerry.com

Has been up since January 2007 and has these stats;

Threads: 268,690
Posts: 3,199,608
Members: 1,392,590

 

What you have said is a perfect example of something I noted in both one or my articles and earlier in this topic. From what you've said, it seems like a text book case of a site that has relatively low activity that has been around long enough to appear to be a big community, but has a relatively low amount of activity/posts per day. Or it was big, before a crisis hit it, but seeing as you've only mentioned their site's activity rate, that'd be wild guessing.

 

It has simply choked itself to death, slowly and painfully. It's had fifty thousand posts during a period where we've had six hundred thousand.