53 replies to this topic

[altenerg]

I was thinking to myself that I don't find IP.Board very seo or signup friendly. Simple things like "you cannot" messages and scary error messages (for the average user) just don't seem very growth friendly. Can someone provide links to 5 or 6 BIG IP.Board websites that are running IPB 3.0, 3.1 or 3.2 other than this forum?

I would like to look for ideas for growth if there are any.

I was using http://www.big-boards.com/ to try to find some and so many for vbulletin and php BB even just off my head. What am I missing?

Is it harder to "grow" an IPB based forum than it is for some of the other competitors?

By large forums I mean at LEAST 500,000 posts, at LEAST 50k or better alexa, at LEAST 50,000 registered members. Any exsist that we can use as positive examples???

[Matt]

Big Boards is horribly outdated and barely updated so I don't think that's relevant.

Bethesda: http://forums.bethsoft.com/ - 3.8 million posts
Neowin: http://www.neowin.net/forum/ - 10 million posts

Other forums of interest
Evernote: http://discussion.evernote.com/
Baltimore Ravens: http://boards.baltimoreravens.com/

I'll let others fill in the rest.

[andret]

Messuring a large site by how many post there are not a good way to messure if its a large community. Take http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/ for instance, is close under 1M posts, but they delete and prune their boards regulary. Steamforums are ranked 981 on alexa.

Minecraftforums http://www.minecraftforum.net/forum are close under 1M aswell, same thing, old posts are often deleted. Minecraftforums is ranked 3,099 on alexa.

http://forums.bethsoft.com/ bethestas forum meets your requirements with a margin. I was to slow. Its ranked 10,877 on alexa though.

And I could go on and on.

But using big-boards.com and looking at boards with most members, a forum using IP.Board comes out 2nd http://www.unexplain...ries.com/forum/ - ranked 27,821on alexa.

[Con]

What does an Alexa ranking directly have to do with the "largeness" of a site?

[stoo2000]

I'm working with a client at the moment to convert their 9.5 million post forum over to IP.Board, there are many many large IP.Board sites out there.

[altenerg]

Thanks! I've ran a bunch of big vb forums and would like to be able to say the same someday with IBP. These are helpful and provides hope

[TSP]

Diskusjon.no (norwegian forum)
Posts: 18.512.425
Members: 220.922
Global alexa rank: 21,055 (Rank in Norway: 82)
IPB v.: 3.1.4

Been with IPB in 8 years I think, after phpBB. Oldest post is from july 2001.

Edited by TSP, 21 November 2011 - 06:41 AM.

[altenerg]

What does an Alexa ranking directly have to do with the "largeness" of a site?

That debate is old. lol I just used for general traffic "range". Everyone already knows about its inaccuracies but how many people on here pay for comsore reports? Anyway feel free to debate that or this reply haha.

[Kevin_McMinn]

Minecraftforums http://www.minecraftforum.net/forum are close under 1M aswell, same thing, old posts are often deleted. Minecraftforums is ranked 3,099 on alexa.

I'm certain you meant 10 Million posts.

[Frontpage]

Big Boards is horribly outdated and barely updated so I don't think that's relevant.

Neowin: http://www.neowin.net/forum/ - 10 million posts

Who made the Neowin skin? That has everything a large forum would need. I wonder if it was a custom project? I would love to know the folks who put it together.

[andret]

I'm certain you meant 10 Million posts.

Yes ofcourse

I was just testing you guys

[bfarber]

Who made the Neowin skin? That has everything a large forum would need. I wonder if it was a custom project? I would love to know the folks who put it together.

Neowin have good in-house developers that do all of their custom skinning and addons.

NBC uses our software. Example: http://boards.nbc.com/nbc/ (4M posts)

Television Without Pity is one of the largest IP.Board forums I know of: http://forums.televi...ithoutpity.com/ (They hide their stats, but last I manually counted their posts it was over 10M)

Believe me, there are many large IP.Board sites (1M+ posts)

[marklcfc]

http://hmfckickback.co.uk/
http://forum.rangersmedia.co.uk/
http://www.foxestalk.co.uk/forums/

[Rhett]

newer sites but very high traffic and perform very well.

http://www.rootzwiki.com

http://forum.cyanogenmod.com/

[Rhett]

What does an Alexa ranking directly have to do with the "largeness" of a site?

It ranks the sites traffic among other things... and from my experience it's pretty accurate as well. I have been monitoring alexa data with actual server data for the past couple of years and it's very accurate from my testing.

[Ryan H.]

http://forums.zybez.net/ has been on IP.Board since 1.x back in 2001; we're now running 3.2. We've had 14.5M posts over the lifetime of the board, although we used to prune regularly to simplify maintenance. Active posts are now up to about 4M.

At its peak, I think our Alexa rank was around 4,000, but I never put much weight on it.

[altenerg]

http://forums.zybez.net/ has been on IP.Board since 1.x back in 2001; we're now running 3.2. We've had 14.5M posts over the lifetime of the board, although we used to prune regularly to simplify maintenance. Active posts are now up to about 4M.

At its peak, I think our Alexa rank was around 4,000, but I never put much weight on it.

Nice to see a startup and not an existing traffic-whore website who just decided to dump their support traffic via an IPB forum (the best forum software as far as quality once its running and trafficed, but not the best for startups imo). This thread lacks forums started from scratch. I remember a decade ago lived on forums like... http://www.sitepoint.com/forums , http://www.daniweb.com/, http://www.techguy.org/ www.howardforums.com/forums.php all started by 1 or 2 guys (or girl) with some extra time on thier hands. I'd really really like to see more IPB startups. Forums that have grown from scratch and not because of any existing product, service or traffic.

[altenerg]

Take for exampe the "new topic" and "new reply" buttons for IPB, VB and PHPBB. As you know often people visit a forum to err post a question or reply to a topic that they found. Here's IPB's buttons with NO HYPERLINKS:
 not_growth_friendly2.png   2.09K   20 downloads
 Screenshot-5.png   2.1K   21 downloads

Here's vb and phpbb:
 Screenshot-6.png   6.64K   4 downloads
 Screenshot-7.png   13.75K   3 downloads

both hyperlinking the user to some sort of registration page! eg:
 phpbb.png   26.46K   10 downloads

For errors on IPB we have something like this:
 not_growth_friendly1.png   37.26K   8 downloads

This is just one fraction of 1 of the issues. Not even talking about the lack of seo. I wish somehow I could get on the dev team. The software is sooo much better than vb and phpbb in many important ways but with the current disconnect it makes it harder to grow.

Of course, i've reworded the "You cannot make a reply" buttons and linked them to the registration page but things like this should not be left up to publishers. I think the beauty of software such as wordpress (blog i know), phpbb and vb is that u put them online add unique content and they WILL GROW!

Stop telling users what they cannot do and show them how to get involved! Also, please tone down the error messages that seem so fatal its enough to scare the "average" user off.

Please do this software some justice, its being held back by those two things... new-user-UNfriendlyness lol and the lack of proper seo.

[Richard.C]

Stop telling users what they cannot do and show them how to get involved!

+1

[altenerg]

For the record here's what my error page looks like:
 my_ipb_error_page.png   21.12K   32 downloads

Here's IPB default:
 before_ipb_default.png   28.39K   44 downloads


Edit I uploaded the wrong IPB default. That was for 404 page not found. Here's for not signed in to post:
 you_CANNOT.png   28.25K   34 downloads

Big difference huh? No wonder U uploaded the wrong one first.