Well? Based on posts, page-loads, whatever, is it?
No way of telling, at least not in public. We’ve all learned the hard way not to post links to our favorite other message boards, because of the massive troll infestations that invariably follow.
What a strange thing to think, that nobody has rated message boards.
There’s plenty of sites that exist just to rate these things.
I can’t imagine this board being high on the lists though, since it’s not advertized, is it?
IIRC, one of the mods or admins once said that the SDMB is one of the largest vBulletin or UBB boards.
Since you seem to be in the know about these sites, why don’t you wander on over to one of them in your free time and report back to us?
It is one of the largest, but not the largest. There is a person on the vBulletin developer’s site who got 1,000,000 posts on their Board in 8 months from the start, IIRC. I think another person broke 2,000,000 in two years. I’ve also seen a vBulletin site that had more than 45,000 users on it, but I can’t remember where it was.
Well, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, I’d say. If someone wants to post a link to a large “General Interest” message board, that’s fine with me.
We did have a problem in the past, when a few Straight Dope posters started trolling on another site. What followed was just the reverse of that: but it’s inaccurate to blame that on “placing a link to another message board” alone.
Not a “General Interest” site, but I do recall from an earlier discussion along these lines that some sort of hardware message board had the biggest membership. But I’ll be damned if I can think of the name right now.
Well, long ago I once merely mentioned one of my favorite other MBs, in the context of a thread, and during the course of the next four days there was a tremendous sock puppet invasion (with user names like SuckMyBigFatOne), the server was hacked, the MB crashed, and we all had to change our passwords. And it couldn’t have been coincidence, because it was a fairly obscure, very small technical hobbyist board that you normally wouldn’t have stumbled across, unless you already knew it was there.
So.
so, DDG, do you have a link to that site?
Ducks and Runs 
If not the biggest, it is the best
For a “moderator” at a trivia site, you sure don’t seem interested in doing research. Trust me, if you don’t really care about the answer, then neither do I. But I can start someone else off.
I found one of these and then hit the browser’s “Related” button.
Top9.com http://www.top9.com
Topfivesites http://www.topfivesites.com
Top5000sites.com Directory -… http://www.top5000sites.com
Pcdata Online Reports http://www.pcdataonline.com
Wisecat’s Top 100 Web Sites http://www.wisecat.co.uk
Webtop10 Redirect… http://www.webtop10.com
starnet.com.au/zachm http://www.starnet.com.au/zachm
Navipage http://www.navipage.com
100 Greatest Web Sites Direc… http://www.greatest100sites.com
100hot http://www.100hot.com
100.com - 100 Top Web Sites … http://www.100.com
You think we’re a trivia site? Ye Gads.
Those don’t seem to be trivia sites either.
Here’s one list of just message boards http://www.freefever.com/mboard.html
The hardware message board to which Coldfire is referring is probably Ars Technica. They don’t have membership numbers listed there, but I’ve seen threads there with more posts than some of our fora.
Anthracite’s post inspired me to read some of the message boards over at vBulletin. It would seem that there are boards out there with indeed larger numbers of registered members. What I found most interesting was many instances of 400-500 posters on a board at the same time.
Of course, those boards may not employ a search feature to the degree that ours does. Or they may have servers so large that it doesn’t matter.
But reading those threads, we aren’t in the top five based on registered members, threads, posts, or many other quantifiable statistics. I kept searching for statistics indicating posters-who-are-bright-as-hell-and-trying-to-make-the-world-a-smarter/better-place but couldn’t find any.
Just to nitpick terminology, you really want to compare SDMB to other general-interest boards on the web. If you compare the the net, you’re going head-to-head with Usenet, which isn’t even a fair fight.
Actually, since you seemed to be the local “expert,” what I wasn’t interested in doing was re-inventing the wheel. Had nothing to do with “research.” Had everything to do with using an existing knowledge base. What would be the point of duplicating efforts? It would seem though that you are no “expert” anyway. You implied there are many sites that exist solely to rate these [message boards] things, but the links you’ve given us are much broader than that.
[Edited by UncleBeer on 10-15-2001 at 11:56 AM]
That link was worth it just for this thread alone.
http://arstechnica.infopop.net/OpenTopic/page?a=tpc&s=50009562&f=77909585&m=8020990882
Not by any measure nor would most people want it to be. This is a medium-largish BBS and there are others that are considerably bigger. There is an optimium size range where people can have a sense of community and SDMB is (IMO) just within the boundaries of that envelope.
The most important thing about the SDMB is the overall quality of the moderation which tends to help retain quality participants. We are not the biggest overall or even the deepest (within narrow bands of expertise) but I would venture to say we are the most eclectic by a fairly wide margin and I can’t think of any other site in existence that tackles the range of questions we delve into here in volume.
We are not the library but we are the best card catalog of general information guides that will point you in the direction you need to go in search of knowledge.