The metric that I found most interesting in the Big-Boards.com was the ratio of total posts to members:
[ul]
[li]For #44, Deviant Art (online art community), it’s 1.04. (What kind of community is that?)[/li][li]For #20, Chiquitas (Hebrew forum for an Argentinian soap opera), it’s 594. (Don’t these people have lives?)[/li][li]For #45, the SDMB, it’s 108. Ahhhhhh, the perfect combination of community and obsessiveness! (I feel like Baby Bear (of Goldilocks fame) and this feels like home!)[/li][/ul]
It all depends on which NGs you’re talking about. 
Many NGs (though fewer of the alt ones) are moderated, some quite aggressively. Of course, in those your post doesn’t go up until a/the mod approves it. That’s eminently worthwhile in the science (or other academic) groups, as periodically individuals come along who have some crackpot idea, and expect all the experts to fall at their feet (after adopting their beliefs and abandoning science for their hobbyhorse). You might be surprised at how vigorously some of the others, especially those related to the entertainment industry, are policed. This includes some related to TV series, as well as some literary ones. One that is not moderated, and which tolerates/enjoys debating Elaine Whoozit’s Aquatic Ape Theory is sci.anthropology.paleo - that’s also where the Pliocene PussyCat Theory first appeared, as an alternative to AAT.
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Speaking of which, whatever happened to the old DejaNews archive? When Google first bought it, they were promising to have it re-accessible in a few months. If it’s still “there”, how do I get to it??
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WRT newsreaders, does anyone here use Agent? I used it for a very long time, and have never really felt it worth the hassle to adapt to another, and resume active participation. Agent handled everything so smoothly, and had such a user-friendly interface. But I ran into some software/ISP compatibility problems with my last ISP (which offered no help), so I kinda gave up on it. Not, you understand, that I need to spend more time online reading/replying to stuff, no matter how engrossing it is. 
I really dislike the IE reader, BTW, and Netscape’s has never impressed me particularly, either - even though I’ve been using the browser since Mosaic days.
The last board I ran across with the variety, participation & quality of this place was salon.com. But they went pay & I figured “screw that, I ain’t never gonna pay for…”
What the hell???
This probably is the largest board with this level of quality.
The Howard Stern message board gets nearly 40,000 posts a day by my reckoning. Almost all are pointless. If there is a larger one, I’d like to see it.
That Big-Boards page only seems to factor in European-languages boards. One notable exception is the humongous Japanese board 2-channel. There are 30 forums and somewhere around 6000 active threads. Someone compiled a list of 1000 words that appear to have been invented, or at least introduced by 2-channel posters. It gets occasionally mentioned in the news and can be said to be a social phenomenon in and of itself.
If you know how to use it properly you can get some pretty good info. However, every time I visit I’m just overwhelmed by the 1337 speak and trolling. It sure is big, though.
http://www2.2ch.net/2ch.html (The frame on the left doesn’t list threads, those are forums sub-forums).
My understanding is that it’s part of Google Groups (http://groups.google.com). I know I can remember seeing stuff there back to the early 80’s if not before. Just do some searches there and specify earlier dates. It’s been a while since I’ve looked for older stuff there.
Yeah, I still go to www.deja.com by habit to do research and whatnot. I don’t use it for posting, just for looking stuff up, mostly computer related.
The thing that really stinks about Usenet is that the people need to be a little more forthcoming with their opinions on current events and things…
Google has indeed absorbed DejaNews, and the full DejaNews archives are available via Google News. Full, as in right back to the early 1980s. A Google press release shows the timeframe their archives span. Not all threads are complete, but they do have the first mention of Microsoft (May 28, 1981) and the first thread about AIDS (December 20, 1982).
Yes, this one comes up every time we have a “How large is the SDMB compared to other boards” thread.
No, you don’t want to know! :eek:
Yes, I know because I have a teenage daughter (well, almost teen-age; they’re growing up so fast these days… 
)
Dani
I’m baffled by this list. It’s logical to find an english-speking forum about games amongst the most active ones. But then I noticed there was the number 8 was a french-speaking forum about hardware. I found this surprising. I wondered why this forum has more traffic than an equivalent forum from a larger country (say, the USA or Japan) or than a more generalist french forum.
And then, number 16, a forum for the honda fans. Weird. How could there be some many honda fans that their forum is one of the busiest in the world?
And finally, number 20, this “Hebrew forum about Argentinian soap operas”. I can’t believe there could be more than half a dozen posters on such a forum. How many hebrew speaking people are there in Argentina? How many of these are spending their time posting on the internet? And from this subset of a subset, how many are fans of soap operas? I just can’t believe such a place could be one of the most active forum in the world.
Honestly, this list seems totally weird.
I haven’t really looked at what kind of posts those boards have, but the SDMB could easily have ranked much higher if it wasn’t for the previous limitations of our server.
Because the previous servers were often maxed out, the board developed a very rigorous policy against fluff posts (other than the ones in MPIMS and IMHO). I’m talking about all the ‘thank-you’ and ‘rotflmao’ and ‘I agree!’ posts. Those alone could bump us to the top twenty if they were allowed.
Also, the mods lock down (eventually) threads that are post parties or heated debates that go on too long. If not for the lock down, those monster threads could easily be ten times larger than they are.
Peace.