First off hello. And yes, I am a recovering lurker… Its a long hard road. I’ve been one for like, oh, a year now. When the first board went down, I cried. When the replacement came up, I cried. And now I’ve finally decided to post something. Just a few things I’ve been wondering. They are very diverse questions so i expect all answers to be confusing.
What is the biggest message board on the net? I mean SDMB is pretty big, but it must pale in comparison to some of the others.
Whats the Hi Opal! thing about? I’m assuming its some long running joke but would you mind giving me a little background info? please??
How do you quantify ‘biggest’? Most posts, most posters, or most readers?
Since you said ‘on the net’ rather than ‘on the web’, I think USENET is by far the biggest message board in existance, if you call it a message board. It’s significantly better than a web message board, though, so I don’t know if it qualifies. It’s also older than all of the web boards.
Hi Opal is always number 3. It refers to the ancient aol message board where Opal was an administrator and someone just started doing this to lists. Eventually Opal got such a swelled head from all the attention that it burst and she became an animal rights activist. You can still find Opal posting occasionally, but I believe it is under the name OpalCat.
Usenet is not a message board. It is a way of sending messages (mostly plain text, but often binaries (images, programs, etc.)) in a way that’s semi-peer-to-peer. It works like this:
[ul]
[li]A user, with a newsreader (Usenet is also called news or netnews, although the last is obsolete) client program, sends a server (usually his ISP, but not always) a message, called a post. This message has a special field called a ‘header’. This field determines which newsgroups the message is seen under at the other end, among other things.[/li][li]This server sends the messages to all of the other servers in the global network in a way that’s pretty complex if you think about it too hard. It is peer-to-peer at the highest level, which means the network has no center. There is no one machine that runs Usenet.[/li][li]At the receiving end, someone else with a newsreader client contacts their news server and gets the messages for a specific newsgroup (Remember headers? This is where they are used.). There are literally thousands of individual newsgroups, some amazingly busy (alt.fan.cecil-adams, alt.folklore.urban), some pretty much dead (misc.facts.straight-dope). Not all news servers carry all of them (a common free German server does not carry groups that have binaries, for example, and some fascists don’t like groups in the alt. category).[/li][/ul]
It’s completely different from the world wide web: No web pages, no hyperlinks, no browsers. It is Usenet, and it’s mainly unregulated (‘Anarchic’ would describe it, and that’s how the people who own the Big Machines in the network like it. :)).
Here’s how it went: Back on the AOL board, Opal constantly bitched about how a list should always have at least three elements. So, just to irk her nads, Dopers would create two-element lists where the third element was ‘Hi, Opal!’. This was later extended to having multi-element lists where the third element is still ‘Hi, Opal!’.
So, if Wearia is like me, we’re wondering what all this blabber about USENET is all about and waiting to hear about those larger message boards on the web. There are others aren’t there or is that the reason for beating around the bush? [sup]zzzzzzzzzz[/sup]
Anandtech forums is just about to push 100,000 members and I heard that there was a Home audio forum which was a bit bigger. AT is the biggest I can think of right now.
On the AOL board Opal was always OpalCat, just as she is here. And she was never on the staff of the Straight Dope, though she DID put up the Teeming Millions pages back in the AOL days. The TM pages were always unofficial, even as they are today. I believe that originally they were part of OpalCat’s World Domination Website, or something to that effect. Opal had (and has) quite a lot of things to browse through on her site.
How about the yahoo boards? That would actually be my guess. Note that that says nothing about the quality of most of the postings on it.
The yahoo boards have a financial section with specific boards for various companies[sup]1[/sup], which adds up fast, even if most of it is the most idiotic drivel imaginable[sup]2[/sup]. Looking at the Continental Airlines (CAL) board, for instance, it has 16 new messages this morning and apparently has had over 35000 total. Multiply this by hundreds of companies - I’m picking CAL as an issue which probably does not carry a remarkably high message volume. The SUNW board, for instance, has 130 new messages this morning, and is pushing for 300000.
If not yahoo, I would guess the highest volume to be one of the other boards with discussions on specific stocks.
The Motley Fool boards are enormous, come to that. I also think they are among the best designed web-based boards out there (it’s a custom solution, not an application of a commercial product like vBulletin).
[sup]1[/sup] - yahoo calls each individual list of messages on a particular designated topic a “board”, which is fairly common usage. Terminology differs from place to place. In the terms used here, the CAL “board” is more like a forum with one long continous thread.
[sup]2[/sup] - many financial boards tend to be downright infantile, scatological and rude, in addition to having lots of worthless “cheerleading” messages and transparent attempts by people trying to manipulate smaller issues by badmouthing them. Not to mention the obviously crackbrained theories being spouted in good faith, and the name-calling at the grade-school playground level, though using words that grade-schoolers shouldn’t know (I’m well aware that they do, these days).
It is peer-to-peer at the highest level, which means the network has no center. There is no one machine that runs Usenet.[/li][li]At the receiving end, someone else with a newsreader client contacts their news server and gets the messages for a specific newsgroup (Remember headers? This is where they are used.). There are literally thousands of individual newsgroups, some amazingly busy (alt.fan.cecil-adams, alt.folklore.urban), some pretty much dead (misc.facts.straight-dope). Not all news servers carry all of them (a common free German server does not carry groups that have binaries, for example, and some fascists don’t like groups in the alt. category).[/li][/ul]
[sup]zzzzzzzzzz[/sup]