In an idle moment, I thought I’d find out what is the most reviewed and responded to thread on the Dope. I sorted each forum by replies and then by views. The winner, by a very large margin, is the World of Warcraft General Discussion in The Game Room, which has accumulated 6240 replies and a very impressive 117138 views.
Although that may be the longest thread, wasn’t the “What if The Lord of the Rings had been written by someone else” thread read by more people? I can’t find it using the search engine on the board, so apparently it was older than the oldest threads that are still kept here. That thread was widely advertised all around the Internet, so there were a lot of people who read it who never belong to the SDMb.
Actually, I think I’ve discovered a flaw in my methods. I sorted the reply and view columns, as I said, but only the last few months are listed, so there are about ten years worth of threads that aren’t in my calculations. Does anyone know a way around this?
You can go to the main page for each forum, and use the settings at the bottom to sort the threads. There are drop-down boxes for “Sort by (number of views)”, “Since (the beginning)”, and so on. You can do this in each forum to find the most-viewed or most replied threads in each forum.
For example, here are the most-viewed threads in MPSIMS.