How big?

How big do you want your forum to get?

Why is that?

It depends on what resources a forum owner have to invest in his or her forum. This is because a forum doesn't grow without hardwork, commitment, dedication and money. If I have and run a community, if I have the resources to make it as big as Reddit, I will take that chance.

Shawn Gossman said:

How big do you want your forum to get?

Click to expand...

I'd like to have at least 1 or 2 Big Boards (1M+ threads).

That said, I don't mind having slow, and smaller, communities of 10000 threads or less. If in the right niche, and the content is good, it will consistently bring in good traffic that'll convert.

The first forum I focused on for 2-3 years had less than 25 active members, but the content was so niche, that it ranked for everything it needed to. Members could opt out of seeing ads, for free, as the guest traffic paid for it so much more than subjecting members, who would otherwise ignore ads, ever would. I didn't even need to consider a "donation" system to get any money from them because it was a high CPC niche with great content ($1+ clicks) - I was also able to easily sell ad space with a minimum $1000/3 month contract. That said, I had to close it because of C-19 though; I can't go much further into the explanation as to why I had to close it because of C-19, other than social perspective if I kept it open. I might re-open it with the old content, but, a lot of it has changed so it would need to be weeded out, a lot, as C-19 changed the face of the forum from its historical roots to the present.

As big as possible. The sky is the limit.

But honestly, I’d really love to see my forum grow to over 20k members and over 1 million members one day!

Myself, I'd be okay with a Big Board. I'd imagine it would be like running Southern Illinois Hiking & Outdoor Recreation, which is my BIG Facebook Group.

Sometimes, you get lost in all the discussions and don't know everyone in the group. But the algorithm on Facebook is also working against you so you usually only see your friends in the groups versus everyone else without manually looking around.

I'm fine, though, with a forum that gets a couple thousand members, daily activity, and mainly everyone making new topics. That's what I want: An active forum where more than a few people are making new topics

Shawn Gossman said:

Myself, I'd be okay with a Big Board. I'd imagine it would be like running Southern Illinois Hiking & Outdoor Recreation, which is my BIG Facebook Group.

Click to expand...

Why don't you make some sort of terms for (moving forward) that any content submitted to the group gives your board a non-exclusive, permanent, irrevocable, unlimited license to use, publish, or re-publish your their submitted there under a "bot" name (or their real name as it's a public group)?

After a new post to the group is made, a new thread could be published with that content (under a "Facebook Group Posts" forum) with a link to the forum and specific thread, and then a comment made that it was posted to the board for archival purposes (i.e., in the case that Facebook goes down, it preserves the past of Southern Illinois as it's hosted off-site). Comply with DMCA, and you should be fine, as the terms around creating rules like that for a group owned by Facebook are murky.

It might be bad, or it might be good. Some may leave the group, but some may leave the group in favor of using the forum instead.

You could go even further where if the author comments on their past posts like "!archive" "!archiveme", etc., the bot will pick it up and pull their original post, allowing you to take from previous posts with essentially their explicit permission at that point. (Or just use this approach and make a sticky post explaining the process and why you want to take it off Facebook, as it could go down like many other groups before, be it a mistake, or otherwise, and all that content goes into the void).

The biggest forum I ever owned had 10k posts and 20 blog articles. My current dream is to break that record.

Nomad said:

The biggest forum I ever owned had 10k posts and 20 blog articles. My current dream is to break that record.

Click to expand...

Nice.

How many members did that forum have?

Shawn Gossman said:

Nice.

How many members did that forum have?

Click to expand...

1300!
I never deleted spam accounts, I just blocked them.
It had around 100 active users and 90 percent were real users and not the one from posting packages and post exchange. It was crypto niche and during the height of crypto boom in 2021, I sold it for a good price.