Update: We hit 5 million posts an hour ago. This is almost exactly 7 months after hitting 2 million when I started this thread. Getting about 22,000 posts per day and serving 24 million pages per month. Rather monstrous numbers and we are Alexa 5k now. I'm judging that I will be at 10 million posts in 6 months or less. One great thing to happen recently is the CDN I've been using the past month or so which I mention in this thread. So far it's saving me lots of work and keeping site uptime much better. It's crazy to think that in a year I may have more posts than DP. At this rate in 3 years I could have a top 20 online forum. I wish I knew how many posts and visitors the top 100 forums recieved.
Fabulous achievement! Hope to be there with my Health Forums one day. It's more of a joke, but sure I have to dedicate more time to my forums.
I just read this entire thread and I want to congratulate you. Can you give me any tips? I'm dedicated and I try to increase activity on my forum but I just can't seem to get it right (My forum is 7 months old now). Can you tell me your secret?
I am going to get 5 mil posts one day, and will step all over your hacker forum...even though by the time I do, you will have about 5 billion posts
If you're asking about your tech forum. I guess the first thing I noticed is that it was phpbb3. You haven't done much to customize the look. There just doesn't appear on first glance anything there unique or exciting enough for me personally to join. Do you have a high bounce rate? You might need more focus.
A actually do have a high bounce rate. It's above 80%. I'll try to get some custom coding done to it (unless you can recommend some good themes). Thanks for your suggestion.
Yes 80% is extremely high. You should be under 60% and optimally under 40%. The site with 5 million posts is around 30% which is very good. Those that say they have 10% bounce rates are lying or are fudging their stats causing inaccuracy. To work on your bounce rate I suggest you use Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics. Review the site overlay and see what people do click. Focus on that content. Start reviewing the keywords and how people are finding your site. Do you best to make whatever those entry pages are more attractive and shoot for a second click or a signup. Example is on one of my new forums I had a burst in traffic from the movie Inception. Someone posted a great review and it was indexed quickly in top 3. However the site isn't a movie forum so bounce rate was high. But I took the time to see what keywords people were coming in from and where they were going so I added content to the page and lowered bounce rate from 90% to 65% practically overnight. That translated into a boost of signups and activity.
Congrats for your achievement (i recently subscribed this forum, you may have noticed). 5M posts is fine, reaching for 10 M is an interesting goal for the future, but you may have noticed that DP has already 13M posts by now. On an other hand, the number of posts never equals its quality (I admit, my forum in signature is totally out of the game) but i have found some forums like forum.webrankinfo.com of extreme interests, whereas it has only some 1.1 million posts, and totally written in French. Cheers
I do 600k posts or more per month at current rate which is still growing. Let's say I average 750k posts per month over the next 12 months...that's 9 million posts. At the very least I'll do 7 million posts over the next year. I'd guess in 20-24 months I'll have more posts than DP. In just two years I could have 25 million posts on the site.
Wow, Congrats man. I've only got 164,000+ posts on my forums. What a great accomplishment for you. Good luck in the future!