Hello I am very proud to have reached the number of 93 simultaneous visitors on my little forum recently, this for a period of time of 5 minutes. Postyour record here.
I seriously think this record doesn't matter. When I first started my forum, when I submitted it to different search engines, there were many bots online at the same time, so that increased my stats very heavily...
I have no idea about the max but I get around 1500~2000 visitors per each 30 minutes at one of the forums on each given moment of the day. Funny enough that my target audience has no reason to install alexa and the site ranking is low (~50k)
Bruno's site isn't really a community. He has lots of SE traffic but not a lot of forum activity. It's more about information that guests want and his forum delivers. Surely it's a nice site but when you see it it's less impressive than he makes it out to be. He normally only has about 10 members logged in at a time. Shame he can't capture more actvity.
They were bots, phpBB just doesn't know what each bot is. Particularly, lately Amazon has been more aggressive with its own bots. My record is a bit over 900, but that was due to a freak image search result on our part. It didn't lead to any real traffic : /
Well.. I beg to differ. First of all, my name is Nuno and not Bruno. And our community isn't measured by the number of members logged inside the forums. We simply discourage compulsive registrations and neither force people to log just to read what we talk about and make up prettier stats. I'm actually proud that we gathered a very strong community over the years. We take pride in quality rather than quantity and that is the reason why we keep growing at an healthy pace. I've even wrote a paper describing how our community has grown strong enough to propose products that compete pair to pair against much larger groups like MS: http://nunobrito.eu/download.php?view.12 My forum was a spinoff from a much larger forum at the time. I wanted to develop software and wasn't allowed to do so on the other forum as it would compete with the star product discussed on those forums. Founded the new forums with a couple of friends and published my works there without restrictions, also ensured that many other folks could also publish their works without fearing censorship. With time more projects used our forums to host their discussions given our freedom of mind over there. Nowadays our traffic comes at 60% from direct search on google, we get indexed very quickly because our discussions are unique and specialized, so we often rank on top google spots when compared to more generic sites. I also established mutual link exchanges with influential sites on the same field of technology, these connections of trust have really helped our site to establish itself as an authority site. Later came the publications of our projects in paper magazines that would promote the forum as the site to get support in english language. Some of the projects also help the forum displaying an RSS feed of the latest topics every time the user access the download center inside the program. -------- These type of things helped to keep people on pace with what was being discussed on the forums and get a good community participation. If the rectangleman already complains that we get too much SE attention at this moment, we are now preparing new projects to be published within the next months at a far bigger scale than ever before and having lots of fun in the process. (we'll even be using myBB intensively.. ) It's ironic but the less we care about google, the more traffic we get from them.