I wonder how many of those boards are fraudulant. I can't see a handful of members making millions of posts. In fact, I think it's impossible. My board has grown honestly and earned all of it's notoriety from not tweaking a thing. One of my competitor's boards is far less honest in many areas.

I think the idea of being comfortable at a big board is to be there before the rush - in other words, you're there before it gets unbelievable huge. That way, you're comfortable and know your way around.

It's tough joining a forum with hundreds of thousands of members and trying to settle in - takes a long time, unless you're a complete forum junkie like me.

I tend to steer clear of forums that don't have a single specific idea.

I think what happens is once a board gets really busy and starts to cost a lot to run. They look at ways also to save on bandwidth. Like using a very plain fast loading skin to speed browsing up for members and to cut costs on bills also because the plain fast loading skins means less images need be loaded which saves on bandwidth (saves cash).

i noticed the same thing a while ago when I was browsing quite a few TOP SITES for ideas. But what caught my eye was the trash and rubbish threads posted on some of them. Some even looked like a ton of content had been mass copied to them over a long time.

I think many of those huge boards that look poorly designed look like this because 1. they were started some time ago (when the designs were different) and 2. the owners don't know or don't care about the design. I agree that some members don't care about how the forums look, but I can't sleep at night if I have something not showing nice or the design is poor. But I am mainly a designer and then a content writer and for a small forum as mine every detail counts.

I would like to be one of those bug-boards one day, but the looks will remain important, as the quality of content I realy care about. When you keep an eye on the quality of the posts and enforce it, it's harder to get to amazing postcounts, but in the end this is not what I want. I want to give my members a friendly place to stay and good content to help them.