They are definitely the largest and most popular. :) They must have a rich benefactor.

and lots of donators. :) (is one)

they are only using code which could be considered losely based apon phpbb. it is not, by far, stock code.

It is a heavly hacked copy of phpbb, the admin has done many preformance tweaks to the phpbb source code and is also running a large number of servers behind it :)

forums that big is hard to actually start posting since their are way too many replies since I like reading almost every post to seee what everyone has to say something something.

they just recently redid the entire private messaging system, so basically you can see that phpBB is just the foundation(even if that) of Gaia Online.

in reply to J.C. they make alot of the money through advertising, who would not want to advertise on a site with over 15,000 people looking at the site at one moment in time. i wonder how much it is to advertise....

well actually theirs not many advertising ads which im really surprised on a site that big.

But i use to know about some porn forum which only had about 5 forums but it was active all the time but I heard advertisers would pay loads of money to people to advertise their company or website just in their signatures.