Notice paul i said:

Quote:
I would say something along the lines of satisfying one or all of these criteria:

we have to keep things in perspective.

why are we trying to define what "big" is?

is it because we are going for a DB size contest? a max number of users online contest? or win an entry in the guiness book of records?

no, we are trying to define "big" so we know if a web community forum fits into this "big boards" discussion forum. here is the description of this forum:

"Devoted to discussion related to running a large forum. Here admins of large forums discuss and share server tweaks/vBulletin modifications and anything else related to running a large community."

perhaps a definition of "big" can be derived from that.

Hi guys guess you'll be seeing more of me here for now at least :D

It's not just size in terms of number of posts, but activity level as well particularly the concurrency level of the forums. i.e. 10,000,000 post forum with only 5 members activity using the forums and searching would have no issues compared to 1,000,000 post forum with 2,500 users trying to view and reply to the same thread at the very same time or 2,500 users trying to search the forums at the very same time - it's all about concurrency for me :)

vB users online is hard to guage due to cookie timeout out and can only be used as guide in combination with web stats of unique visitor counts as well as the number of mysql concurrent connections to the mysql server.

Personally i'd consider

- a medium large forum as any forum which has 500+ vB users online over default cookie timeout and at least 300-400 mysql concurrent connections (this is usually the threshold where most vB forums are forced to split to more than one dedicated server)
- a large forum as 800+ vB users online over default cookie timeout and at least 400-600 mysql concurrent connections
- a very large forum as 1,000+ vB users online over default cookie timeout and greater than 600+ mysql concurrent connections

I think a board is big, when the admin feels it is big. ;) Big to me is very different than what it might be to you. For example, my private big board admin forum is for forum owners with 100k or more posts. I feel that once a forum owner sees his forum surpass 100k posts, he has to be serious about his endevour. There are hosting issues to look in to, possible security issues, opportunity for monetization, and more at this point.

I own 3 soon to be 4 "big boards" according to Quentin, but I don't feel they are all big. :)

Very nice to see you here posting George. Looking forward to seeing you here more often.

If you mean big-boards.com, then you need a minimum of 500,000 posts to be listed on their site.

http://www.big-boards.com/submit/

Edit: I noticed Sculli's post after replying. :)

thanks :)

When you have to modify vBulletin code (for performance reasons only) to allow your forums to run at a reasonable speed.

The number of concurrent MySQL connections are only applicable if you are using MyISAM tables. Connections are higher due to the number of threads waiting for table locks to be released. If you're using InnoDB, then the number of connections drops dramatically.

For example, with MyISAM and around 600 people online, I often had over 400 concurrent connections. Since switching to InnoDB, I rarely reach 100 connections.

I run one of the more popular forums for a [dying] MMORPG (Lineage2). It's no where as popular as WoW (at least not in North America), but I still get a good amount of users. I created the site last August when the then current popular forum (L2orphus) had major server problems that lasted weeks. I started off using phpBB (yuck), and in around September I switched in vB.

Here are my current stats:
Currently Active Users: 715 (302 members and 413 guests)
Most users ever online was 1,273, 03-07-2006 at 05:49 PM.
Threads: 19,568, Posts: 617,269, Members: 9,804

I don't think it's necessarily a "big" board, but it's decently sized for the time it's been up, as well as the advertising (or the lack thereof) that I've done. Basically when I first made it, I told about 15 people that were in an IRC channel about it, and my clanmates (about 40ish people). From there the site just blew up within a week, and has steadily increased.