Smack :)

I will add one thing... I own a number of forums, all medium sized. (4-10k members each - close to a million posts combined) So I dont have a single board that qualifies, but I have enough between the forums that many of the same issues apply to me as well.

umm, no.

I don't have a big-boards.com site with over 500,000 posts but my forum does have over 250,000 posts. I think perhaps it would be useful to have it so that only big board members can post here. I used to come to this forum for information and discussion but there were too many other posts clouding the discussion.

For example, a how many registrations do you get per day thread might have "i'm lucky to get 1 or 2 members a day" from a forum that has 250 members. I really don't think posts like those are the point of this forum.

I posted a question over at vBulletin. I wanted to know what constitutes a big board anyway. Number of posts alone seems misleading to me. Here's what I asked.

Please note that I am NOT asking for server optimiztion advice. I AM asking for a guide to where my board fits in in the scale of things so that I can make better sense of threads that I read, and can ask more informed questions if and when I need to.

Now as to this thread, if you made this a private forum, how would someone like me break into it? Who would determine if I was ready to make the grade?

I think the difference between big boards and other boards is that you run into problems that smaller boards or with less visitors never will have.

Examples:
-Search
-Caching (both code and content)
-Server Hardware
-Apache/Lighttpd
-Table Locking

As a board with 30 users online you will never have these problems even with 1000 million posts. Our problems basically started with ~ more than one million posts and more than 1000-1500 online (everything else makes our server run at <2 load). And you can do a hell of a lot of optimizations if you put the time in it.

Problems like "I have 50 queries on my forum home and it runs very slow on my shared host with 512mb ram" or obviously misconfigurations of apache/mysql/etc should be in a general optimization forum like the one on vbulletin.com to be honest. But I don't really care, if I see something I can help out I'll post my cents.

Yep it should.

And lets make the graphics section private to only the graphics people, we dont want them to feel left out since there is a ton of information already hidden in a coders forum only coders can see.

Making this section private, and the graphics section should pretty much complete the splitting of the site into little "factions" and it'll be a better overall place knowing that the small boards cant get information on how to become big, and what to do once they are there. And we sure dont want any graphic secrets leaked out either.

Who dragged this old thread up ?

There are no plans to make "Big Board Discussions" private.

Do you think if people want to keep things from you, making the board 'public' will stop them from doing so?! NO - they just won't post!!

At the end of the day, the big board owners will ultimately decide whether they use the section or not, and I feel more of them would be happier to do so if it was private. In other words it would end up being more useful for big board owners (you know, the people/boards it's meant to be aimed at!).

This can be tested/settled once and for all, by creating an additional BB section that is private - then seeing which one gets used more.

*edit - didnt realize that the thread is 40 years old.

Thus completely going against any community feeling, this place is to freely share information, thoughts and ideas with everyone. Not to pick and choose who should and shouldn't you share your information with if you choose to share it here.