Did offtopic.com purge their posts?
 

I was looking at a few old posts on here a while ago. I noticed that offtopic.com kept coming up as the largest vbulletin forum. In one post here it said that they had over 100 million posts. I went over to offtopic.com to check and they had 9,956,788 posts. Are most of the posts only available to registered users, or did they purge all their posts a while ago?

About 5 seconds to register & login to find out will answer that for you.

I don't exactly understand what you mean.

He is saying if you want to know, " Are most of the posts only available to registered users, or did they purge all their posts a while ago? " to register and see. :)

Ok i just registered and it appears that they purged their posts a while ago.

Well there ya go. :)

Just wondering, why would a forum that big purge their posts? Must have taken them off of the big board list. I checked about a month ago and they had 10 million posts. Maybe those posts are still available to administrators. It could be that they auto move the old threads/posts to an admin only section.

Ask them over there, all anyone here can do is guess.

Ok i will post a thread there.

A "Big Board" was considered a site with over 500,000 posts. At 10 million posts, they still qualify. Not only that, but Big Board really doesn't mean anything at all these days.

And just wondering, but have you ever run a site with a lot of posts? There can be server issues with a site with a lot of posts if you aren't always on top of it. I prune users and threads regularly on my site. Less users definitely helps my site run smoother.

None of my sites are big. I use 1 dollar webhosting lol!

This post is not about offtopic.com ... this is more about WHY WOULD ANYONE PURGE??

- bad posts (thin content)

- duplicate content (people copying/pasting same content) across multiple forums

- content from feeds (copying content from other sites ... this use to be big a few years ago)

- paid content (3rd party feed available to you on a contractual basis - if contract is terminated all content must be removed)

- server overload (server may be getting overloaded during peak hours)

- to improve brand perception (maybe too much crap on site)

- SEO (a lot of the above helps with SEO)

- budget (trim overhead costs to get a bigger ROI)

- etc

so yes, there's a lot of reasons why someone may want to prune their "posts" ... this is just a short list