Whoa.
 

http://ian.gaiaonline.com/forum/index.php

I came across this on a Sitepoint blog comment. It's powered by phpBB.

But, with 69,398,283 posts, 606,350 registered users, and something like 10,000 online at average, it's probably the largest forum I've ever seen.

Most surprising: how fast it loads. Not bad for an RPG site, and there are no ads anywhere. The author himself actually modified phpBB to make it very query efficient:
http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=135383

yeh my friend pointed it out to me. pretty crazy huh. makes me want to hack in and mass email everyone lol. tell them to register at my site :S

well it goes to show u can make a successful site with any forum software just depends how hard u want to work

i personally will stick by vbulletin coz it has everything i need and its hacks are damn near the best :P

That is a lot of member lmao.

Holy Moly! That's crazy, could you imagine trying to find a certain post in just one thread?!?!

That is one of the largest message boards on the 'net (customized to the hilt and a few releases behind, but WAY ahead of the developers). IIRC, they run off of a 10 box server farm.

Amazing, isn't it?

According to http://www.big-boards.com/ OT.com is the largest vB.

it gets talked about loads, well done to em though.

Someone pointed this out to me earlier on also, and yeah it will have to be the biggest forum I've ever seen, too.

They also have 15~ servers to handel the load ;)

can you imagine the problems you have when you register there?

Nickname already taken.....Nickname already taken.....Nickname already taken.....Nickname already taken.....Nickname already taken.....Nickname already taken.....Nickname already taken.....Nickname already taken.....Nickname already taken.....Nickname already taken.....Nickname already taken.....Nickname already taken.....Nickname already taken.....

^^

Xenon74585639 yeah ^^

Lol basicly, however their phpbb is rather hacked and they use an awful lot of power to do what they do considering they have sponsors im suprised they didnt use a differnt forum software, and i dont mean vBulletin specificly, but im suprised they chose phpbb

Probably because it's free. The owner probably got familiar with the code, hacked it up and can't be bothered to switch because he'd have to learn a lot more stuff. If I was him I would stick with phpBB (God forbid:p)

It's a nice forum anyways.

Yea i imagine, but i wonder how much better vBullinet or another software would handel 7000 users online, with less servers.

vBullinet eh? Is that a good forum software?:):p

Oh shush i havent slept tonight Steven ;p

I'd doubt that vBulletin could handle that kind of load without removing a lot of the core code. Side by side a phpbb/invision board against a vBulletin board - i'd have to say that I think vBulletin would be the more resource-intensive out of them :)

Not so true, phpbb and IPB by default have alot of semi inteisive options on and there is no "quick" way to turn them off.

By vBulletin you could turn almost everything that would be removely server intensive off including store your css somewhere else. There was an attack on vBulletin.com right around the vB3 release (beta 3) 1000 users looking at one thread, and the server load didnt bugdge one bit ;)

That's amazing...

My server would've probably burnt to a crisp hitting 7000+ simultaneous users. =X

Whats "your server"

The one my site resides on.

:p i was refering to stats

Ahh, it's not very high at all.

I only use about 20-40 megs of bandwidth a month. :X

I only hit around 4-5 users at one time. :p

SERVER Stats ;p

If you shut off a lot of the main code, vBulletin would do just fine. With the help of eva and Chris, you could probably do it with half the servers they are currently using.

Oh hehe, hold on, I'll get those in a minute. ^_^;;

i think the same, if you work on the code, as the admin obviously did on his phpbb code as well, i think vb will be less intense.

but you have to work more than a bit ^^