[peterska2]

A lot of it depends on the type of people that you attract to your site and the existing content that you then can encourage them to join in with.

For example, my site (up 3 years next week) has the following stats
Threads: 4,096
Posts: 52,657
Members: 340

Out of these 16,664 posts are in just 26 threads. I also regularly merge threads posted by my RSS bots into monthly threads.

I'd like it to be a big board, but it is more of a family. Very few of the users are active, and those that are either come for a few days then that is it, or they stick around for a good while and become part of the furniture.

Anything goes on most of the site, and in some areas more than others, but it still keeps being smooth and on the whole my members like it. My staff and myself (me, one other admin and a mod) know most of the members, and the two admins (me and my co-admin) try and personally welcome each new member.

I think it all comes down to limits and what you believe in. If you are strict with rules then you get people pushing them all the time. If you have rules, but work on a respect basis, then most people will respect it as they know that they will be the one who spoils it for everyone else. If you don't have any rules then you have anarchy.

Going back to my site (sorry it makes good examples for all the size of it) in my site rules, which are actually quite lengthy, we have two comments that work very well. The first regarding the warning system that we have in place (now infractions, previously has been AWS, a thread in the staff forum, and way back when we ran IPB - their warning system) says:

For the majority of members this should never affect them as long as they abide by the site rules. For those who do not abide by the rules then they will become familiar with the warnings system.

In total 15 warnings have been given out in 3 years. a few bans have taken place, but mainly because they were inactivated acounts from adult domain names.

The other one says:

There is currently no profanity filter on this site as I like to think that people can be sensible and do not require one to be in place. However, should people be abusing the fact that there is no filter set then I will be adding one.

and we have never had a problem with bad language. Occassionally profanity erupts, but mainly in our rants and raves area, or used as an infrequent method of expression. No-one pushes it though as they like the right to be able to use profantity from time to time.


Styles are not really important, the most important thing should be useability, and content. If you have a good established user base and a good topic, then you should become quite big quite quickly, otherwise just plod along and enjoy the ride. You never know when something will happen and you will have an explosion in growth. After all, think of the money your saving if you only have a small site Theres a big difference between being on shared hosting using 1 or 2GB bandwidth a month, to having a massive dedicated server using at least that much a day.