[General rant] I want some traffic, too!

[Cyburbia]

It seems like there's a gazillion anime and first-person shooter boards out there, each one with hundreds of thousands of posts. Not a day goes by when I see yet another very-dark-gray-text-on-black-background vB site devoted to Counter Strike, each with a few hundred thousand messages ... folks can't get enough of 'em. "Posts:118,751 ... refresh ... Posts:118,804 ... refresh ... 118,863." Are there that many folks going blind over GeForce versus Radeon versus Parhelia debates? Yeah, I'm glad vBulletin can handle your traffic. GIMME' SOME OF IT! :ermm:

I started one of the first urban planning-related sites on the Web, back in 1994. I've had bulletin boards on the site since 1996; first WWBoard (ick), then Discus (ehh), and since last August, vBulletin. My users love it. Unfortunately, there's not enough of them -- 661 members, with only about 30 or 40 being active. Consider that there's about 25,000 urban planners in the United States, 50,000 if you consider all English-speaking countries, and 100,000 to 200,000 potential users if you consider students and "armchair planners." Despite oodles of promotion, and having been online about as long as Yahoo, Cyburbia has a small but devoted following, but that's about it.

I get anywhere from five to ten posts a day on weekends, to 50 to 100 on weekdays. I occasionally stop by a Volkswagen Passat modification board (that's not vBulletin powered), and there's somewhere around 250 to 500 new posts a day. I see OptiBoard, with thousands of posts, and I think to myself "How come even a bulletin board for optometrists is swamped, but I'm practically dead by comparison? What's going on? I've got no competition but mailing lists!" Yeah, I'm jealous ... I'd love to have just a tenth of the traffic that any one the 500 rice car, overclocking, Dave Matthews Band or Dragonball Z boards has. Maybe I should give up the urban planning thing, and start a board to discuss early 1980s Armenian post-feminist folk music, 300 baud acoustic coupled modems, Renault Le Car window crank knobs, or eyebrow piercing enthusiasts in Las Cruces, New Mexico. I'd probably get more traffic ...