10K posts from 300 members

What is the norm?

[spaceylacie]

I would consider my forum members to be "very active". Just over 300 members and almost have reached 10,000 posts. Percentage-wise, what is the norm?

[idolw]

how long did it take?
maybe your forum is on politics? ;)

[encyclo]

It depends on so many factors - demographics, subject matter... My forum still has fewer than 200 active members, but in the 18 months since the board opened they have clocked up almost 100,000 posts between them.

[trillianjedi]

It does indeed depend on many factors.

I have one forum with 3,000 members and 40,000 posts, and then another one with 14,000 members and 16,000 posts... I consider both to be "very active", but that's a viewpoint expressed by being involved and experiencing it rather than just looking at numbers.

Just over 300 members and almost have reached 10,000 posts........I would consider my forum members to be "very active".

Great. It's all good content - I wouldn't worry too much about "what's the norm" - if it's working for you and is a "busy" place, then it's the makings of, or is already, a good community. And an "authority" to the eyes and ears of a search engine.

My forum still has fewer than 200 active members, but in the 18 months since the board opened they have clocked up almost 100,000 posts between them.

Looking at those numbers (which are extreme), I would say that's a very high quality community with high-grade quality members who know what they're talking about.

In many ways, that's the ideal.

TJ

[badass101]

We've just hit 10K posts, with approx. 900 members and have been running for just over a year, on phpBB.

Our stats:

Number of posts: 10052
Posts per day: 26.90
Number of topics: 1609
Topics per day: 4.31
Number of users: 909
Users per day: 2.43
Board started: 10 Jan 2005 12:05 am
Avatar directory size: 101.46 KB
Database size: 14.74 MB

[ThomasB]

45 days
about 800 users
about 2400 posts
about 450 topics

[spaceylacie]

My board is phpBB too and will be one year old on April 18th. It's a hobby topic, nothing controversial, but fans of the hobby do call it, and our forum, "addictive".

I thought 10,000 posts from 300 members seemed like a large number, but I see that some topics/forums have even more avid members.

[rogerd]

I think the more a forum is used for "chat", the higher the post generation per member will be. I've seen one member rack up a hundred posts in a day. Many of these, of course, are one-line opinions, "me too" posts, and short answers. If posts tend to be more substantive, it's hard to rack up those kinds of numbers.

[spaceylacie]

Thinking about what you said, rogerd, I just had to look at my stats. Just this past week, we(me and mods) decided that there was too much general chatter on the forum so decided to make a separate social area. It was implemented then we started going through past posts to move all social posts to the new section.

Anyway, back to my stats... For example's sake, my forum is about building model cars. Since the forum was separated, there are now 2 main areas to visit, a social area containing almost 3000 of the 10K posts and a "talk shop" area containing about 7000 posts.

The social area is very social, even people talking about meeting in "real person" at certain public functions related to the subject. Saying "hi", "I became a grandfather today"... stuff like that.

In the "talk shop" area people post pictures of their lastest model car projects, talk about what kind of glue to use, stuff like that.

General Chatter: average 9.33 posts per thread
Talking Shop: average 9.35 posts per thread

Hmmm....

[rogerd]

I think a lot of time it's more the atmosphere than the topic... Some people treat a forum almost like a chat room - posting quick comments and waiting for a reply. They may hop from thread to thread doing that, and really run up a post count.