Case Study What's the biggest forum you built from the ground up?

[Bawse]

What's the biggest forum that you started with no members? Did you merge with other forums to grow faster(increase members & posts)?

My current poker forum is my largest forum. I just registered pokerwebmaster.com and pokerwebmasterforum.com. I plan to start a poker webmaster forum, and try to revive what I believe is a dead niche.

 

[Cory]

It was called Big Boards, an InvisionFree/ZetaBoards resource forum.

Here's the last Wayback I could find for it: https://web.archive.org/web/20120905165200/http://bigboardsresources.com/index/

 

[Shawn Gossman]

Skywarn Forum (2010 to 2017)

I started the forum in 2010. There was another bigger competitor (Skywarn Online) who sent me a message asking why I needed to reinvent the wheel. I kept going anyway.

I got it to several thousand posts and members by 2016.

The following year, I acquired Skywarn Online (for over $1,000) because the former owner wanted to quit forums but not see his creation get wasted.

I merged it into mine, which resulted in a forum with over 7,000 members, over 100,000 topics, and nearly 200,000 posts. Good content, too!

Back then, I didn't back up like I should have. A database error occurred, and I lost everything in the process. It never recovered.

I've recently started another Storm Spotter Forum. It's not as big, haha.

Here's a screenshot of the forum before I lost it all. Thanks to Wayback.

 

[Rey619]

It was called Big Boards, an InvisionFree/ZetaBoards resource forum.

Here's the last Wayback I could find for it: https://web.archive.org/web/20120905165200/http://bigboardsresources.com/index/

man i remember this forum lol was it not a top sites forum or maybe i am thinking of something else.

 

[Cory]

man i remember this forum lol was it not a top sites forum or maybe i am thinking of something else.

You might be thinking of this site: https://web.archive.org/web/20120204034144/http://www.big-boards.com/

 

[Rey619]

You might be thinking of this site: https://web.archive.org/web/20120204034144/http://www.big-boards.com/

Yes and i think you need have a X amount of posts to be added. ill get there soon.

 

[Cpvr]

Yes and i think you need have a X amount of posts to be added. ill get there soon.

It doesn’t exist anymore. The big boards website hasn’t been around for a couple of years now.

 

[Ravenfreak]

Mighty No. 9 Universe was the largest forum I've had. Back when the game first was announced on Kickstarter and it reached it's goal fast, I decided to jump on that opportunity of making a community before anyone else did. It grew pretty fast once I promoted it on Twitter.

 

[Nomad]

In 2019, I started a forum on crypto niche on wordpress. I used wpforo plugin to create forum on wordpress. For the first one year, I struggled. I had to pay to people to join, post on the forum and also create blog articles. But in 2021, my forum started growing. I reached 1300 users, and 15k forum posts and 50 blog articles. I had more than 100 daily active users. In 2021, crypto market was growing, so was my forum. Just like they say hit the iron when it is hot. I sold it. The new owner had a lot of issues running it because crypto market started falling by the end of 2021.