Growth What's the biggest online community that you've ever built from the ground up?

[Cpvr]

Building an online community takes a lot of time, effort, dedication along with passion. The hard work, time and effort pays off in the end, especially once your community starts thriving. However, what's the biggest forum that you've ever built from the ground up? What helped you to build the forum?

How many members and posts/threads did it have? Did it take you a long time to build this particular community? Is it still online today? If so, how old is your community now?

 

[InMyOpinion]

Hmm well I ran my forum years ago it never got over 100 members unfortunately, it did have a reasonable amount of posts/threads for the amount of members though to be honest. It is not still online as I ended up closing it due to having no time to manage it.

I'm hoping the new forum myself and my helper is working on gets a lot more members, posts and stays alive a lot longer than 2 years (which was how long my previous forum was active for).

 

[Nomad]

In 2019, I created a forum "Crypto Talk" on wordpress. I used wpforo plugin. Crypto related keywords were very popular and I managed to grow it into 10k posts and 1k members with daily 20 active members in less than 6 moths. The forum was monetized with Adsense and other crypto ads and I was making good money. In 2021, when the crypto market was booming, I sold it. I made good money.

Never in my life have I ever been able to build a forum as big as this one. The one that I am running these days has 50 members and 1500 posts.

 

[Bryn]

RX Community was my biggest, until its untimely demise in 2012.

 

[Bawse]

My current forum: https://poker.community

We currently have 300+ members, and 8000+ posts. I hope to see a lot of growth in year #2.

 

[Ravenfreak]

In terms of members, I had the largest amount of members on Mighty No. 9 Universe, but Thee Zone is the largest in terms of posts and threads. I had over 100 members on MN9U, and it was quite active too back when the Kickstarter was first announced.

 

[Matthew]

I had an old Zetaboards forum that had like 3,000 posts. I've never really put too much time into starting my own project unless you count Discord servers. I have a Discord with 30-40 users that was once active to the tune of hundreds of messages daily during peak COVID work from home time.

 

[Malcolm]

My site Code Forum has been open for 6 years now, we currently have about 6,444 (almost 1,000 users per year) users - we have about 5,463 threads and 26,490 messages.

I found at the beginning talking to people 1:1 really helped. Most times a lot of people won't join your site if it doesn't have a lot of users or posts but when you get to know them more than they are more likely to join. After some time, I started doing advertising on Google/Instagram/Facebook etc and we started to grow a little faster. But really kept going with the Google Ads to the point we start growing on our own - today we average about 6-8 users per day maybe?

 

[Cory]

It was on InvisionFree, then converted to ZetaBoards: https://web.archive.org/web/20120905144548/http://bigboardsresources.com/index/

My current Jcink resource board is the second largest community I've had built from the ground up.