UBB.Developers Forums General Discussion Chit Chat Is big-boards.com BIASED in favor of vBulletin?

Or is it possible that there are so much more large vBulletin communities out there?

Forum Software (number of message boards of each type)

vBulletin 546
phpBB 86
custom 69
Invision 68
UBB 36
ezboard 34

http://www.big-boards.com/statistics/

Big-Boards tracks the most active message boards and forums on the web. They currently have 910 message boards in their database (according to their claim)!

I believe that most large boards are using vbulletin, as using UBB.classic isn't an option for the size boards they are refering to, and few are fond of UBB.Threads looks

A lot of it depends on nominations/ recommendations as well... unless it changed recently, they didn't even include ubb.threads as ubb forums.

They include all forums now, including the custom ones.

But they have a 500,000 post minimum for forums to appear in the ranking.

Actually, the largest UBB forums are UBB.threads

http://search.big-boards.com/result.php?q=ubb

Hostboard is not even listed

then submit it

"Big-Boards tracks the most active message boards and forums on the web."

That is hardly true.

"Big-Boards tracks the most active message boards and forums on the web, that have been submitted and approved for display on thier site"

That's more accurate.

Further, the number of posts they have listed is "historical", not current. Take a look at some of the post counts listed for these boards, then look at the actual post numbers. Does it add up to you?

I have submitted to them before, they just don't like me

Actual posts stored on Hostboard at the moment exceeds 1.2 million with over 110,000 registered members as per the database this evening.

hi,
i'm the creator and owner of big-boards.com. Just thought i'd drop in to clarify some points.
big-boards is not biased towards vbulletin, or any other software. It just happens there are a lot more large vbulletin forums than ubbs.


this is incorrect.
817 out of the currently 920 boards listed have their stats fetched and updated daily.
The truth is however, that a lot of the 100 that do not get updated are UBBs, because they need to be manually counted due to a lack of way to retrieve the counts dynamically on the cgi version (as discussed here: https://ubbdev.com/ubb/ultimatebb.php/topic/26/3149.html#000000,on the php one, the post id can be fetched).

Overall, the accuracy of the rankings is not the primary objective of the site, the main goal is more to provide categorized lists of active forums.

As per hostboard, it wasn't included because it is more of a hosting service like proboards/ezboard/invisionfree and similars which are not listed as a whole. If a singular instance on hostboard reached the 500000, it would be listed.

Cheers,
Quentin

Quentin,

I challenge you to take the time, sit down, and compare actual live post counts on a board compared to the numbers you have listed. I've done it. Have you?

I don't know, or care frankly, how you get your dynamically counted numbers. What I do know is that I was curious at the numbers I saw on your site so I did take a few hours and do the math.

I'll stand by my comment.

Further, you're getting it dynamically from a return the board gives you. Gee, I could return any number I felt that I wanted to give you, couldn't I? Post ID number of last post? Historical, Quentin.

Don't get me wrong, your site serves a purpose and does it admirably well. Is it biased to one software or another? No, I do not think so. Never have. But as the end all and be all of which site has is larger, or has more live posts than another?

Not even close, sorry.

i don't deny it. As i said the rankings aspect of the site is, well, mostly "hype" (it's good for marketing the site ).

It's true that someone can cheat on the numbers they show on their board. This has happenned sometimes and i have removed the ones that were spotted.
The thing is also, the numbers does not represent the same thing depending on the software used by the board. Some are the total post counts ever, some the ones actually present in database, some even something else.

But again:

The users i try to serve is not the one looking to see whether board xxx is higher than board yyy.
That users just come by once and don't get much out o the site.
i try to serve people looking for active boards about a certain topic. If someone looks for a board to discuss his brand new mazda rx7, i daresay my site can provide him with some. The other service is to board admin themselves, who can find there a source of inspiration, learning by example.

"It's true that someone can cheat on the numbers they show on their board. This has happenned sometimes and i have removed the ones that were spotted."

Your number 5 site says 26 million posts. I see less than a million.

"i try to serve people looking for active boards about a certain topic. If someone looks for a board to discuss his brand new mazda rx7, i daresay my site can provide him with some."

This, I would agree is your most important function, and for that I don't even see a need for a sham post count to be displayed at all.

Quentin,

Thanks for coming by to answer some questions.

Will you be able to dynamically get the post numbers for the new UBB product?

I noticed that too. Something's strange with that forum as they seem to have 1362 user online right now.

That's not uncomon on a large board, so in and of itself it's not odd.

I suppose i should reiterate what i'm saying here.

I'm saying that as a measure of which board is largest it's not. As Quentin points out, as a means of finding boards in your genre that have traffic and activity, it most definately is, and a good one at that.