Talk:List of Internet forums

Shouldn't

this page be part of the Internet Forums entry, but listed at the very bottom?

Created page

I created the page today, since I thought it good be good to have a list of internet forums.

The "members" field can be a little difficult to keep updated, but it is at least an indication of the size of the board. --Kri (talk) 16:58, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

I'm not seeing how such a list would be possible. There are simply too many forums out there. What do you think? Netalarmtalk 17:05, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

I think it is impossible to list every forum. Maybe we can put a least limit of some kind in order for a message board to be in the list, like least amount of posts or least amount of users? http://rankings.big-boards.com/ ranks message boards after those things. --Kri (talk) 17:23, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

Ah nice! I was thinking you wanted to rate every forum out there. I related that to listing every website (which I did attempt to do when I was in 1st grade). I'll help out in the process too. Maybe list the top 150? Netalarmtalk 17:32, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, sure, why not? Then maybe we can remove "Leisure for mommies". :) --Kri (talk) 11:37, 12 August 2009 (UTC)

Okay, I have already cleaned up the list a little, and set a limit of at least 1,000 users so far. We may have to increase that limit later on. Maybe it is also a good idea to start writing the boards in size order in the wiki code instead of in alphabetical order, to make it easier to clean the list up in the future. --Kri (talk) 20:35, 12 August 2009 (UTC)

Removed Sonic and pals for only having 260 members, not nearly enough to satisfy the requirements. --68.149.183.16 (talk) 01:17, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

Too low limit for lowest amount of users

A list, while being impossible to complete, still has plenty of value. 1,000 member seems awfully small to be noteworthy though. I would suggest the cutoff being 5,000 - 10,000. Davo499 (talk) 06:07, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

That limit will be changed for sure, when the list grows too big. Maybe we should just have a limit to how many forums can be in the list. --Kri (talk) 10:46, 12 September 2009 (UTC)

Impossible list

Hi, I added my site ("The Kingdom") to the list just to prove a point. At the moment it fits the list as, by member tally, it is more active than a lot of them; the site itself is really inactive. Members isn't a good thing to measure by. Posts, on the other hand, is, as it actually shows how large a site is - for example I notice HBGames at the top of the list has 500,000 posts whereas the site I added has 6,500.

Furthermore bigboards holds 2,000 forums with over 500,000 posts, with 6,000 pending processing, therefore a list here is inadequate and based on Wikipedia's standards is currently more an advertisement than a valuable list. It would be more useful, and more accurate, to display say the frst 20 forums from the bigboards list instead.

90.196.48.169 (talk) 10:42, 1 September 2009 (UTC)

You're probably right; a forum can have many members and still be hopelessly inactive. The thing is only that many forums don't seem to have information about number of posts. Maybe we should change to number of posts anyway, and simply remove the forums which don’t have that information from the list. What do you say? --Kri (talk) 10:33, 12 September 2009 (UTC)

I've just added StarPoints RangerCrew, which has exactly 3,700 users, and Digital Spy, which definitely belongs on the list with 232,000! SPRC is the biggest Power Rangers board on the Internet, and Digital Spy is a long established TV forum (in fact, it was already linked to in DS's article). Digifiend (talk) 14:38, 1 October 2009 (UTC)

I tried to add the Bungie.net forums to the list but gave up after I couldn't figure out how to edit tables(I'm new to wiki editing). If someone could add it I think that would be great as I think it definitely belongs on the list. It is a very active forum that is based around the company Bungie and their video game series, Halo. I couldn't find the year started or exact number of members, but there is over 28 million posts from all of the forums combined.Josh hoesly (talk) 15:04, 11 June 2010 (UTC)

Not notable

It's an interesting idea, but shouldn't those which do not have Wikipedia articles be deleted? I see that the top one on the list does have an article, but is not linked to the article. -- SEWilco (talk) 15:49, 1 October 2009 (UTC)

While I do support the idea of having this list, there need to be clear cutoffs of when a forum may be included. Wikipedia also has a list of notable blogs, and this isn't too different. To ensure that only notable forums get listed, I'll see if it's possible to remove those that do not have a Wikipedia article. (Main concern being that we'd be left with nothing.) Netalarmtalk 00:09, 5 October 2009 (UTC)

I'm suggesting the cutoff limit be at 5000 members, suggestions? Netalarmtalk 00:12, 5 October 2009 (UTC)

What about either minimum 5000 members or the forum must have a Wikipedia article (thereby proving its notability)? TheLastNinja (talk) 20:38, 6 October 2009 (UTC)

I'm now thinking that the restrictions should be raised. Any thoughts? Netalarmtalk 01:39, 20 October 2009 (UTC)

I started to put Croatian forums, I hope you don't mind, so I have couple of suggestions:

1. You should categorize it by country, because if I started that way, I hope I will make people to start doing that. 2. For this suggestion, of 5000 members, I really don't know what to say. For example, forum of my hometown has about 800 messages and over 5000 registered users, they are 95% spammers, because no one deletes them.I think activity is rather important.

I presume that's why first forum from my list was deleted? It is fine by me, but we have to agree. I started with those smaller forums, that I know of, and finished with bigger ones. I hope this way it is OK.Is it OK if i write some articles about Croatian forums? It is rather interesting theme to me, and Croatian internet is still in his path of development, so I think it deserves it. Your comments?-- Jagor (talk) 6:47, 20 October 2009 (UTC)

I liken this to listing every website on the Internet, so there must be clear standards that must be met for a forum to be listed. Otherwise, we'd end up with a super long list that won't be too usefeul. I think we should model this list after List_of_blogs, where each entry must have an article in Wikipedia. Netalarmtalk 01:38, 21 October 2009 (UTC)

4chan

300m users? What the hell? Are you people insane?

There may be 6b people but it doesn't seen realistic. http://rankings.big-boards.com/ says 28k but I would put the number at around 90m at most. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.30.63.60 (talk) 21:16, 24 October 2009 (UTC)

About the removal of a lot of forums

It has been decided that only forums that have their own articles or are directly affiliated with sites that have their own articles should be added to the lists. That's why there has been a major cleaning of the lists; if you still think that one or more forums should be in the list, make sure to find a Wikipedia article or a section in an article that is about that forum, and link the article name to that article or section. For forums in other languages than English, Wikipedia articles in other languages are allowed too. If you have more questions about this decision, please ask them here. --Kri (talk) 16:45, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

For the old lists, please see this subpage. --Kri (talk) 17:34, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

Cleanup and member/post count requirements

Hi all, I have just removed forums with less than 50,000 members, updated the member counts, added the post counts, and reordered by posts; along with a few other cleanup bits and pieces.

Also, judging from this talk page, it seems like a lot of the 'decisions' on requirements etc (as well as other things said in posts) were written as if it were 'Kri's list', and while I accept that a lot of the contributions to this page may have made by him/her, the article is still very much unsubstantial, and I would like to remind everyone of WP:CON.

I therefore proprose (tentatively) a requirement of 500,000 or more posts as a minimum for entry on to the list.

Control-alt-delete ★ user◾talk◾favs 21:03, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for adding the post counts, I think it makes a lot of sense to include that. However, is the inclusion criteria going to be 50,000 members or 500,000 posts? Or both? TheLastNinja (talk) 11:17, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

Well, although I started it, it's definitely not my list, and I appreciate that you make contributions to it; adding the post counts I think was a good idea. I still consider the list a bit experimental, although I think it has improved in quality. Actually, the decision on the current requirements (which says that a forum has to have a Wikipedia article or be closely related to one) was actually made by me and by Netalarm, we discussed it a bit on his talk page and eventually came to an agreement. If it's necessary maybe we can bring it up again, but then on this talk page. --Kri (talk) 16:14, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

Ya, if needed we could discuss this again. By nature, this list is going to be a bit more complicated to create and regulate with notability being a big concern. Regarding the number of members, is it really necessary to keep them up to date? (up to date as of...") or to have them that accurate? Most forums have a substantial number of spam accounts anyway, so that accuracy is already off. Thoughts on this? Netalarmtalk 03:26, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

I think it's fine to have the "up to date as of" sentence. That way we ensure the list reflects the relative sizes of the boards. And yes, there are a lot of spammers that cloud the picture, but all boards have them, and at least all vBulletin boards count the same way: I believe all accounts are included in the count, banned and not banned alike. Now, what is the inclusion criteria going to be? It currently says in the article that it's a list of boards with more than 500,000 posts, but there is no mention of the additional criteria of 50,000 members? And Kri and Netalarm seem to have previously agreed that the criteria should be forums that have their own article. Personally I'm not sure what the best solution is. I guess it depends on what is the purpose of this list in the bigger picture. TheLastNinja (talk) 11:35, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

Personally, I don't think you're going to find a board with >500k post but <50k members so I don't think it really matters too much about it being specifically mentioned that it needs 50k members. Control-alt-delete ★ user◾talk◾favs 13:06, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

Several of the ones you deleted fall into this category. I think the full inclusion criteria needs to be spelled out in the article. TheLastNinja (talk) 16:33, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

I was going for something more like List of blogs. That way we can ensure that only notable forums get listed. The member/post requirement is always going to be arbitrary, so I'd support removing it entirely. Netalarmtalk 00:36, 4 December 2009 (UTC)

I think I agree with this - if I understand correctly, a forum can be on the list if it has an article. I still think it adds value to the list to have member and post counts, and order the list according to one of the counts, but a certain minimum count should perhaps not be a requirement to be included. TheLastNinja (talk) 12:42, 4 December 2009 (UTC)

Removed «updated as of» statement

I thought this statement was a good idea at first, since it would ensure that the list order reflected the relative sizes of the forums. Then I wanted to add a new forum to the list, and realised I had to update all the counts. That is just too much work! Maybe we should have another column with the date/time of the counts for each forum? TheLastNinja (talk) 11:44, 7 December 2009 (UTC)

RuneScape

I tallied up the visible boards on the RuneScape.com forums.

377,427,951

This puts it in second place on this list. (It seems a lot, but consider for example the weapons trading section, which has 49.5m posts)

In terms of members, I will leave it blank since there is no report of stats on the site. It is between 1 million (the number of "member" accounts) and 130 million (the number of free accounts), but there are stat requirements for free players to access the forums etc.

94.10.84.32 (talk) 11:29, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

NB: Xlinkbot removed my edits; I possibly did something wrong. Replaced the link with an in-wiki link anyway. 94.11.198.54 (talk) 20:59, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

Runescape? seriously? Wow.... --190.60.93.218 (talk) 14:01, 14 February 2012 (UTC)

Why were the Runescape forums removed from the list? The Sporum too? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 125.237.67.211 (talk) 10:09, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

Improving the list / Afd discussion

So the list survived the Afd, but I really do think it needs to be improved. In the Afd discussion I made some suggestions to possible improvements:

• More explicit inclusion criteria. (Should say that only forums that have a Wikipedia article are allowed in order to ensure notability.)
• More columns, such as year of launch, forum software, timestamp for when stats were updated.

I'm not really sure if the allegation that the list is simply the product of WP:Synth has any implications. Admittedly, the stats in this list are probably collected not from the respective articles, but directly from the forums listed, and as such could possibly be said to be original research. Is this a problem? Anyone? TheLastNinja (talk) 12:08, 22 April 2010 (UTC)

Ok, as there are no objections, I'm going to go ahead with some of this. I plan to remove the "web address" column as it is redundant (can be found in the corresponding article), other columns are more important and there isn't room for the web address if these new columns are to be added. TheLastNinja (talk) 18:46, 23 May 2010 (UTC)

Democratic Underground

Under main interest was listed as "US Progressivism". I changed to US Democratic Party as it is funded by Democratic Party institutions, and, in their own rules states, in so many words, that dissent from the Democratic Party during election time is grounds for a ban. Indeed, many people have been banned from this site for aggressively criticizing the Democratic Party from the left. Therefore, classifying the main interest as general "progressivism" is inaccurate-- the site exists for the primary purpose of supporting the Democratic Party.--SmashTheGlass (talk) 01:38, 20 May 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for that! I think it was me who added it to the list. Based on the article at the time I was lead to believe it was a forum for progressives in the US, but I now understand that this was not the case. TheLastNinja (talk) 20:21, 5 June 2010 (UTC)

Facebook?

I don't believe Facebook belongs on this list, but thought I would see if anyone else has any thoughts on the subject, before taking action. KevinOKeeffe (talk) 12:46, 19 August 2010 (UTC)

I think you're right. Facebook doesn't seem to fit the description of an Internet Forum. Note that the edit that added Facebook seems to have overwritten Gaia. Feel free to revert it. TheLastNinja (talk) 13:19, 19 August 2010 (UTC)

Default sorting

So a recent edit has changed the default sorting to be alphabetic sorting on the name. I don't really see the value of that. It's better to sort on number of posts or number of members. Opinions? TheLastNinja (talk) 19:26, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

My mistake, i didn't read the lede. I reverted and fixed a couple that were out of place. ~~ GB fan ~~ 19:55, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

No worries, and thanks for your efforts! TheLastNinja (talk) 12:41, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

Requirements?

It says the list needs expansion or cleanup.

As far as I can see from this discussion page and article, having a Wikipedia page, 50K members, and 1M posts are the requirements, correct? Because I know a couple forums (Support forums, etc.) that have stub articles on here that can be used. Just checking before I do anything. NuclearWizard (talk) 15:34, 31 March 2011 (UTC)

Forgot to mention, there are a couple forums that are below 50K. — Preceding unsigned comment added by NuclearWizard (talk • contribs) 15:35, 31 March 2011 (UTC)

No, as stated in the lead of the article, the only criterion is to have a Wikipedia page (which is dedicated at least partly to the forum). That way we avoid random inclusion requirements, and the burden of proving the forum is sufficiently notable is transferred to the article. TheLastNinja (talk) 18:47, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

Newgrounds BBS

Does anyone have a source that states that the Newgrounds BBS is run by phpBB? Based on how everything works (and the staff's lack of ability to move topics), I always thought it was custom software. Echnaret (talk) 18:46, 21 August 2011 (UTC)

Sporum

The official Spore forums (can be found with a Google search of 'Sporum' has over 3 million posts, and about 85 thousand registered users which might make it worth adding, however I am not really sure how to add this appropriately so if someone sees it fit they could add it to the list. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 125.239.115.88 (talk) 04:07, 16 March 2012 (UTC)

 Done--NavyBlue84 12:25, 16 March 2012 (UTC)

why doesn't the list work ?

it won't sort properly for example number of users. something is busted or wrong format Penyulap ☏ 21:32, 19 May 2012 (UTC)

It seems to be sorting it as if it were text, not numbers. TheLastNinja (talk) 17:53, 22 May 2012 (UTC)

It seems the only way to fix it would be to remove the sorting ability from the table. Any better ideas? TheLastNinja (talk) 20:14, 22 May 2012 (UTC)

It looks like the 'number of members' column is sorted left-to-right, or treated as text (as TheLastNinja already noted). Can a capable person please review the format of table cells, and ensure that numbers are numbers? Smittee (talk) 09:07, 30 June 2012 (UTC)smittee

Notability

The list contains only forums for which an article exists dedicated either wholly or at least partly to the forum.

I added Two Plus Two's massive forum (~35m posts, ~350k members) to the list quite a while back, and I see it was recently deleted along with several others. While I don't really care too much if 2p2 makes it on the list, I'm wondering what exactly "dedicated" means in that above sentence. The forum is noteworthy enough to have been mentioned in the article in direct relation to several things - including 60 Minutes - which seems to me that it should qualify as "notable" (even though you hardly can say the 2p2 wiki page is "dedicated" to the forum).

In any case, the current list is horrifyingly lacklustre. If 2p2 was re-added it would currently be the 6th most active board when ranked by posts(which is laughable). IMO, there has to be a way that we can add some of the large, notable forums around the web while still maintaining a level of organization and notability to the page. Jamesa7171 (talk) 15:36, 8 December 2012 (UTC)

I believe it was me who originally authored the sentence about notability. This notability requirement was the result of long discussions about how to avoid the list becoming an easy target for people wanting to promote their own non-notable forums. I wouldn't mind if "dedicated" was replaced with another word that better describes what we're after, or even the whole sentence was rephrased. However, the underlying idea was to rely on Wikipedia's own notability requirements for articles, and I still think that makes the most sense. A forum can be extremely big and active without being notable, and the other way around, it can be very small and slow and still be notable. If there is no Wikipedia article about the forum, then it probably doesn't belong on the list. As for 2p2 though, I personally think it would be fine as it's mentioned in the article, like you said. TheLastNinja (talk) 15:38, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

Minecraft forum

This forum has over 19 million posts and 1.9 million members. It should probably be added!

http://www.minecraftforum.net/forum — Preceding unsigned comment added by 125.237.67.211 (talk) 10:07, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

AVSIG

Although it currently has a small membership, and I don't know if there is a way to find out the post count, I added Avsig because it was recently judged in the Afd process as sufficiently notable to warrant a Wikipedia article. Its claim to notability rests partly in the possibility that it may be the oldest continuously operating forum, and partly in its past influence on Federal Aviation Administration policies and the aviation industry.--Palmpilot900 (talk) 02:17, 8 March 2013 (UTC)

Circuit Board

This does not seem like a very active forum whatsoever, yet it keeps being re-added, by the same IP. This forum does not meet the criteria, and should stay deleted. Or am I incorrect? PerseusRad (talk) 02:45, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

Bigfooty Fourm

This has over 29 million posts and over 100000 members it should probably be added — Preceding unsigned comment added by 124.181.101.30 (talk) 21:09, 10 November 2013 (UTC)

Reddit?

Why isn't Reddit on this list? Shouldn't it be included? It's one of the most visited forums in the world. I would like to get some consensus before adding anything --Farquezy (talk) 14:14, 20 December 2013 (UTC)

Reddit is not a forum, it is a news aggregator... --Chewbakadog (talk) 11:32, 5 January 2015 (UTC)

It's actually mostly a forum. siafu (talk) 18:23, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

reddit is 100% a forum. It just has a small section where people can post and talk about the news. There's entertainment threads, game threads, racism, travel, etc. What ever you can imagine. IT'S A FORUM. You create an account, find your topic, and talk to people about it.

-G — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.29.47.164 (talk) 03:18, 21 April 2015 (UTC)

Reddit is definitely a forum, yes, you can post links to external content, but it's by no means required to start a thread (and probably isn't even the norm, from a plain statistics-side of things). It's a forum of forums. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.37.10.164 (talk) 01:11, 1 May 2015 (UTC)

Other Langages

This page is very english centric. Foreign langages boards are missing. I added the obvious one in French, but the lack, for example, of any chinese/Japanese/Russian boards makes the whole exercice pointless. (Sry for english) Wiiip (talk) 16:17, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

@Wiiip: I've reverted your additions as we need existing articles about the boards to show their notability. I agree that foreign languages are substantially under-represented but the solution to that is to have interested editors write the corresponding articles. --NeilN ^{talk to me} 16:57, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

@NeilN: From this page : "For forums in other languages than English, Wikipedia articles in other languages are allowed " -> what I did - not easily btw. Well, as you want, I'm not going to write a full article on these, since I'm far from having enough knowledge to do so. Wiiip (talk) 17:57, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

@Wiiip: That's the opinion of one editor, and not supported by guidelines. Also, the links you added did not go to articles in other languages. [1] --NeilN ^{talk to me} 18:08, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

Vandalism www.thebiggestforums.com/

There has been ongoing spam effort since 00:51, 20 April 2014 (67.193.122.196) to list the above porn site in the External links. There is a similarly named site www.thebiggestboards.com which appears to be legitimate tracking site whih is being removed and replaced by the porn site. The www.thebiggestboards.com seems to be of value although I'm not endorsing it. 192.136.235.164 (talk) 19:35, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

You've added the link incorrectly twice. The site itself might be a good reference but does not present any independent encyclopedic material. --NeilN ^{talk to me} 20:09, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

I was removing the porn site and trying to restoring thebiggestboards.com. Removing both is fine.

192.136.235.164 (talk) 20:33, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

Getting back to the matter of the thebiggestforums.com adding its porn link repeatedly for 9 months - any suggestions?

192.136.235.164 (talk) 16:16, 13 January 2015 (UTC)

If it's added one more time I will ask that it be added to Wikipedia's link blacklist. --NeilN ^{talk to me} 16:21, 13 January 2015 (UTC)

I've completely removed the external links section as it is a sink for spam and other unreliable information. Of the 3 links present (sort of in flux) there appears to be nothing of significant value presented therein. Page protection to autoconfirmed may help in regard to external link and drive-by article body spam which comprises a large number of the recent edits. However, IP contributor 192.136.X may unfortunately have to register should this avenue be explored (edit requests via Talk are possible but it is just not the same). 192.X, do you have any objections to protection? -- dsprc ^[talk] 01:27, 14 January 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for asking. If that is what is needed, lets do it.192.136.235.164 (talk) 13:37, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

Robinson Technologies - Qualified?

The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia's notability guideline for web content.

The article associated with this website has no references. I question having it on the list at all. At the very least it needs a "citation needed" tag. Please resolve before removing tag.
192.136.235.164 (talk) 22:41, 24 January 2015 (UTC)

Webtretho - qualified?

The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia's notability guideline for web content.

The article associated with this website has no references. I question having it on the list at all. At the very least it needs a "citation needed" tag. Please resolve before removing tag.
192.136.235.164 (talk) 22:43, 24 January 2015 (UTC)

Urdu Mehfi - qualified?

The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia's notability guideline for web content.

The article associated with this website has no references. I question having it on the list at all. At the very least it needs a "citation needed" tag. Please resolve before removing tag.
192.136.235.164 (talk) 22:45, 24 January 2015 (UTC)

Futaba Channel - qualified?

No verifiable post cont. Remove until count can be verified otherwise we are opening this list to 100's of unqualified sites and encouraging vandalism.
192.136.235.164 (talk) 22:45, 24 January 2015 (UTC)

The Well - qualified?

No verifiable post cont. Remove until count can be verified otherwise we are opening this list to 100's of unqualified sites and encouraging vandalism.
192.136.235.164 (talk) 22:45, 24 January 2015 (UTC)

I reverted these. I am not a paying subscriber to The WELL so I can not dig too deeply but, WELL is notable. It is one of the oldest, and most influential communities on the internets, the Web, and utilizing technology as the medium for transfer. WELL is maybe a million, or maybe it is not but, it certainly meets criteria for notability. Others are welcome to weigh in here; will yield to consensus.

For foreign language content: I do not read Japanese, so I can not retrieve the post numbers for Futaba; it exists, lists are not stand-alone but for navigation (we may present in a different manner like with navboxes but largely still for navigation), and there is generally a different expectation for foreign language content; there are upstream sources in native wiki. We have editors that are multi-lingual (usually identifiable with their language tags/categories) that we can reach out to for retrieval of this information. There are also different expectations for non-english content as it is extremely difficult to source; this is a HUGE problem for the Indian community on en.wiki.

Robinson is a notable developer, and fora for discussing games. It is not GameFAQs but it doesn't have to be. Web is bigger than top 100.[2][3][4]

The one million is kind of arbitrary as the title indicates list of forums, not list of forums with one million posts. Notability should stand on its own; preferably upstream if meeting GNG. What if we have the single largest fora but it does not publicly display or supply a post counter; is it forbidden here? What if most notable forum ever but it only has 500,000 posts?

Also: please try to keep these grouped under a single sub-header. Namaste -- dsprc ^[talk] 00:06, 26 January 2015 (UTC)

I reverted them again, respectfully. If we need to submit for resolution, lets do that.

From the beginning this list has had two arbitrary requirements - a post count minimum and notability (an article) - to keep the list from becoming too large (read above).

Some of the sites that you have put on the list have articles that are flagged as not meeting notability standards. It's reasonable we flag them on this list as needing citations so that anyone with information an help.

Some of the sites that you have put on the list don't have post counts. It's reasonable we not list them until we have the counts. If we open the list to sites with no listed post counts this list will expand exponentially. There are many in prior revs that would now qualify for the list.

If there is a consensus to change these requirements, thats fine.

166.173.59.229 (talk) 03:17, 26 January 2015 (UTC)

Futaba

To get post count [5] for Futaba, I just went to their website, scraped the post number off the first thread on each page and then used AWK[0] to sum them (can also do with pen and paper). This would make the numbers slightly lower, as it does not take into account post numbers for replies to those threads but, it is an adequate generalization.

[0] awk '{ sum += $1 } END { print sum }' FILE

-- dsprc ^[talk] 06:02, 26 January 2015 (UTC)

Delphi.com - qualified?

Delphi is a forum hosting service, not a forum. Just like blogger is a not a blog. Here is the signup page:
http://www.delphiforums.com/createforum.ptt
http://www.delphiforums.com/pforumfeatures.ptt (premium service)
192.136.235.164 (talk) 22:05, 26 January 2015 (UTC)

I think it is similar to others just that you can create "subforums" on demand (for a fee); it is kind of like Reddit or Yahoo! Groups in that regard and each provide premium upgrades. Something Awful also has premium sub creation (and a host of other nasty "features"; pretty much if you pay you can do w/e). -- dsprc ^[talk] 23:15, 26 January 2015 (UTC)

SkyscraperCity.com is not SkyscraperPage.com

SkyscraperPage.com has its own article; Cities is just a redirect, a blurb and a separate product that was spun off - IDK if Cities alone meets the GNG. SkyscraperPage.com proper is clearly still active: http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/ IDK how to proceed when you have one article and two separate, independent services, other than to list them both, whilst pointing to the same article which is not desirable. -- dsprc ^[talk] 02:24, 27 January 2015 (UTC)

It looks like vandalism.
The article is about SkyscraperPage.com. Sometime later SkyscraperCity.com was inserted in the middle of a paragraph about SkyscraperPage.com. with a footnote tying back to SkyscraperPage.com.

SkyscraperPage.com is a Canadian site owned by: SKYSCRAPER SOURCE MEDIA INC.

SkyscraperCity.com is European site owned by: STICHTING WOLKENKRABBERS (Jan Klerks)

Here are the websites owned by SKYSCRAPER SOURCE MEDIA INC.: http://skyscrapersource.com/websites.htm

Here are the websites owned by Jan Klerks: http://www.janklerks.nl/

I restored the paragraph. What is "GNG"? Can we fix the redirect?

192.136.235.164 (talk) 03:58, 27 January 2015 (UTC)

You are probably right on the vandalism part; although it is maybe just spam. Yeah I did a whois lookup on them too :). GNG is WP:GNG, or General notability guidelines; (bureaucratic red tape) which sets a minimum standard for inclusion of content (also allows ill-informed to suppress valid content). For redirect, you seemed to have handled correctly already. -- dsprc ^[talk] 01:50, 28 January 2015 (UTC)

Inclusion / exclusion criteria and log

Operation Clambake (OC) was removed for lacking 1 million posts. OC is highly notable and prime for inclusion in this list. Same rationale for non-inclusion was expressed previously for The WELL. Arbitrary post count impedes inclusion of notable entries. Seems 1M was a protective measure to stop indiscriminate inclusion of non-notable entries over 5 years ago(!) when list was is worse shape. Mayhaps can include table for notable forums w/o 1M posts (as with non-English table)? Alternatively we can let entries stand on GNG alone; which is preferable (and expressed in that discussion half a decade ago) - and verify notability by vetting upstream articles (as done with Skyscraper etc). -- dsprc ^[talk] 05:08, 24 May 2015 (UTC)

The only way we should be using a number like that is if that's a number used by the sources or if the name of the article is list of internet forums by number of posts (which again assumes reliable sourcing for that sort of organization); otherwise the article topic isn't appropriate for a stand-alone list (forums are encyclopedic, but forums with X articles is trivia). I think the better way to articulate the inclusion criteria -- and, admittedly, harder -- is to come up with a way to distinguish those sites which are notable for being a forum and other sites which happen to have a forum. But in general, that something is an internet forum and has a Wikipedia article should, to me, justify inclusion. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 05:46, 24 May 2015 (UTC)

I went on a bit of an editing spree, and while the list is in somewhat better shape, there are some lingering issues. I wasn't able to update the post/member counts on all of the forums as some did not clearly display it, and at least one forum was inaccessible (members-only access). Some of the forums that do not display a post count will still provide post counts for each subforum, I wrote some JavaScript to parse this for College Confidential and Wrong Planet, but I didn't have the time to modify it to work with any of the others (those two had formatted the post counts in a way that made regex matching much easier). Anyone wishing to update the post counts on those two in the future can just reuse the JavaScript, I left it inside a comment above both entries.

I also manually resorted the list from highest to lowest. BPDFamily.com had a massive drop in post count, from 12,550,839 to 2,946,601. I'm not sure why this happened, but the most likely possibility is that someone accidentally added a one at the front of the previous number, and nobody ever caught the error.

I added several major sites from the Curse network. While the ones I added do not have individual Wikipedia articles, they are all mentioned on the Curse Inc Wiki page I linked to. They should easily qualify for inclusion based on the number of posts/users, but may not "perfectly" meet the inclusion criteria. I excluded the Bukkit (2.3m/408k) and GW2 Guru (2.1m/74k) forums because they were much lower volume forums and weren't really as significant, but was that actually justified?

There are some forums that might qualify but weren't added. Nexopia certainly qualifies, but I can't easily get a post count, and it's targeted at Canada instead of the US despite being English. HackForums is massive (46m posts, 2.7m members), but it's shady and there is no Wikipedia article (it got deleted in 2010 due to a lack of notability), so I'm not adding it, although I believe that the situation has changed significantly since 2010 and it would now be considered notable enough to justify a Wiki article and inclusion in this list. It's not clear why d2jsp, conceptart.org, Honda-Tech, etc are not considered worthy of inclusion based solely on requiring the article, but I'm not going to challenge that directly.

Anyways, here's the summary:

1. How should we handle updating the post counts on forums that no longer clearly display the current counts? While scripts may work for some forums, it is a bit impractical for others.

2. Does anyone have an alternate explanation for the BPDFamily.com drop? It's probably not important and just from an error when inputting the first value, but I want to make sure I didn't miss something major with a such a large (ten million!) drop in the number of posts.

3. Does anyone have any thoughts on the eligibility of the major Curse network sites that I added? Or on if my disqualification of the Bukkit and GW2 Guru forums was justified despite the sites technically meeting the criteria for inclusion?

4. Can someone (else) take a look at adding Nexopia and perhaps HackForums?

5. A very large number of these forums only have an article to link to because of sponsorship by a notable parent organization. While the parent organization may be perfectly notable, that does not always mean that the forum they run is actually really that notable. How many of these forums would actually justify their own Wikipedia page? I'm concerned that this makes notability a very poorly defined concept, and this list mostly worthless. Many of the "clearly notable forums" (meaning standalone forums with their own Wikipedia page) have relatively sparse Wikipedia pages in the first place. There isn't much to write about with most forums, even extremely active ones. I'm being nitpicky, but I feel that the whole criteria for this list is a bit questionable, and that significance/notability would be better established by activity (using metrics such as post/member thresholds).

Anyways... Garzfoth (talk) 21:55, 28 May 2015 (UTC)

Really good work! The Java script is cool.

I removed the sites that you added as they "don't fit perfectly" as you state. I agree with you comments that "a very large number of these forums only have an article to link of... a notable parent organization" - I think these sites need to be pulled too.

The purpose of this list, as I understand the consensus above, is to have a list of the forums that are notable in their own right - and have a wikipedia article where the forum is a major aspect of the article - its a directory of sorts.

When I look at the list, I see forums that are notable like SkyscraperPage.com or Ultimate Guitar. On the other hand, Boards.ie is a hosting organization with a collection of little forums.

Let's talk about notable.

I listed your additions below so we can examine these for inclusion and others, like Boards.ie for removal.

72.190.103.213 (talk) 00:20, 31 May 2015 (UTC)

Boards.ie is unquestionably adherant to criteria. Comments and removals:

Craigslist -- forums not mentioned in detail and not the notable part of Craigslist -- removed

Digital Spy -- if this is considered valid, then it justifies the addition of Nexopia

Major League Gaming -- forums not mentioned in wiki article -- removed

Paradox Interactive outright fails at forums -- removed

If aggregating discussion boards is bad, 4chan and 8chan are candidates for removal. If it's okay, reddit would qualify for addition.

ArsTechnica fails to prove significance -- removed

PistonHeads fails to provide enough detail to justify significance of the forum -- removed

Steampowered fails to prove significance of the forum component -- removed

SMF has the same issues phpbb has, and has been removed.

Are role-playing forums truly considered forums? They aren't discussion forums in the traditional sense.

Candy fails to establish relevance -- removed

Robinson Technologies has the same issues that Paradox has -- removed

In many cases, forums are mentioned as a small section commenting on their existence and features (Facepunch and Newgrounds are good examples). In my opinion, this fails to establish significance (irregardless of the "actual" significance of the site, as we're apparently using this myopic criteria), but I am not going to remove sites based on that alone quite yet.

There's my edits, forums should be added onto the list below. What do you think?Garzfoth (talk) 22:38, 31 May 2015 (UTC)

I've added the following instructions, subject to any additions made here on talk.

ATTENTION EDITORS! This is a list/directroy of notable Wikipedia forums - do not add a forum to this list unless:

1. a Wikipedia article exists for the forum, specifically, and

2. the forum has 1 million or more posts.

If the forum is related to organization that has an article, the forum must be established in the article a primary aspect of that organizations notability. For example, an article about Chrysler or Dodge Challengers does not establish notability for a forum about repairing Dodge Challengers. Conversely, a forum like MacRumors has a standalone article and notability. We will presume that the forum is not notable without an article here where its specific notability has been established. Additionally, a hosting services for forums does not qualify. Any forums not meeting these requirements will be removed without prejudice and archive on the talk page. -->
72.190.103.213 (talk) 15:49, 2 June 2015 (UTC)

To keep from revisiting the same site issues, I am establishing a log of disqualified sites and the reason.

The list should only contain forums for which an article exists dedicated either wholly or at least partly (significantly) to the forum. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.190.103.213 (talk) 18:21, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

Excellent work! I've removed a few more, all added below with reasons... And removed boards.ie.

I removed the entire other languages section as the forums there are too generalized and are of very dubious significance. It's worth revisiting in the future, but for now, I think they just don't belong there.

The definition of "hosting site only" is vague, some of these general forums may fall under the same classification. I have no objections to removing 4chan and other sites of that style, which includes reddit, but we should probably figure out a clearer definition that handles forums that are "general discussion" forums in large part... Although to be fair this isn't much of an issue anymore after my previous removal spree. Garzfoth (talk) 21:26, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

Wow thanks for doing all this work to the list. I think that I agree with most of what's been done here. I do have a question, though. There are some on the list above, like Forumosa, that seem to be excluded for quasi-notability reasons? Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but if that's the case, the standard for stand-alone lists is that if an article exists, its notability is presumed. If the subject isn't notable, that article should be deleted. If there's some higher bar for inclusion you're referring to, that makes more sense, but I would dispute the use of e.g. post count or member count as part of the list inclusion criteria. I like the idea of basing inclusion on whether the WP article is about a forum or covers a site's forum in some significant level of detail -- that defers to the articles, which can be modified/discussed locally. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 03:19, 2 June 2015 (UTC)

Good points. Forumosa is labeled as a stub and has no third party references. It was identified for deletion in 2011 [6] My thinking is that a dedicated article should at least be labeled as having notability issues if we are not listing it for this reason - otherwise no one will try to resolve it. I tagged this article. 72.190.103.213 (talk) 19:54, 2 June 2015 (UTC)

Disqualified sites log

Name	Posts	Members	Category	Launch year	Disqualification
Gaia Online	2,287,349,646	28,064,467	General	2003	Wrong category: Social networking service
4chan	1,874,218,277		General	2003	Wrong category: forum hosting service
IGN Boards	110,559,008	1,205,444	Video games	2004	Article's notability not related to forum
Minecraft Forum	27,117,330	3,741,925	Video games, Minecraft	2009	Article's notability not related to forum
The Straight Dope	18,257,381	170,042	General	2000	Article's notability not related to forum
Marriland	6,155,459	284,254	Video games, Pokemon	2003	Article's notability not related to forum
PhPBB Forum	3,998,232	456,074	Forum support	2001
Arena Junkies	3,902,531	242,282	Video games, World of Warcraft	2007	Article's notability not related to forum
MMO Champion	21,945,171	445,282	Video games, World of Warcraft	2007	Article's notability not related to forum
Craigslist	261,179,318		General	1995	Article's notability not related to forum
Major League Gaming	43,398,805	8,905,419	Video games	2003	Article's notability not related to forum
boards.ie	36,000,000	630,000	General	1998	Wrong category: forum hosting service
Paradox Interactive	18,988,823	757,374	Video games	2000
Ars Technica	16,596,984		Technology	1998
TOTSE	9,666,399	95,036	Sub-culture, General	1989	Forum is gone, no current relevance to the list
8chan	17,141,509		General	2013	Wrong category: forum hosting service
PistonHeads	16,236,135	2,540,000	Automobiles	1998
Steampowered	13,756,222	1,633,424	Video games	2000
Anandtech	37,386,989	358,744	Technology, General	1997	Article's notability not related to forum
Simple Machines Forum	3,596,990	351,105		2003
StackOverflow	26,000,000	2,700,000	Programming	2008	Wrong category: question and answer boards
Team Liquid	22,480,039	336,849	Video games	2001	Article fails to establish significance for the forums
Newgrounds	21,309,559	1,147,016	Flash, General	1995	Article's notability not related to forum
Aelyria	1,794,125	17,677	Play-by-post	2001	Wrong category: Role-playing game
Forumosa	1,447,038	31,284	Taiwan	1998	Article has issues
TechSpot	1,412,514	136,092	Technology	1998	Article fails to establish significance of forum, article is focused on non-forum components of TechSpot.
Teen Talk	1,719,741	195,488	Teen lifestyle	2008
Robinson Technologies	1,320,143	66,859	Video games	2002	Article has issues