How fast did your community grow?

[AjayJunkies]

Every community is different which means that every community will grow at different paces. You may have seen that some communities grow to be quite big over a few weeks and others could have taken months or maybe even years to grow to where they are today.

As a community owner yourself, how fast did your community grow? Do you prefer your community to grow fast or slow when you start up?

 

[Old Nick]

Do you prefer your community to grow fast or slow when you start up?

Slow of course.
I ban anyone who writes more than 10 messages per day otherwise it goes too quickly.

 

[ForumFan]

I would prefer fast... big and fast, of course!

But success is usually a marathon, not a sprint.

My stats, FWIW.... My forum is 30 months old.


So about 74 members per month joining. I figure as long as it's growing and active, it's all good.

 

[Old Nick]

I'll warn you if Mr Muscle arrives I'm leaving this thread!

 

[stromb0li]

I ban anyone who writes more than 10 messages per day otherwise it goes too quickly.

Spoken like a true admin

 

[Paul B]

I ban anyone who writes more than 10 messages per day

Just saying ...

 

[BassMan]

how fast did your community grow?

 

[Old Nick]

Just saying ...

Someone must have hacked my account, I don't remember posting all that.
I saw my dog hanging near my PC last night... I wonder if...

 

[CedricV]

Someone must have hacked my account, I don't remember posting all that.
I saw my dog hanging near my PC last night... I wonder if...

Always blame the dog.

 

[Ricsca]

View attachment 309055

Just saying ...

Being tired of talking to himself (for months) in his community, he writes here...

 

[CedricV]

I'll get the popcorn....

 

[Old Nick]

 

[mjda]

My community, like other's I'd imagine, took a bit to get rolling. These days, it's even tougher to get one going from scratch.

Being tired of talking to himself (for months) in his community, he writes here...

I have two forums, one which is twenty years old with more than 55,000 members which has had two messages in the last month and another forum of around 15 years with around 9000 registered users who had 60 messages in the last month!

 

[Sim]

ZooChat took about 2.5 years for people to start noticing it (mostly Australians), but it wasn't until around 4 years in that people from the UK discovered it and it turns out they are crazy about zoos over there, so traffic exploded.





Membership isn't huge - after 20 years we only have 10,000 valid members with another 12,000 no longer valid. But the average posts per day from the individual members is huge - they are very active. We also have over 650,000 photos from zoos around the world.

I just ran some queries on the database - we have 4 users who have averaged more than 4 posts per day every day for the past 10+ years

We have some members who have been on the site for more than 18 years who have managed to average nearly 2 posts per day over that time - and one at just under 18 years averaging well over 3 posts per day. These are just regular users - not admins or moderators.

- - -

By way of comparison, my other big site PropertyChat, grew instantly with around 2,500 new members in the first couple of months because we had an existing community that migrated across to the new site. Since then, growth has been pretty consistent and we're at nearly 40,000 valid members now after 9 years of operation.

 

[Ricsca]

@Sim it looks like you're using version 1 of xf right?
Why did you decide not to update? Don't you think that xf 2, even if it doesn't have significant improvements, could still be a little more appreciated by today's users?

 

[Sim]

@Sim it looks like you're using version 1 of xf right?
Why did you decide not to update? Don't you think that xf 2, even if it doesn't have significant improvements, could still be a little more appreciated by today's users?

I've been working on upgrading my sites to XF 2.x since it was first released.

My sites are heavily customised so it's taking me a while to get the upgrades done. In particular, my advertising management platform, which is where I make the majority of my revenue - so it's a critical factor before I upgrade.

 

[Ricsca]

Can you tell us about the advertising platform you adopted? Maybe I'll take inspiration from it
Thanks

 

[Sadiq6210]

Impressive statistics, I mean you have more posts in 2024 comparing with 2010 when the forums were very popular!!
We started our forum in 2006 as well and we reached ~700K posts until 2012, and today it increased to ~850K only
Although we put continuous effort to develop our forum but the time has been changed and generation has been changed, most of young people prefer social applications

 

[Sim]

Can you tell us about the advertising platform you adopted? Maybe I'll take inspiration from it
Thanks

It's a custom built native text advertising platform. Gets great engagement from our audience.

 

[80sDude]

ZooChat took about 2.5 years for people to start noticing it (mostly Australians), but it wasn't until around 4 years in that people from the UK discovered it and it turns out they are crazy about zoos over there, so traffic exploded.

View attachment 309061

View attachment 309064

Membership isn't huge - after 20 years we only have 10,000 valid members with another 12,000 no longer valid. But the average posts per day from the individual members is huge - they are very active. We also have over 650,000 photos from zoos around the world.

I just ran some queries on the database - we have 4 users who have averaged more than 4 posts per day every day for the past 10+ years

We have some members who have been on the site for more than 18 years who have managed to average nearly 2 posts per day over that time - and one at just under 18 years averaging well over 3 posts per day. These are just regular users - not admins or moderators.

- - -

By way of comparison, my other big site PropertyChat, grew instantly with around 2,500 new members in the first couple of months because we had an existing community that migrated across to the new site. Since then, growth has been pretty consistent and we're at nearly 40,000 valid members now after 9 years of operation.

View attachment 309066

A perfect example of patience is a virtue. That’s awesome that it took off.