my community
http://www.iasian.net/board
not many posts and members yet…our site is less than 2 months old …hopefully, it will grow
Lanzer_: your site is totally awesome…i really love it…wish mine like that 
Online only since a few months, the boards have known since a faster-than-imaginable growth, having at the time of this interview more than 4 million posts and 80000 users. How true it is ? btw, I am presently devloping a site for 9000 users community base…replaced 512DDR, celeron, 80GB HDD but still slow, what abt yours ?
by the way Lanzer_, may i ask how did you get that much traffic for only a few months? what techniques did you use? did you spend a lot of money on advertising?
Hi webcrawler, the user count is true, though personally I don’t think user count is of big relavance since it might just reflect the age of the site and not the activity. :xeye: (the post count isn’t technically true since I delete anything over a month old on most forums) A more relavant count would be the number of users on-line during peak hours and new users signing up per day. When we had 9000 users there were about 200 users online during the day. The celeron 1.3 with 1GB RAM was starting to slow down, and when we reached 250 online users we had to upgrade. Actually, that was before I did all the forum optimizations and learned about the server configuration tricks. Wonder how much better it would have ran with what I have now. 
Today I manage 2 graphics server, 2 forum servers, 1 server for other parts of the site like the store and the art arena, and 1 database backend. More details are in a thread I responded yesterday:
http://www.sitepointforums.com/showthread.php?threadid=131796
I came across sitepoint in search of other forums and admins managing sites similar to ours for tips on maintaining and configuring servers since I’m still a newbie on so many things, especially on strategies in expanding with more servers, clustering, and all that good stuff. 
Hello, in terms of site promotion I don’t know of any secret for I’m not a marketing guru. I just listen to ideas and tips from everyone I talked to. I’ve led to believe that it isn’t about promotion but more about the focus on “visitor’s interest”, more like spending all the time and effort into making sure that there is something to ensure repeated visits, or something to make the visitor want to invite their friends over, so to speak. Or in another words, something to counter the “if you build it, they will come” philosiphy. 
My community, MissSportsTalk was launched in May of '02 with phpBB running it. It got a few initiall signups, but because of the nature of the subject matter (high school sports) it was pretty dormant for most of the summer. But it picked up slowly through the fall of 02 and then saw a flury of activity during the football playoffs.
It did okay during the spring sememster and then got really slow again during the summer. I used that time to convert over to IPB then upgrade to IPB 1.2. Even though I was using a different skin when I was with phpBB, I’m still using the default IPB skin (I know, that screams “Lack Of Attention” really clearly.) But most members haven’t cared. I still think that if I get a custom skin made and add a few features, it would do even better. But word of mouth has been the greatest publicity for me, as well as posting a link now and then to some larger, instate university sports boards. I’ve even had some people say they’ve surfed in by way of Google. But signups and activity has been very encouraging the past 3 or 4 months.
I’m in the top 10 for searches of both Mississippi Sports and Mississippi High School Sports. So that’s not bad. But I really want more representation from the entire state…most of the members are from the north half.
A few of you that I’ve looked at have some really nice looking IPB skins. I might send you a PM about designing one for me soon… And I’d like to place some local ads on it soon so I can let it be more than just a hobby and maybe even break even!
i must say…you’ve done a great job Lanzer! keep up the good work
Here’s my community.
www.internet-clubhouse.com
It’s a fairly large site and it’s getting bigger all the time with more features and enhancements always being added. My member base is beginning to grow as well. I’ve been working on it for about a year and really havn’t done much to promote it. I’m in all the major search engines and I posted my link on a few other sites but that’s about it. The main way my site is promoted is through my forum sigs and word of mouth.
Our community is focused on Native American Pow Wows. We have about 6,500 members.
We have the following features:
Forum - vBulletin
HelpDesk - Kayako
Shop - osCommerce
Dating Service - WebDate
Photo Gallery - PhotoPost
Instant Messaging - Hubz
Chat - DigiChat
Pow Wow Calendar
Pow Wow Resource Database
Links
and more
Discussion for sports enthusiasts. Opened just last week so I’m still trying to find some people to sign up. any tips?
Synergy Forums are a new field for me, it all started as a way i could learn some PHP but after 3 days of the site being open people started to register… I didnt and have not promoted the site apart from the last few weeks exchanging links with others but the site is growing everyday.
All i want from the site is a place people can chat, have fun and share thoughts and whatever with others. Anyway have a look www.synergyforums.com
Hey nice site. How did you add that banner section the the right on your links forum? Very nifty 
FlaglerOnline: http://www.flagleronline.com
We created this community site dediacted to our local county. Fortunately, it took off well and it’s been a massive source of web dev business for us. We have also ceased advertising requests as a sole sponsor purchased 80% of space.
Frags Argentina: http://www.frags.com.ar/
We are a small gamers community we started as a clan page and then we started growing. Slowly but growing.
Things that really worked and are working is SEO.
We’ve never promoted it. I started doing some SEO since the last 2 months… and I can tell you it works… our average number of visits was 130 and now is 200… and this in two months of SEO and updating contents.
So to me Content and SEO is the best way to increase traffic, visits, signups.
Software we use: vBulletin of course. PHP and MySQL for the database.
Now I’m creating the new layout for the page and I will focus more on SEO by using stats. That will help us to see what people is looking for.
I started www.BigBlueBall.com a few years ago, originally just to have a place on the web to exercise my web development. It evolved to find a purpose 2-1/2 years ago, with a focus on instant messaging.
The things that have helped:
- Persistence and consistency. Keep things fresh.
- Get people involved. Don’t even imagine that you’ll ever achieve a vibrant community by doing it all yourself. You’ll end up with a community of one.
- Content. You’ll do much better if you have content in addition to community. Too many sites are nothing more than a forum script. People (and search engines) need meat to sink their teeth into.
- Promotion. Create a newsletter, even if you can’t publish regularly. Make sure your site is in your email signature, forum signature, etc…
- Get Listed. Make sure you work to optimize your site for the search engines.
- Persistence. Yeah, I know I’m repeating myself, but that’s how important it is.
not really my site but i’m also admin of it.
www.helpen.be is a dutch computer community forum, it uses phpBB and is a bit modded with useful features such as a quick reply box. in the feature we will be converting to an other php forum package will be written by a team member…
not that much promotion, we added our url to many link sites in the beginning and that gives a small snowball effect 
My site is at www.thebookforum.com
It’s two years old today
Been slowly evolving over that time. Started with ezboard 
before moving to vbulletin.
Tyring to work on promoting the site a bit more at the moment. Will probably be adding a newsletter in the new year. Maybe auctions and a webmail service. Not sure how useful they would be given the popularity of ebay and hotmail etc.
We are still developing the site but its getting there. Should be done sometime next month maybe.
We plan to probably use Google, Overture, DarkBlue, SEO, and some other methods to promote the site once its finish.