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How to make a local copy of an ancient Web forum?

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city_zen:
I would consider DonationCoder to be an average sized forum
-Paul Keith (November 23, 2008, 09:48 AM)
--- End quote ---

From the forum's frontpage:
Total Posts: 139,067
Total Topics: 14,933

IMHO, this forum is rather on the large-ish side ....

Anyway, maybe mouser can tell us the size of the forum's back end database in MBs, so we can have at least a ballpark approximation of how big a forum database can be. Yes, I do understand that it may vary GREATLY, depending on whether attachments and/or images are allowed or not, but still it'd be better than nothing

Paul Keith:
city_zen, while that's true, I think just compared to the really popular forums, it falls short but my litmus test for a really active forum is one where you can't read one topic and go back to find that the entire first page has become different in a matter of minutes where only topics that are constantly churning out replies are the ones getting back up and new topics have to be constantly bumped to the top.

Lashiec:
Compared to some behemoths, DonationCoder is almost like a grain in the sand. Just for reference, the IGN boards have exactly 189,401,031 messages in this exact moment. And they have a couple of users with more than 100,000 posts, so...

city_zen:
Yup, you're right. Turns out Donation Coder is in fact an average sized forum, my "humble opinion" was wrong  :P
Since I don't usually participate in or even visit such huge forums, I wasn't aware of the gigantic size some of them have acquired.
After I realized it, it wasn't long before I thought "Hmmm, I wonder which is *the largest* forum in the WWW", which led me to this page: Big Boards Ranking

 :o
What can I say? I can't believe there's actually a forum with over a billion posts and over 15 million members, but the info is there ...  :huh:

Paul Keith:
Well Gaia Online is constantly fed by their in-game currency. You see, people there gain in-game money for every post they have which allows them to buy new stuff for their avatars.

To add to that, there are constantly poem/story contests there which promises big huge in-game money which further feed the post counts. Finally, before it jumped the shark, it had a decent Religion/Politics/etc. "Expanded Discussion" board that was on par with DonationCoder's friendliness except on popular topics.

Most of the discussions never reached the advanced stages of discussions but many also were able to avoid flame fests and the fact that, that section of the forum had no censorships, made it one of the more popular boards for awhile even when topics were repeatedly being made so it's something fundamentally different from the way you approach DonationCoder's more traditional forum design.

The same can be said for 4chan which allows for anonymous postings which if it isn't already helped by the porn in it, constantly creates and popularizes memes mainly due to it's anonymity and ease of inputting. It's kind of like the original more bad-ass version of Twitter and Plurk. (though the design isn't original and in fact has been copied from the design of many Japanese forums)

That's why these two are incomparable. The rest pretty much have 24/7 internet netizens topic in mind.

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