Right, finally got the RPGDL wiki up and running. Should be productive in the long run, since this group does a lot of collecting game data, however it's an entirely new system to 90% of the users (most of whom have only used message boards and AIM) so there have only been three or four people editing so far.

Regardless, seems to have a lot of potential (organizing links and collected data on games; editing pieces of writing for the main site; potential roleplaying opportunities) so it certainly seems worth a shot. Heck, maybe it'll attract some outside interest....

For those that don't know, the RPG Duelling League is a tournament of console-RPG characters inspired by Bobbin Cranbud's RPG Playoffs. Well the community-run website has finally been transferred from my departmental website over to a permanent url www.rpgdl.com. Working on a website has...taught me how to use php, designing images with the GIMP, ssh, ftp, and all that. We've got more programmers who know what they're doing finally; Hal looks to be transferring a lot of our stuff to MySQL databases, as opposed to text output.

I do hope to put the code under a GPL, though I want to see the MySQL stuff running before I put any code up for download. Of course, html is, as always, free.

Well, I figure it's time to start a second Journal entry (mostly because the first seems to have hit its limit, or else /. is glitching).

I'm doing a study of the internet which I hope will turn into a /. article. Basically, I'm looking for the highest posts-per-day output of forums on the Internet, as well as individual message boards. Help would be appreciated, I know there's more large forums out there.

So far, the ones I'm still testing are (in alphabetical order for quick reference):

Ebay community
Fark (though I'm having trouble getting post totals for the entire site; just doing post-a-link right now)
ForumPlanet
GameFAQs
General Mayhem
Go-Gaia (though I'm having trouble measuring individual boards)
IGN boards
Nickelodeon (Nick.com)
Penny-Arcade
Slashdot (bet you didn't see this one comming)
Soompi
Rotten Tomatoes
TechTV
UltimateWedding

And the other one's I've looked at, but stopped testing because they were too small (though I have enough data to place them roughly):

3DRealms
AskMen.com
Hard Forum
Gamers.com
Msn.com
Newgrounds
Something Awful (I can't even test the thing because I need to pay to even see the forums. Either it has a fast purge rate or it's small from the one single piece of data I did get, though).
Straightdope
TeamXBox
Webcomics
Yahoo (Message Boards, not groups which are private)

You can find most of my old data and analysis at my previous /. Journal.

In addition, most of the people who have been helping me are from Current Events, GameFAQs (Though note that you need a GameFAQs account that's been active for...I think a day to view this forum).

Hmm, well I have been wondering this recently. All the particularly large message boards that I've managed to find in my search have been game boards. (...at least in terms of sheer post volume. Slashdot has considerably larger posts with more intellectual quality, for instance, and this is not measured by post numbers). So far, the largest I've found have been GameFAQs and IGN.com. Well now for some basic data. NOTE: this is just raw data right now; it tells nothing about the actual rate of posting, and is not accurate between sites.

GameFAQs purges topics if they haven't been posted in for a given amount of time (for most larger boards about a day; but the purge only happens once a day). Hard to get posts per day for that reason...at least as far as individual boards go.

Taken at 9/24/2003 19:09:29
topic=10239326
message=106369223

Individual boards: taken at 19:06 GameFAQs time

LUE:2381; 36680
RI:1028; 26798
CE: 1735; 17528

And a few a bit later:

SC2003: 626; 17194, 9/24 7:12PM
PotD: 929; 17476, 9/24 7:15PM

IGN Doesn't seem to purge...or maybe they purge every two years or something; hard to tell. Fortunately they tell total posts.

Total Messages: 60,807,042 (38,322 posted today) Taken at 7:19pm IGN time.

Vestibule: 371,251; 5,689,766; 7:19pm
GCN General Board: 106,834; 2,199,845; 7:25pm
XBox General Board: 77,941; 1,280,921; 7:27pm

The thing to do is to check back later, and then estimate Posts per Day (PpD). Obviously post raw post counts between sites don't tell much due to varying purge rate; and moderated messages are not insignificant for some boards. My estimation just by pressing the refresh button is that LUE is larger than the Vestibule, but not by too large of a factor.

Why am I doing this? Scientific curiosity... Cataloguing the Internet... something like that. If anyone is reading this, can you direct me to other particularly large boards (or suggest a way to estimate the size of Slashdot...)?