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I'm really interested in like, "Board Theory" these days

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Professor Snuggles:
The board theory stuff I am talking about has less to do with "this is the way this forum is" and more to do with "why is this forum the way it is." Anyone who has been posting here, or at least in the off-topic zone, has an awareness of the fact that this forum is a fairly personable place, whatever. The amount of people who know each other by name here is to me at least fairly atypical of most message boards, but it is definitely the way it is, here.

I think part of it, and a part we don't think about at least anymore, is that this board is to some extent a spiritual successor of Dumbrella. Not entirely, because Dumbrella doesn't even exist anymore, but the first people who registered here were all Dumbrella boarders, because Jeph was and they followed him over to support him in his new endeavor. I think a lot of the personability of this forum is actually a side effect of taking cues from that board, at least on the part of the people who were responsible for board culture in those earlier days.

The relationships on this board have a lot to do with that, I think. The fact that we all met each other early on, either through like, Comic-Con or just random board meet-ups, or me showing up at your house while I was traveling, or when Tanya came and met me at Coachella... there's a lot of reasons, and I don't think we would have interacted with each other that way if there hadn't been a precedent set for it on this other forum so many of us read. And obviously the fact that we have broken bread together, gotten drunk together, makes it kind of silly to then call everyone by their forum names. I have people I know from real life on hipinion, or people I've met, but there's no chance I'd ever refer to them by first name on that board.

Jimor:
I probably have way more to say on the subject than is healthy. I'll come back to more later, but while time permits before I head out for the day.

One important factor in how an online community develops is the board software/interface. Some forum software just seems more conducive to general conversation, while others seem to be better at keeping topics separate and on track, but lose a personal touch in doing so. The former is better for "communities" while the latter would be better for say a help forum on a piece of software.

One feature that I've seen people come to virtual blows over is "threaded" vs. "unthreaded". QCForum is unthreaded, in that when you open a topic, you're given a straight chronological list of every post, and who is replying to whom is determined by context or quoting. Other boards, you'd have to untwizzle the thread tree to get to a specific line of conversation, and so if you're following that line, you may totally skip and miss a different branch of the tree (and miss a lot of what other people are talking about). I've even been on some boards where each person has an option of viewing it either way, so you get some people who never quote because it's obvious to them from the tree who they're replying to, but people who view it unthreaded lose all the context of that post.

I think I like the forum software here the most of just about all I've seen because it really emphasizes the real estate given to the posts. Some web forums squeeze that so much with sidebars and such that they naturally lead to a style of all short posts and replies, maybe 2 paragraphs at most. A post like this would really be a Wall-O-Text on those sites. We value conciseness here, but we still can post at length if needbe.

A subset of this is a rule here that I think makes more difference than people realize: the no sig image rule. I've been on so many sites where the sigs just overwhelm everything else and it becomes more work to scroll through and read a thread than is really necessary.

I think these things is why a good multipost here is appreciated, it really doesn't make people scroll much more than a single lengthy post would.

More later perhaps.

johnny5:

--- Quote from: David_Dovey on 02 Jan 2011, 09:05 ---
--- Quote from: johnny5 on 02 Jan 2011, 01:19 ---this board seems to have its own way of talking/typing/accent. i can't place it right now without pulling up some good examples, but hopefully some of you know what i mean. other msgboards i'm on don't seem to have this, but maybe because they aren't as personal as this board (i'm guessing, with all the sex)

--- End quote ---

Basically we're all trying as hard as we can to mimic the speech patterns of T. Rex and/or the characters of Achewood, in the main.

--- End quote ---

yeah, that seems right


--- Quote from: Johnny C on 02 Jan 2011, 02:38 ---it's a community that functions in the way its members choose to treat it. here, they treat it like basically a conversation between a large group of friends, which in a lot of respects it is.

--- End quote ---

also seems to be true, are you able to tell if this board is very busy/large, active users-wise? discounting the forum about the comic, i would probably place regular active members below 500.

Drill King:
I would agree with Tommy in a lot of ways. Because people are able to talk over instant messages it changes the dynamic a lot. Also I think the fact that many members have been consistent and sharing(a lot and openly) over the years has created the same atmosphere as with old friends.

Jimor:
I see there's been a membership purge at some point in the last year. There used to be about 30,000 registered members, now there's about 15k.

There's a pretty good rule of thumb that follows boards like this. You take whatever attracts people to the web site in the first place, in this case, the webcomic, and ~10% of those people will at some point sign up to the forum to post or lurk. Very fuzzy data from elsewhere suggests that QC has a following of around 300k, so the pre-purge number works there pretty well.

Of those, about 10% ever bother to post more than 1 or 2 introductory posts before disappearing completely, or going into lurker mode. Of those, you cut down to another 10% who become "active" in that they've posted sometime in the past few months, and might possibly show up again later. Here we're roughly in your 500 territory.

Next, you get the 10% of those who probably compromise over 50% of the posts committed on a daily basis. So maybe 50-100 here. Then the last tiny group is your power posters that seem to be everywhere and really rack up the post count (and as the other thread notes, it's not like they have to be here 24/7 to do this, just be semi-interested in many of the topics being discussed).

Another surprisingly consistent number over the years has been the lurker/(active) poster ratio. Of sites that can track it, 8:1 seems to be the sweet spot.

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