Hmmm, I looked, and just found it confusing, gave up and went away.

Hey Lee, thanks for the writeup.

@Peter - What exactly is confusing? Maybe I can make some changes to the main page ot make the purpose of the site clearer.

I submitted my site but it won’t spider the number of posts in my forum stats. Shows “0″ posts (and there are almost 2 million posts) but does show the 103,000 members. Means the algorithm isn’t accurate for my site so my ranking isn’t accurate either.

Well, Matt, I really just don’t get it. And, that’s coming from someone who eats, breath, and sleep forums for the past five years. It looks to me like a pretty tops site. The rankings don’t make sense at all.

I understand you want to build something to compete with Big-Boards.com, and that’s cool, I’m all for more sites about forums. One thing Big Boards has going for it is its simplicity. Very simple concept.

You’re welcome to get me on IM if you want to chat more about it.

@Kathy -

It’s not a problem with the algorithm, but a problem with the crawler. Your site uses terminology that isn’t typical of vBulletin boards to label your data; therefore, the site can’t pick up on it. We’re working on a cheap and easy solution to this for yours and other boards.

Basically this is one of the main reasons Big Boards doesn’t accept smaller forums. There’s no way to make an entirely universal script to gather the information needed for ranking, so it takes a lot of programming manpower to customize it to fit everyone’s needs. With a system with no requirement on size or age, that is a bridge we’re going to have to build in time. We’ll get a working solution, but it will take a lot of work and a little bit of time.

@Peter -

I’d like to talk to you on IM sometime this week.

Matt- That’s interesting since Big Boards has no problem keeping up with my stats accurately. I hope you find a solution soon. (P.S. My website posts are called….Posts. Nothing odd in the terminology there).

Kathy,

As far as the terms used, I was referring to “Users Online Now” which is different from the typical “Currently Online Users” of most vB’s. It’s not a huge deal, just one of many little bumps that we’re going to have to work through when developing this software. Big Boards has a big head start on us (3 years I think?) so of course they have less bugs in their system. Hopefully it won’t take us long to catch up

@Kathy -

I think we found the problem for your Post counts. Nothing more than a typo in the crawler Next update should work for you.

Thanks Matt. I look forward to seeing the results of the update.

Matt, There is confusion for me about your ranking system.

Example: Rank: 28
Board: vbulletin
Members: 31,616
Posts: 1,173,576

Rank: 35
Board: vbulletin
Members: 104,828
Posts: 1,969,097

Can you justify a forum with such a big difference in size, ranked ahead of another obviously larger forum? Am I missing something? I just want to understand. Thanks for your help!

The system factors in a lot more than just size; that’s what makes it a more accurate grade of forums than Big Boards. It takes into account registration rate and user activity among other things for example.

Seems all just arbitrary to me.

And to me too. A forum doesn’t get to be the leader in their field, with almost 2 million posts, 100K members with the longevity of eight+ years for no reason. I think your algorithm is a bit skewed and yes…arbitrary.

Kathy, I’m sorry you’re mad that your forum doesn’t rank as well as you would like. The system is not arbitrary. It calculates what we believe to be the most important factors of an active forum - size (being the main one), authority, activity (of both guests and members), and registration rate.

Your forum is relatively small when compared to the forums that rank better than yours. If you look at all of the numbers on the whole you’ll see it is a very consistent and fair system. As far as why your forum ranks lower than the example you pointed out despite the difference in size - I’m not 100% certain. I’ll go ahead and tell you that size alone accounts for about 30 of the overall 100 points. The other points are calculated based on what I mentioned before (authority, activity, and registration rate).

So although your forum has almost 2 million posts, it only has ~62,000 backlinks whereas another forum with only 535,000 posts has over 466,000 backlinks (as well as many more pages indexed on MSN and Yahoo). That’s just one example that illustrates one of many many different reasons why some forums rank higher than others despite the difference in size.

This system was created so that smaller forums could rank as high for larger forums if they had a more active community, an authoritative presence, as well as decent size. I’m sorry you as well as Peter think it’s arbitrary, but I promise you a lot of time and consideration has gone into this system, and it displays what we believe to be the best of the best ranked properly.