Internet forums are user-generated content websites consisting of categorized discussions organized into threads. Internet forums are also sometimes called message boards or online discussion sites. It’s appropriate that we define what an Internet forum is here, as this site aspires to be the premier Internet forum directory. Internet forums are similar to, but not exactly the same as, an electronic newgroup or Usenet group.
The Largest Internet Forums
Internet forums are categorized by how large they are. (There are other ways to categorize them too, by topic being the main tool we use in the actual directory here.) Internet forums’ sizes are usually measured by how many posts and topics have been discussed there. And the number of active members is another way of looking at the size of a forum. At the time of this writing, some of the largest Internet forum include:
- Gaia Online – Discussions of games and entertainment with an anime and manga focus. As of this writing, they have 19,234,851 registered users, and 1,639,517,332 articles posted. According to Quantcast, 340,000 people a day visit their forums.
- 4Chan – Focuses on discussions of Japanese culture, among a wide variety of other subjects. They do not require registration to post. As of this writing, they have 313,222,060 posts and 29,637 active users. Quantcast estimates that they have close to 500,000 visitors a day.
- d2jsp – A Diablo message board with 225,127,426 posts and 496,485 registered users. I had no idea that Diablo was so popular.
- IGN Boards – IGN owns a huge network of entertainment and gaming websites, many (or all) of which feed into this one big message board. As of today they boast of 199,944,051 total posts and 4066 different boards.
- Nexopia is a sex and relationships forum with over 1,432,073 users.
- Face the Jury is one of those silly site where you rate pictures of other people. There are millions of posts in almost all of the different boards here, and there are at least a dozen different boards available.
We found these forums using Big Boards, which is a directory of forums organized entirely by the size of each forum. If you’re looking for more information about forums and about large Internet forums in particular, then that’s the authority site on the subject. They track over 2300 different forums, and they include listings for newer forums as well as for the fastest growing forums.
We operate a few forums ourselves, but none of them are going to make the Big Boards list any time soon. These forums include:
- Horror Forum – You can discuss horror movies and horror literature here to your heart’s content. We’re particularly proud of our H.P. Lovecraft forums and our Stephen King forums there.
- Cinema Threads – Movie discussions.
We have plans to start updating our blog about Internet forums on a Monday through Friday basis, so stay tuned for more news and information about Internet forum, message boards, and online discussion sites. We’re pretty cool about publishing comments, but they actually need to serve the purpose of carrying on a discussion rather than just being an excuse to drop your link somewhere. We vet all of the comments by hand, and we can tell the difference.