[Darth-Apple]

Personally, I absolutely do. I get a little overwhelemed on a forum with 300+ posts a day. It's harder to feel connected with anything when the bar to getting involved is getting to 20,000+ posts. 

The largest forum I'm active on is the MyBB community support forum, but even that has become a bit slow nowadays (maybe about 50 posts a day). The very first forum I was involved with is simtropolis.com. I ended up leaving there to get involved in SM (a now defunct community that inspired MS). SM had about 40K posts by the time that it went by the wayside, and it was honestly the perfect size for me. 

I've always been a fan of smaller places. It's less overwhelming.  

What are your preferences, forum wise?

[Juneberry]

I tend to like smaller forums because they're less draining on my severe anxiety... But big ones don't bother me as much as I'd expect, either. Well, maybe a little...

[Guardian]

I like places where I can keep up.

The biggest I am on is HackForums, and there's no keeping up with it.

[Darth-Apple]

Hackforums is huge. I could never, not in a million years, even begin. I rely on the "view new posts" feature pretty heavily, and there, you'd have thousands of new posts between visits.

I'll agree with Juneberry on this one... Slower forums are less draining. I don't feel like I'm missing all of the action because I'm out for a day. It's nice in its own way.

[Guardian]

Hackforums is huge. I could never, not in a million years, even begin. I rely on the "view new posts" feature pretty heavily, and there, you'd have thousands of new posts between visits.

I'll agree with Juneberry on this one... Slower forums are less draining. I don't feel like I'm missing all of the action because I'm out for a day. It's nice in its own way.

Yeah, go to New Posts. Wait 10 seconds and refresh, the entire page has been pushed down. Its nuts. I can't even.

There's people with 10s of thousands of posts, and he deletes accounts not logged into after 7 years regardless of how many posts they have, so there's 10s of thousands of "Guest" posts now too. Its just... crazy.

[Plushy]

Depends of the content... like... a forum with +500 post a day (since most forums today barely have activity) but 480 of the post come from the spam/"fun" area with ramdom post from the classic threads: "Say something to the person above!" "Let's count to X" "Kiss, Hug, Slap" etc...

In my case... that kind of activity just depress me because for me, forums are still places to express in a more complex way than on social media, a place to learn and share thoughts and knowledge.

On the same way, a forum with a post every month is not a good place to stay xD

[Darth-Apple]

@Guardian: I registered to Hackforums yesterday. 60 million posts, and about 12K a day. No joke, that place is active as active gets.

@Plushy: Agreed. Quality over quantity.

[JennyorAlice]

I'm with Pushy. It depends on the content of the forum. I join a forum because of the content of the forum, because they have something I want to discuss.

[Kyng]

Somewhere in-between .

I think there's a 'sweet spot' where a forum is large enough to still have something new and interesting every time I log in, but small enough to still have a tight-knit sense of community.

[Darth-Apple]

Somewhere in-between .

I think there's a 'sweet spot' where a forum is large enough to still have something new and interesting every time I log in, but small enough to still have a tight-knit sense of community.

I agree. 

One thing I've noticed is that it's equally important to maintain that level of activity. Once a registered group of people are active on a forum with a general gauge of a certain activity level, the community either has to grow up from that or it has to maintain. If it falls, it's not a good sign. 

Small forums I've noticed often last a while just because the bar for keeping them alive is pretty low. You could get on and have 3-5 posts a day, but if it's a forum with 5K posts, that's acceptable. And on the same token, if they truly die, again the bar for bringing them back is low. You just gotta get a few people back on and get some level of activity. On the other hand, a forum with hundreds of posts a day would be considered dying if it went down to 50. The bar is much higher.

[Kyng]

Somewhere in-between .

I think there's a 'sweet spot' where a forum is large enough to still have something new and interesting every time I log in, but small enough to still have a tight-knit sense of community.

I agree. 

One thing I've noticed is that it's equally important to maintain that level of activity. Once a registered group of people are active on a forum with a general gauge of a certain activity level, the community either has to grow up from that or it has to maintain. If it falls, it's not a good sign. 

Small forums I've noticed often last a while just because the bar for keeping them alive is pretty low. You could get on and have 3-5 posts a day, but if it's a forum with 5K posts, that's acceptable. And on the same token, if they truly die, again the bar for bringing them back is low. You just gotta get a few people back on and get some level of activity. On the other hand, a forum with hundreds of posts a day would be considered dying if it went down to 50. The bar is much higher.

Yeah, I agree there. A lot of people seem to be good at creating a forum, but bad at maintaining it: it's like they operate entirely on the novelty factor that comes with a brand new community, then they just lose interest as soon as that 'new car smell' wears off  .

There's another thing I should add to my previous post, though. I tend to prefer mid-sized forums, with a balance between "lots of content" and "tight-knit community"... but, when it comes to Discord servers, I definitely prefer smaller ones. I don't do well at all in the fast-paced environment of a large Discord server: if it has more than a few dozen people in it, then I find it hard to keep up.