Where Oh Where has our BT Gone

Will Heath said:
Largest? Are you saying largest by data stored? I still believe we are talking a couple dozen gigs here at the most, not that it matters at all, but a terabyte is 1,024 gigs, let's compare some other reference source sizes...

A pickup truck filled with books would be about 1 gigabyte

The contents of a DVD would be about 17 gigabyte

A collection of the works of Beethoven - 20 gigabytes

A library floor of academic journals - 100 gigabytes

50,000 trees made into paper and printed - 1 terabyte

The print collections of the U.S. Library of Congress - 10 terabytes

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid5_gci944596,00.html


Will
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Yeah, I would say BT is the largest by data stored, the amount of signed up members, the most pictures posted and the largest overall bonsai forum in America.

Storage is super cheap nowdays...... Heck my new pc has over 750 gig hard drive and I have another 1+ terrabyte external harddrive/storage that was very inexpensive.....so I can now run my own forum? I justmight kick that around a bit..... I could use my laptop as a server......hmmm....
 
Will, one major problem with your figures is most of them are text. Text doesn't take up hardly any room-a book is nothing.

I personally have 50 gigs of pictures and music on my hard drive.....and that's only in a 2 year period. And that's just my work, and that's me constantly deleting things :). I've been eying the 1 terrabyte external drive and seriously considering it, because I haven't even begun to delve into making music and video.

Anyhow, it's the pics on BT that would make it a pain to move. Not to mention all the links.......etc etc etc. I'd hate to move my website.....much less an entire forum. If I can have 50 gigs no sweat in 2 years.....imagine whats on BT.

Jason.......yea you could run your own bonsai forum :). But do you really want to ? :)

In the meantime, I'll be in the vault bwahahaha
 
I highly doubt that BT is the largest by data stored by a longshot if your talking in the category of all forums in America. He was on shared or virtual hosting. The most he could get out of that was 30 GB at most and 30 GB would have been costing him more than a dedicated server. 2nd, it isn't even near some of the biggest forums on the internet. The biggest of which contains over a billion messages. I'm not sure that BT even has over a million. If your talking about bonsai forums, then yes, it's biggest that I know of. If BT had even near a terabyte of pictures, the bandwidth and storage costs would soon spiral out of control to a point that was no longer sustainable by advertising. Like I said, my guess would be 2 to 3 GB of storage needed for that site. Pictures in a gallery take up much less space than on your computer because of software optimization for the internet.
 
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JasonG said:
Yeah, I would say BT is the largest by data stored, the amount of signed up members, the most pictures posted and the largest overall bonsai forum in America.
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I think you may be mistaken here. Before IBC went down and lost all its data, it, being in operation longer than most other forums, had many posts and because of its strong preference for pictures, it had thousands upon thousands of pictures of bonsai. It also was very busy most the time, very active.

IBC aside, BSite not only holds the second listing on google for searches on the word "bonsai" (in comaprion AoB is on page three and BT is on page four see http://lmgtfy.com/?q=bonsai ) but it has quite a user list and is very active, more so on most occassions that BT. Its long history also has built up quite a data base.



Will
 
Will Heath said:
I think you may be mistaken here. Before IBC went down and lost all its data, it, being in operation longer than most other forums, had many posts and because of its strong preference for pictures, it had thousands upon thousands of pictures of bonsai. It also was very busy most the time, very active.

IBC aside, BSite not only holds the second listing on google for searches on the word "bonsai" (in comaprion AoB is on page three and BT is on page four see http://lmgtfy.com/?q=bonsai ) but it has quite a user list and is very active, more so on most occassions that BT. Its long history also has built up quite a data base.



Will
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I know IBC was probably the biggest forum, but that changed a while ago when it crashed. So that is a non issue or not even comparable to BT.

The fact that BS comes up before BT doesn't mean it is a larger site than BT, is just means it comes up first. That could be for many reasons. Heck you could have KnOB at #1 if you want to throw a few dollars Googles way.

I stop into BS from time to time, yes they are builiding up qite a database...the problem with them is there is only a couple people there that have good/descent trees and know anything. If it weren't for Grouper (He and I are good friends) that site wouldn't be as active with descent trees..... Great site for begineers.

I think Brent wrote a very spot on post about all the sites and who/what they cater to. It might even be here on the nut??

Jason
 
JasonG said:
The fact that BS comes up before BT doesn't mean it is a larger site than BT, is just means it comes up first.
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As you pointed out Jason, seach engines leave a lot to be desired. "Crash Bonsai", "Bonsai Potato", and "The Bonsai Icon Collection" all are ranked higher than BT, BN or KoB on Google, and I can guarantee you they get 1/1000th the traffic; including the fact that they are only tangentially related to the base subject.

The other major fallacy is that number of registrants on a forum equate to traffic, or even more importantly, quality of content. We have had over 10,000 "registrants" here at BonsaiNut, but I regularly prune the list to drop people who did not complete the process, or who haven't visited the site recently. For forums who do NOT do this maintenance, over 90% of their registration list will be registration bots or spammers.

There is a relatively new koi forum (that will go unnamed) that was created and zoomed to over 1 million posts in 4 years with fewer than 15,000 registered members. Some of the members had over 10,000 posts. It was a conversation site - most of the site traffic was people chatting about subject matter that had nothing to do with koi. Average posts per registrant - about 100.

My favorite forum, Reef Central (an online site for salt water aquarium enthusiasts) has almost 15 million posts and has a LOT of expert level content, including Chemistry PhD's, Marine Biologists, etc. It has over 200,000 legitimate registrants - they prune their list to eliminate spammers and bots. Average posts per registrant - about 75.

This site - even with a managed registration list - has averaged about 15 posts per registrant. Bonsai Site gets about 15. I don't have the stats for BT. The new IBC gets 4. KoB gets 15. Either bonsai forum sites attract a lot of lurkers, or perhaps bonsai enthusiasts only post when they have something to say :)

The only forums that I have found that get lower stats are technical support forums - where people tend to register, fix their problem, and then never return.
 
BonsaiNut said:
The other major fallacy is that number of registrants on a forum equate to traffic, or even more importantly, quality of content. We have had over 10,000 "registrants" here at BonsaiNut, but I regularly prune the list to drop people who did not complete the process, or who haven't visited the site recently. For forums who do NOT do this maintenance, over 90% of their registration list will be registration bots or spammers.
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This is true. I delete about 30 users a day at AoB and also at KoB, mainly spammers, bots, or those who do not abide to the user name policy. If I left hem all as users, we'd have literally hundred of thousands of members. :eek:


BonsaiNut said:
Either bonsai forum sites attract a lot of lurkers, or perhaps bonsai enthusiasts only post when they have something to say :)
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I'd say lurkers, especially with AoB, we average 1728984 hits every month, but few posts, people tend to treat it more like a magazine than a forum, but this does not equate to inactivity. Averaging 34691 unique visitors per month, with a average bandwidth usage of 63.41 GB, like some other forums, AoB is busier than most would imagine.
 
Which is larger is pretty easy to figure out. Total number of posts + Total number of pictures + Total number of attached files + Total number of PMs. Those three things are going to be your biggest data hogs on a forum. Two of them are pretty easy to figure out. With BT though, you've also got their side applications like link directory and wiki. I doubt they contribute that much to total storage, but they do contribute something.
 
subnet_rx said:
Which is larger is pretty easy to figure out. Total number of posts + Total number of pictures + Total number of attached files + Total number of PMs. Those three things are going to be your biggest data hogs on a forum. Two of them are pretty easy to figure out. With BT though, you've also got their side applications like link directory and wiki. I doubt they contribute that much to total storage, but they do contribute something.
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You forgot a big culprit: personal icons - they can easily surpass the size of your text data if you aren't careful.

Large forums (really large) will start to have problems with search functionality since search generates a fair amount of server load. The solution here is to limit search availability (only so many searches per x seconds), to archive threads that are over x days old (and require a separate search query to search archived content), and most importantly, to set up your forums in an intuitive manner in the FIRST PLACE so that people don't have to run as many searches to find content that is relevant. Forum hosts might not like the size of your databases, but they HATE forum search with unbridled passion :)
 
Limiting some of those things are just counter-productive to a thriving community though. Your right about avatars, although I didn't list them because in my experience, so few people use them in relation to overal member base, it's almost not worth mentioning. On my forum, avatars make up about 0.5% of the overall storage needs.

I wish the admins of BT would reach out to the community for help when they don't have the time to maintain their community. I don't visit BT that often because I don't really like the community, but that doesn't mean that many people find it useful and to their tastes. Therefore, it is good for the art to keep it alive and running.
 
SO, I hope I am wrong, but what if BT is dead, as it seems. All the traffic comes here. Does this site have the capacity to handle it?

Free sites are cool as long as they actually work. I would have rather paid than lost that site. (Like I said, I hope I am wrong, but have been checking for almost two weeks now and see no change)
 
And how will the old-time BN people feel? There's a post earlier in this thread from someone who hoped BT would get back up quickly so it could "reclaim its own." :confused:
 
Most people who posted at BT also posted on other forums before, they are doing the same now, and most likely will always do the same....this is the nature of the internet. Few few people only read or post on one forum.


Life is good,



Will
 
grizzlywon said:
All the traffic comes here. Does this site have the capacity to handle it?
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I'm not too worried about it. This is actually quite a small site. Even BT is a very small site for an Internet forum. Now THIS is a big forum :)

I prefer quality over quantity. In the case of bonsai, one thorough, well-documented thread can be worth (to me) the entire cost to host this site for a month.
 
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