Re: Most Active Tolkien Forums of 2013

[RA]

Bree's probably also helped by all the actual spam.  

[Ally]

2.92 posts a day bitch!

[CC12 35]

11.18 posts a day bitch!

[Eldorion]

trolololololololololololololololoo.....ø

My thoughts exactly.

You gotta give Mrs Figg a lot of credit too. Eldo is ahead on total posts because he's been around longer, but with a career average of 13.2 posts per day, Figg is ahead of Eldo  by 1 1/2 posts per day.

Yeah, I'm going to have to keep my activity up if I want to turn things around.

[Eldorion]

Bree's probably also helped by all the actual spam.  

I was aware of the spam problem so I made sure to exclude spam from the post count. Sinister has also done a great job deleting most of the spam.  Bree's #9 ranking is fairly earned.

[Mrs Figg]

 You gotta give Mrs Figg a lot of credit too. Eldo is ahead on total posts because he's been around longer, but with a career average of 13.2 posts per day, Figg is ahead of Eldo  by 1 1/2 posts per day.

 most of those are Pettypoking posts  

[Ally]

50% of CC's posts are asking Petty to edit Taylor Swift into the soundtracks of his projects.

[Pettytyrant101]

most of those are Pettypoking posts - Mrs Figg

Aww Figgs, so romantic, how often you think about me in a violent way!  

50% of CC's posts are asking Petty to edit Taylor Swift into the soundtracks of his projects.- Ally

This is very true!

[Norc]

18.85 posts per day

[RA]

So, Bree's all better.  

[Eldorion]

I'm glad you guys got your spam problems sorted out.  Much respect to Sinister for slogging through so much of it.

[Norc]

oh, wait, so i'm not a spammer?

[Eldorion]

Eh?  Not in the sense of posting advertisements, but in the sense of posting a lot...

[Norc]

.... i just.. like to reply to every posts people make (reference see the hobbit thing.)

[Eldorion]

So this is much-delayed, but here's the Top 10 Tolkien forums of 2013, based on my numbers.  Some of the forums had technical problems, downtime, large-scale post deletions, and the like, so a few of the numbers are speculative.  Most of them are simple counts that remained consistent throughout the year.

Most Active Tolkien Forums of 2013
ppd = (average) posts per day

1. TheOneRing.net: 333.5 ppd
   
2. Forumshire: 165.0 ppd
   
3. TheOneRing.com: 85.1 ppd
   
4. Council of Elrond: 81.3 ppd*
   
5. Arwen-Undomiel.com: 80.4 ppd
   
6. LOTR Fanatics Plaza: 77.4 ppd
   
7. The Hall of Fire: 58.9 ppd
   
8. The Barrow-downs: 21.6 ppd
   
9. The Hobbit Movie (Bree): 10.3 ppd*
   
10. board77: 10.2 ppd
    

* Approximate value

Some miscellaneous observations I've made since the mid-way point of the year.

• The Tolkien fandom is definitely on the decline.  These 10 forums were the only ones to pass 10 posts per day in 2013, and the next 10 fell off rapidly.
  
• Most of the forums (including those below the top 10) are well past their heyday and coasting by largely on inertia.  Several have tried to revitalize with The Hobbit movies, but the only that seems to have succeeded at making the jump from being a LOTR forum to a Hobbit one is TORn.  Meanwhile, most of the forums founded in the last several years specifically as Hobbit forums have failed, with Forumshire and Bree the two biggest exceptions.
  
• Activity in the fandom is highly concentrated in about 6-8 forums.  The forums at the top of list remained consistent, with jockeying for position between them but few major changes.  The bottom section of the top 10, however, saw numerous changes.
  
• The one sort-of exception to this is Arwen-Undomiel.com, which was consistently in the #2 or #3 spot in the first half of the year but fell off massively in the second half.  I'm still not sure why this was.
  
• Council-of-Elrond.com also fell off in the second half of the year, though not to quite the same level as A-U.  It was replaced by the mid-year list's #11 forum, board77, which was one of the few forums to actually increase its ppd figure by the end of the year.
  
• On that note, almost all of the forums had slower second halves of the year than first halves.  Apparently residual activity from the release of AUJ outweighed activity in the run-up to DOS.  It remains to be seen if this pattern will hold true in 2014.
  
• The figures for Council of Elrond are somewhat suspect since that site had several inexplicable changes in its post total, probably caused by technical changes and large-scale deletion of subforums.  However, when I was able to get multiple reliable readings in a row, it was consistently near the top of the list, and I've extrapolated from the available data to come to a conservative estimate.
  
• Bree's numbers are also subject to additional scrutiny since they had to be added manually (there is no post total counter), which opens up more room for error, and because of the spam problem.  I took measures to try to limit both problems but I can't be positive how effective they were.  Also, Bree saw significant downtime late in the year and I don't think it's been online at all in 2014 so far.
  
• On the other hand, The Hall of Fire saw a significant surge in posts towards the end of the year, but this wasn't enough to alter its ranking.
  
• This was the first year I took regular measurements of forums throughout the year.  At the end of 2012 I attempted a very rough estimate of large forums using a less reliable methodology.  While the ordering was different (and part of this is probably due to changes in levels of activity), the top 10 was identical to 2013's except for the aforementioned replacement of C-o-E by board77.
  
• It's interesting to note that in addition to many forums in the fandom sharing members, several of the sites have unique relationships with each other.  Of course, Forumshire and Bree are unofficial sister-sites and are also related to Planet Tolkien (#16 on the year-end list).  Also, The Hall of Fire and board77 were both founded by members of TheOneRing.com, and all three sites retain close relations.
  

Some of the more confusing numerical oddities made this a frustrating project at times, but I find it interesting to look at the results at year's end.  It's not beyond criticism, of course, and certainly just having lots of posts doesn't make a forum "better" than another.  But I had fun crunching and playing with numbers, and I hope the results are of some interest to others as well.

[Ringdrotten]

Very cool, Eldo, must've been a lot of work Interesting observations. I didn't even know half of these other forums. We're a talkative bunch indeed - half of TORn's average ppd count! I guess crabbit needs more posts to be done proper justice

[Eldorion]

Thanks Ringo! I think it's worth noting that we have a smaller core member base than most of the other large forums.  Also, TORn benefits from being the go-to site for Tolkien movie news and from having a special relationship with the filmmakers.  Our search engine presence is much more limited and many of our members came from Bree, since the blog there has really good SEO (going back to Ady's day).

I knew most of theses forums from my early days on Tolkien forums when I discovered and/or was introduced to a lot of sites.  I did some fairly exhaustive Google trawling to try to find any forums I may have missed, but very few of the ones I came up with even came close to the top 10.

[Pettytyrant101]

Stellar work Eldo. We rock!   

[bungobaggins]

Hey! Second place! Not bad! Especially when you consider how many active users we have as compared to torn.

[Pettytyrant101]

Talking of ToRN I seem to have upset them again. I rarely post there due to its hostility to anyone whose tongue is not permanently placed in the PJ arse licking position, but on occasion I do (post that is, not lick PJ's arse   )- today was one such occasion, and now an Admin has removed some posts pertaining to it -although at least not the original one to their credit.
But they really dont like the crabbit over there, not even in small humorous doses it seems.   

[bungobaggins]

It's a good thing they have their mods over there to baby sit them. Wouldn't want anyone to get offended or to see what anyone actually wrote.

[Pettytyrant101]

Tis a strange place by all accounts, and makes me all the happier when I find myself home again safe in my barrel where I can have a buckie and a healthy rant without anyone jumping in to censor things.
And on the crabbit scale I was barely starting   

[bungobaggins]

I like Forumshire because I really felt accepted here from the start. Posting on torn was (and is) like walking on eggshells.

Plus, what's the point in posting there in between movies? Seriously, how many "What do you think the Battle of Five Armies will be like?" threads will there be until TABA is released?

  

[Pettytyrant101]

The thing most glaringly missing from ToRN's Tolkien film forums for me is fun. They dont seem to know about fun   

Which is a shame as there no doubt some good folks there.

[Eldorion]

Stellar work Eldo. We rock!   

Thanks Petty. It's pretty easy to collect the data, though you start to notice (and resent) how many forums do not have a convenient little post tally on the main page.

Hey! Second place! Not bad! Especially when you consider how many active users we have as compared to torn.

Yep. I think it's also significant that every other forum in the Top 10 besides Forumshire and Bree was founded in 2003 or earlier, with several going back to 1999 (including TORn). The head start is actually even greater than that, though, because the size and activity of online Tolkien fandom in the early 2000s was absolutely massive. By the time we got started around the beginning of 2009 things had fallen off and continued to do so. A lot of older sites had been banking on The Hobbit movies to bring activity back up to earlier levels, but aside from TORn I'm not sure how many actually succeeded at that.