size of forums

October 12, 2005 11:45 AM

Does anyone know of a site that discusses the membership size of listservs?

I've found http://www.big-boards.com/ which measures actual forums and bulletin boardd, but is there an equivalent site which lists membership info of listservs, Yahoo Groups and all that? Also while big-boards is good for raw data of forum size, are there any more definitive sites to use, and anything that lets me compare two sites on a similar topic (2 Mac forums, for instance?)_

Thanks!

posted by rmm to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

Best answer: Web forums and e-mail lists are entirely different beasts, with entirely different metrics, and your question conflates the two. That may be understandable, because mailing lists these days often have Web portals for user subscription management, archives, and even operations. But there are major differences in the ways mail lists and Web forums work, and in the cultures that support them, due to the ways in which messages are received, stored and delivered to participants.

Even within the category of mailing lists, LISTSERV® (which is an actual trademarked product for mailing list management) is a special case, although the parent company (L-Soft) maintains a voluntary registry of LISTSERV lists, which are believed to be some of the largest mailing lists on the Internet. LISTSERV by default registers any instance of itself with L-SOFT, and the information provided by all the instances of LISTSERV running in the world allow L-SOFT to maintain some of the most reliable statistics about email lists in the world, and contribute substantially to the automated maintenance of some of the biggest mailing lists in the world. For example, if mail sent by any registered LISTSERV bounces to an address more than a certain number of times, other LISTSERV machines can learn about it, and use the failed send history to drop the same address from their own list of recipients, fully automatically, if that is the way the mail list owner has configured his LISTSERV list.

You could also look into TILE.NET, or Topica for stats on particular lists, running on other MLM platforms, that they know about.
posted by paulsc at 9:03 PM on October 12, 2005

Best answer: A better comparison would be Google PageRank, or Alexa rating. "Membership" is an amorphous thing -- people sign up for a site then abandon it, or lurk but don't post, or forget their password and get another, or have three or four sockpuppets ...

MeFi may have ~28000 "members", but only a couple of thousand of us post regularly.
posted by dhartung at 1:14 AM on October 15, 2005

Response by poster: Thank you so much folks - great resources and it's helped me think of new ways of addressing the topic. Thanks again!
posted by rmm at 9:11 PM on October 15, 2005