How can I find out stats for internet forums like MN?

[LowLevelBahHumbug]

You know how sometimes you'll see MN referred to in the media and they say MN has so many thousands of users? Where do they get these stats from, and how can I find other popular UK forums?

Just doing a bit of research in preparation for some uni work.

ta

Some sites pay for ABC electronic circulation checks (like the audits on news print) but the figures are private to the website owner (they have to submit web stats logs to ABC for checking...

ABC has test IP addresses that they can check for and ensure no stats are sumitted with 'creative' data [duplication of page views etc] and seek to check for spurious hits from the organisation running the site.

boardwatch.com and boardreader.com showed info a few months back regarding threads on politics and MN was listed. Not sure if boardwatch.com has changed hands but seems to go to some 'news' (mobile phones, networking, etc) site and I might have misremembered.

However, seems the judgement on boardreader.com is based on levels of estimated activity because a few hours following web links on a site would find how many topics have been posted to in past 24 hours, say, and on those threads, a count could be made and thus you get an estimate of number of posts over whole board.

With a bit more processing, you might spot moderators and ignore them, and where a few prolific posters with hundreds of items posted are found, ignore them (as they fall well outside regular usage levels), and might be described as having too much time on their hands...

PS The Alexa toolbar add-on gave stats for sites you visit, and there are sometimes web trend reports giving lists of top 50, top 100 sites, by traffic/visitors but many of the statistics will be related to worldwide figures, or not specific to forums, or might include websites like the BBC (where there are so many pages, it may be unclear from any outside inspection what portion is for strictly viewing news or programme information pages, what portion would be viewing tourist-type info - what's on, etc, at county or regional level, weather/traffic and what portion, for you, might be of interest - participation on the Blogs as users can comment, participation on the messageboards, and those who comment on news stories, perhaps.

Other forums will include topics from train spotting, sports (football team sites), all the way through.

I view a few different boards, mostly to do with technical topics, but use NewsNow.co.uk to find subjects which interest me (items on personal / company blogs for example) as there are no blogs or single sites I routinely check daily (no twitter feeds, no facebook pages I check, no personal or news blogs individually).

Thanks for that NG, really helpful! And at 'too much time on their hands"!

I'm actually looking for other websites where people will chat about what's going on in the world like we do here, but I would have to justify why I use them, eg popularity.

I can see moneysavingexpert.com is popular, but they mainly stick to topic don't they?

I also found a student site which was quite when you're used to chatting with lovely sensible people here.

Can anyone suggest any other sites?

Sounds like you are close to needing to justify "too much time ..." (well it was 500 odd posts in a single day!!)

I can only think of one other "what's going on in the world" type discussion area (however, it sometimes becomes a lot more "what's going on in Wales", or goes rather too much of a clique with regulars who have chatted /argued off and on for weeks/months) - see the messageboard here: www.walesindex.co.uk/mb/

Great, thanks! I'll have a look.