Kevin Bonham, a member here at OzChess and moderator at the ********'s Forum, made this post in October of 2007, which I have slightly paraphrased:
Originally Posted by Kevin Bonham
********'s Forum post rate since 1 January 2007 has averaged 114.74 posts per day. About 14 posts per day of this is correspondence game moves so the real average is more or less exactly 100.
ACCF started on or slightly before 14 July 2006. By 18 July 2007 it had received approx. 3049 posts at a postrate of 8.26 posts per day. This wasn't rising by this stage but had well and truly stabilised, if not declined (I believe it was around 10-12 posts per day average in the early days of the forum). So ACCF had less than eight percent market share by postcount even before 18 July 2007. If the stat examined is active posters it is even lower than that.
ACCF was never going to be a serious rival.
On or around 18 July 2007 another forum known as OzChess was founded. This effectively killed ACCF within weeks, and since then ACCF has received only about 79 posts at a post-rate of less than one per day.
Naturally OzChess is a bit better supported than ACCF, since it doesn't have a cumbersome membership approval process including a remarkably silly and selectively enforced boy-scout pledge, it is technically superior and its administrator seems to put more energy into running and promoting it. Apart from that it is basically the same demographic.
OzChess is currently averaging 14.6 ppd (almost twice ACCF but still not nowhere near ********'s Forum).
Kevin recently provided an update yesterday or the day before, and I thank Kevin for providing reliable numbers and trust he made efforts to ascertain what the correct numbers were.
Originally Posted by Kevin Bonham
Post-rate for OzChess excluding correspondence games since its inception : 17.5 posts per day
As we can see this is almost a 3 post increase per day over the past 2-3 months at least! The words
'since its inception' might even mean that there has been a higher post per day rate than 17.3 over the past 3 months! Go Team!
Kevin then continues: (Slightly paraphrased again)
Originally Posted by Kevin Bonham
Post-rate since last update [on ********'s Forum] excluding correspondence games: 84.3 posts per day
Top Posters by postcount
1. Bill Gletsos 11331 [+725]
2. Kevin Bonham 10116 [+1277]
3. ggrayggray 8853 [+566]
4. Rincewind 7905 [+466]
5. ursogr8 5680 [unchanged]
6. antichrist 5674 [-1]*
7. Gunner Duggan 5312 [+1445]
8. arosar 4529 [+30]
9. PHAT 4253 [unchanged]
10. Alan Shore 3871 [unchanged]
I find it interesting that the 3 unchanged posters now post almost exclusively here at OzChess (Iconoclast, Moz, and Gendo), and this seems to have led to a fall of about 16 to 17 posts a day at Karthicks site.
Guess it goes to show that dedication and energy and new ideas and acting civily and courtesly towards one another is the way to grow a forum. Keep up the good work everyone
AO
ps- Kevin, I don't know how this may affect the numbers, but the post count has been turned off for correspondence games - all posts in that forum might have already been excluded from the post count before you manually culled them from your figures. Presumably this may mean the ppd rate is even better than 17.3?