High volume message boards

[Sara_ELL]

Hi.

Though new to his board, I've none the less been following the 
dramas regarding the high volume of messages on the main board and 
the perceived lack of good qualilty posts, with interest.

Though the volume of posts seems to be halving every month after 
peaking at ~8000 in July, I still find it difficult at times to 
follow threads and work out if things have been discussed before. I 
do not unfortunately have the time to trawl through every message 
and very quickly worked out that the only way to navigate the main 
board was by accessing the entire board through the yahoo groups 
site instead of through my email. I also, in the first few days 
after the release of the novel, turned to the main board desperate 
to discuss the story with other obsessed readers like myself. I 
composed long messages with the quotes and punctuation in the right 
place but was fairly disheartened by the lack of any response to 
most of what I'd written, again mainly caused by the utterly insane 
volume of posting. The only thing that kept me reading and posting 
in the very high volume days was TBAY, which at least enabled me to 
follow some sort of debate or narrative. 

Now, though I love the HP books, I've been a longtime fan of 
the "Trilogy that must not be named" (Star Wars) and am active on a 
couple of their sites too. I was posting on the message board of the 
main unofficial fansite (The Force.Net http://boards.theforce.net/ ) 
when a couple of their stats caught my eye. Star Wars has an huge 
fan base as well and on this particular site (operating since 1998), 
I noted that they have:
- 251 message boards (accessible through one main menu)
- Have accumulated 12,000,000 messages (give and take a couple of  
hundred thousand)all of which are accessible through the main site
- Have around the order of 900 posts a DAY
And seem to cope with it.

Other features of the board that are absolutely invaluable are 
things called "sticky threads" that are message threads at the top 
of each sub-board containing links to other oft-discussed thread 
(the star wars equivalent to "the gleam in Dumbledore's eye", for 
instance), personal messaging, moderation (with a list of mods 
online who you can instantly PM if probs arise), an way of adding 
certain users to your "watched list" - you get an alert whenever 
they post something on the board, together with the standard search 
options. The qualilty of the messages on the star wars board is even 
more variable as you can imagine (it's an open board) but despite 
this, with the sub-boards and whatnot, it's very easy to skip the 
rubbish (the mods are permitted to lock threads and direct people to 
other ones if topics are being repeated ad nauseum) and actually 
find a niche where things are being discussed intelligently.

Again, I'm new to the group and don't want to come across as totally 
presumptuous, telling board veterans how to run things however, if a 
HP board (with current occupants, mind you) equivalent of the SW 
board was around, I imagine that we'd all have much less to complain 
about. 

My two sickles.

Sara_ELL