Today we passed 20,000 forums

Well it took us about 3.5 months to reach our first 10,000 forums, and now the second 10,000 have come in a almost a month shy of that. Thank you for choosing Lefora and helping us improve our service. We’re exited to see what we’re gonna look like at 50k!

And keep an eye out for an all new directory we’re working on, so that you can find communities on the thousands of diverse topics hosted on lefora.

Sharing a fascination with web forums

Russell Beattie put together a great piece about the value of forums and explores some of the behaviors on larger forums, such as 4chan.org.

http://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/my-fascination-with-web-forums

Russell talks of the importance at times of anonymous (guest) posts – like their low barrier to entry. The drawback are the spammers that take advantage of the system. That’s why we’re building out anti-spam support, similar to what exists on services like gmail and wordpress to keep the forum ‘doors’ open but block the spam with some tough bouncers.

Another interesting post of his, is the concept of ‘no spam or trolls‘ on twitter, thanks to the one-way friending functionality. This is close to something we’ll be building out around lefora as we’ll be adding support for ‘fans’ and ‘foes’ later this year. With the idea that posts from your foes will be collapsed automatically to help prevent the incited arguments by trolls. We hope to be able to extract community level ranking out of this as well (a person frequently marked as a foe or with many thumb down remarks.)