The 'discussion' in discussion forums

Message boards are long recognized as a place where most of the discussion between people on the web takes place. But how much discussion takes place in the Boardscape? and what are its characteristics?

The first part of a series of articles will explore exactly that aspect of the Boardscape.

While boards vary greatly in most characteristics, be it number of members in the board, age, gender, theme/topic of the board, language, design and even the board software, there are interesting aspects of the discussion on boards that arise from the total of all of the discussions generated in them.

One key factor for a discussion is it's "length". How many exchanges are made in a thread? While a single person starts a thread in a forum, others in the forum can reply to that thread (in most cases). Some threads get no reply, because it calls for no reply or there is no need for one (some board announcements for example), some are looking for information that others can not provide, topic is locked and other reasons. Some threads however generate hundreds or thousands of replies. There are even extreme cases where the number of replies exceed 100,000. Again, a thread with more than 100,000 replies by members of the forum.

The following chart is a histogram of the number of threads with specific replies.
As you can see, the biggest group is the threads without replies. However, it is about 13% of the threads. This means that over 85% of the threads on boards get at least one reply. It can be stated then that boards are not a lonely place like other internet mediums. To emphasize that consider the following fact.. a thread in the Boardscape receives on average about 16 replies.

about 2.5% of the threads get between 51-100 replies, less than 1% between 101-200 and only less than 0.5% receive more than 200 replies.

The following chart illustrates the accumuated number of threads with at least X amount of replies.

As you can see, over 80% of the threads receive up to 15 replies, over 90% of the threads receive up to 26 replies and over 99% receive up to 50 replies. Again, the percentage reaches almost 99.5% at about 175 replies which means that 0.5% of the threads out there receive more than 175 replies. While not a very high number, it does mean that in an average board, one in two hundred threads receive about 200 replies or more.

We should take into consideration though, that the most "value" found in threads is more likely to be found in the shorter threads and towards the beginning of them. The format of board conversation, be it an informative thread (where most of the value is often in the first post) or a question and answer session where most of the value is in the question and the first 10 or 20 answers (granted there are many cases where valuable information can be found in the 100th reply or even 1,000th, although rarely do people take the time to read 1,000 replies).

When applying a "value" factor to the replies, assuming that the value of the first post and 15th reply is 100% and that value degrades by 1% till the 116th post where it stays on 1% value, we can compute the following data..

As might have been expected, almost all the "valuable" posts in the Boardscape are in the first 95 replies. However, 99% of the "valuable" posts are in the first 55 replies and more than 90% of the "valuable" posts are in the first 25 replies.
It is most common that message boards are set to display the first 15 posts in a thread. This means, as the graph illustrates, that over 80% of the "valuable" posts in a board are displayed in the first page of the thread.
Again, to clarify, this is a generalization of the posts' value and it may very well be that some threads have all the value in much later replies.

The above graph might help board owners decide how many posts they want to present per page. To cover more than 90% of the value of the thread in the first page, a board owner will need to display just the first 25 posts. It is safe to say however, that this does not mean that only 10% of people will view the second page of a thread. Thread viewing habits are not covered in this graph. Most likely, curious people or people involved in the specific thread are very likely to follow to the second page in such a scenario. However, given the fact that only 7.5% of the threads out there will actually have a second page if the board chooses to present 25 posts per page, there will be a very low number of second page views.
Bare that in mind when you decide on how many posts per page to present.
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