Finding active forums to advertise in

[Rupert]

Just messing about, as its Sunday, trying to think of ways to find active forums that might be good for either links, or advertising.  first disclosure, I know little about forum software.

Now there are loads of different forum scripts out there, and the first hurdle would probably be to find the most used ones. I am looking at this to find the favourites:
http://www.codefear.com/scripts/5-best-php-forum-bulletin-board-script/

I did think https://www.phpbb.com/ was the most popular, but these guys have it as No 3, so thats fine.

So I can find a load of these site searching for:

"/phpBB/index.php"

I would take that list, and put it through some analysis, and see which are the hightest PR sites, but if I want to find out how many active members there are, and how many new posts (looking for activity) for advertising, then I am trying to search for active members lists:
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22%2Fphpbb%2Fsearch.php%3Fsearch_id%3Dactive_topics%22&oq=%22%2Fphpbb%2Fsearch.php%3Fsearch_id%3Dactive_topics%22&aqs=chrome.0.57.3850&sugexp=chrome,mod=19&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

Searching for "/phpbb/search.php?search_id=active_topics"

But that only tells me the page exists.  Sure the order in the serps helps, But I am missing something here.  I am not getting the "Number" of member, or posts... the age of the site....

Any ideas?

[Chunkford]

> favourites
This site will offer a better insight into that -http://wappalyzer.com/categories/message-boards

The rest I need to give more thought too

[Rupert]

Just realised, I can search the site map...

for a member number:
/forums/member.php?u=3000

I think that will tell me there are at least 3000 members.

or search the members list urls for this text:

Showing results 2101 to 2130
Or similar

There is the issue of good forums hiding the membership list. 

Oh thanks Chunkford 

[IrishWonder]

I think you might find this helpful:
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22most+online+today%22+%22most+online+ever%22
- just to see the level if activity

Or maybe also this:
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22*+posts+in++*+topics+by+*+members%22+%22latest+post%22+today

- that should give you all the vital forum stats right away while filtering out forums that do not have any fresh posts

[Rupert]

Simple.. Genius.  Thanks Irish Wonder!

[IrishWonder]

UW

[Rooftop]

A lot of  forum software uses thread URLs that are sequential. Searching inurl:filename.php?threadid=100000 or similar might help.

Edit.   Real example now that I am not squinting at a phone: inurl:showthread.php?p=50000 - works on older phpbb forums at least.  Might bring up a different set to using member profiles, as lots of people set those to be viewable my logged in only to prevent all the link drops.

[Rupert]

Ah Lovely!

[Rupert]

For the record, got to do a full post advertising my site to over 1000 members, who could all do with my products.

now to hand it over to one the team. It works (free link to  of course)

[jimbanks]

You might want to consider (for the future) http://www.big-boards.com/

[Rupert]

Nice. A couple of new ideas there. Thx Jim.