Can you suggest some interesting discussion forums?

Is there an index or directory of online discussion forums?

• There are likely millions of online forums - ranging from mostly unused forums on personal websites to the 100K+ forums on an active site such as Topix. I'm curious if there is any service somewhere than monitors and indexs web forums - perhaps displaying and sorting them via the following type(s) of categories: 1) Attempt to categorize the forum(s) at a given URL by the topic(s) they cover 2) Display some amount of statistics about the forum as publicly shown (for example highest number of active users, average number of active users etc) 3) Display some metrics about the forums (# of posts, # of discussion areas, # of views, # of answers or average # of answers per question etc) and perhaps other nuggets such as : - does the forum allow anonymous usage (i.e. is it 4chan) - does the forum require registration to view? (i.e. is it only semi-public) - is the forum sponsored and/or ad supported (and perhaps who those sponsors are) and perhaps other nuggets of information?

• Answer:

  There is no comprehensive listing that encompasses all the details you describe, but there should be.  The closest thing is http://www.big-boards.com which has not been actively monitored for over 4 years now.  The previously submitted sites continue to rank against each other, but no new forums have been added in the past 4 years.  Big Boards covers your points 1-3, but it does not include hosted forums that do not have their own domain name.  Big Boards is also missing many new brands of forum software (Vanilla) from its selection. Your questions about privacy, anonymity, and registration are usually not included in forum directories because these factors can often change and as a result, they become very difficult to track.