Community | Forum Insider: Community | Forum Insider -> Interview with Lee Liu - Administrator of IdolForums.com

For our second Admin Focus interview, we've talked to Lee Liu, administrator of the hugely popular IdolForums.com. Easily the biggest American Idol forum, and of the largest, by number of posts, IP.Board installations on the internet. Here's what Lee had to say.

Can you tell us a little about the forum you run, and also give us a little run-down of just how big it actually is?
Neurox Media runs the largest American Idol discussion forums on the Internet. Idolforums.com for everyone, IDF for pretty much anyone who's been there long enough to realize we're all lazy to type the full name. We recently started engaging on Twitter, so I'm obligated to include @idolforums and @idoltom.

We're reaching 100k members and just over 21 million posts. Our traffic really varies depending whether it's on-season or off-season. Off-season, we typically get about 200k uniques a month, on-season, that figure jumps to about 500k uniques a month. Storage....~20gb database, 5gb user uploads. Bandwidth is pretty slim....about 800gb/month.

If you set up the forum yourself, what inspired you to do so? and were you surprised by it's resounding success?
We used to run a Kelly Clarkson forum, that eventually evolved into idolforums after our Kelly forums died due to bandwidth constraints. Yes we were surprised to the degree we were taking it, being a hobby board for the admins.

What led you to choose IP.Board to run the forum? How has the experience been? and would you still choose it if you knew then what you do now?
Personally, I liked the look and management controls. Also, IP.Board back in the day was a lot less expensive than vBulletin, and the style of vB didn't gel with me. There's been some bumps along the way, but overall the experience was good. We've always gotten great support from Invision staff. Would absolutely still choose it today. Besides, we have a IP.Board lifetime license for upgrades + support. Hard to give that up.

What kind of technical challenges have you faced, in scaling your hosting and I assume IP.Board itself, to handle the size of your forum?
We used to use phpBB and encountered a lot of scaling issues. Since then, I believe phpBB has gotten a lot better, but back then, we decided to just go with a paid solution. IP.Board wasn't the easiest to scale back in 2004 either. Being the largest IP.Board out there in terms of posts, we had to try a lot of our own tweaks. Some worked, some didn't. A couple of guys at Neowin and Soompi really helped us a great deal with technical issues. While our online member count isn't really high, our members post very quickly, which meant a write-heavy db. Whereas users on Neowin might take the time to write a decent length post, the majority of posts on Idolforums are very short with very quick intervals between posts. We experienced massive db locking issues in the beginning.

In a similar vein, what kind of community management challenges have you faced? Have you faced any legal issues?
All sorts. Typical of any community and then some. Think of the number of idol contestants and their fans. Add in fuel + competition + fan remarks. You get the idea. As for legal...yeah a couple. Two C&D's...nothing major. We had to take down a leaked list of the Top 32 once.

Do you get many requests for new features or changes to the forum? If so, what are the most common ones you face?
Changes mainly. We use an ancient version of IP.Board when it was still called IPB. IDF is still very much a side project for all the admins, so haven't had a chance to brush it off yet. Lots of tweaks which even I don't even remember how I coded it originally.

What new feature additions would you like to see to make your members happier, or make your life easier as an administrator?
Scalability changes in IP.Board 3. Right now we have our own memcache system and our own post reporting system, both of which I hacked together, neither of which are great but they work and they do the job...for now.

Will you be upgrading to IP.Board 3?
Eventually....if IDF ever stops being a side project....hasn't happened in the last 4 years....I still have my fingers crossed. Then again, eventually I'll probably just hire a PHP dev who knows IPB inside out to do the upgrade, rather than tackling the whole job myself.

Thanks again for choosing us to do a profile on ForumInsider.com.


Thank you to Lee for taking part in this interview. I'm pleased to have checked off our first interview with an administrator of a forum listed on Big Boards, and what a great start! If you've got any questions about Idol Forums, or for Lee, please leave a comment below and I'll try to make sure he sees them.