How to find the best webmaster forum to join?

Good forum is the one where a lot of people are instantly online so that you can sure that you can post your question and get a qualified answer quickly. The second measure is that the forum is fair moderated. You would not like to struggle with spam messages to get required information. You need moderated forums to be protected from so called trolls that try to argue you or even scam.

Imagine that you have some questions about creating websites. Let's see what happens if your search in Google for "webmaster forum".



There are 31,800,000 search results. And what forum is the best one? What should you join? You can register in the first one found by Google, but is it really the best one? What is difference between all of them and how good they are performing?

Open the forum page and see the date of the last post in each section. Good forum is well frequented and the date of the last post should not be older than one day. Today, we have the 5th August, 2010. See the screenshot of one of the forums made right now.



Let's see another example of the forum that is worth to join

Scroll down to the bottom of the page and see the forum stats. This section is usually called "What's Going On?". The number you are interested in is: how many forum visitors are now online?



Guess in which forum you will get the answer rapidly? The first one where 0 members are online or the second forum where 154 members are ready to pick up your question and give a quick answer?

Tip: if you do not see any What's going on section in the bottom of the forum, speculate why? Good visited forum would not hide this section as nobody would hide his huge success numbers.

Now, you can go through Google search and compare stats of different forums. However, it takes time. Is there any possibility to quickly find the best visited forum for webmaster?

To some extent, yes. There is a website in internet called Alexa.com. This website gathers visitors stats of all websites in the world and create a rating among them. There is a general rating through all the websites in the world and also rating grouped by category. Let's see how you find the highest visited webmaster forum in 10 seconds. Open alexa.com and follow the 3 steps below.

1. Click on Top sites in the top navigation
2. Select the tab By Category.
3. Choose the main category Computers (webmasters belong there :).



You see the list of categories that you can drill down to narrow your search. Find the sub-category Internet, proceed with Web Design and Development and finally choose "Chats and forums". The list of webmaster forums listed in this category is sorted according the number of visits they get, so the most popular forum is shown at first.

Direct click: The list of the most popular webmaster forums sorted by the number of visitors.

Note: Although the number of visits to the forum is estimated, Alexa ranking is one of the key number that advertisers use to evaluate the websites.

Good luck and see you in forums :)