Last night, with a full gas tank, Lefora rolled passed the 200,000 member mark (now at 48,640 total forums), we still have a few months to go until our first birthday, so we’re all pretty excited over here.

Lefora ‘by the numbers’ for January:

• 575,904 People
• 8,682,123 Pageviews
• 6.61 Average Pageviews / visit
• 6:08 Avg. Time on Site
• 27% of visitors came from a keyword search (mostly google of course)
• 59% of visitors returned to the site, a third of our visitors returned 10 or more times!

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We were also recently reviewed at forum-software.org, a popular forum comparison website, we’re the first ‘hosted’ forum solution they’ve reviewed – they had to create a new category on their site just for us.

With the start of the New Year, we have big plans here at Lefora on building out new features for your forums – we’ll especially be focused on features to help mature communities faster – from ranking & point systems to widgets that will help promote your forum outside of lefora.  We’ll also be building an API to offer more services for developers to ‘hook’ into Lefora.

We launched less than a year ago, but in 2008, we’ve seen 1.85 million people visit your 40,000+ forums.  With an average visit time of 6 min 20 seconds.  A third of the traffic to the forums comes straight from people searching on google, yahoo, and the other search engines – much of this comes from the search engine optimization (seo) that we build directly into your forum.

Cheers!
Saúde
乾杯
¡Salud!
Prost!
乾杯!
Kippis!
Salute!
Skål!
Na zdrowie!
Santé!

Well it took us about 3.5 months to reach our first 10,000 forums, and now the second 10,000 have come in a almost a month shy of that. Thank you for choosing Lefora and helping us improve our service. We’re exited to see what we’re gonna look like at 50k!

And keep an eye out for an all new directory we’re working on, so that you can find communities on the thousands of diverse topics hosted on lefora.

We all had a bet around the team when we would hit 10,000, and we beat every one of our guesstimates by a few days.

Sam was the closest, so we all owe him a pint of beer.

Andrew has been working on a nifty little visualization of forum activity.  Click the image to see it full size.

• Each arc is a forum.  It arcs from its creation to its last real post to date.  Top vs. bottom arcs don’t mean anything, it’s just so they all fit.
• Arc height is proportional to the number of posts.
• Arc width is proportional to the number of members.
• Green circles are the start of forums, red circles indicate the last post date.

Full size.