I wonder what’s the order of number of users discourse could support without sharding etc, i.e., heavy customization of code.
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Number of users isn’t necessarily relevant – the amount activity is. I can’t name our largest hosted customers for privacy reasons, but we host communities for several of the largest brands (and games) in the world.
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thanks Hawk! Possible to share a couple of such active communities ?
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Unfortunately not. Customers at that level have strict NDAs in place that mean we can’t name them. It’s possible that other Meta users may know about some of them and could name them here, but I’m afraid that we can’t.
One reasonably large one that I can name is https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/ but we host communities much larger.
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The World of Warcraft forums are a great example.
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Roblox DevForum is another great example of a Discourse-powered forum with lots of people.
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Post wise the largest Discourse community I am aware of is https://forums.mixedmartialarts.com with 31M posts.
User wise the largest Discourse community I am aware of has 33M users (can’t disclose the name)
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Great examples, thank you @Stephen @twofoursixeight @RGJ for inputs!
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Would you be able to give numbers, such as the number of active users in your largest boards?
I’m curious to see if there is a practical scaling limit to Discourse, and knowing exact numbers would be helpful 
Some communities at https://discover.discourse.com/ show over 15k active users in the last 7 days. There is one with over 300k active in the last 7 days, but I believe they also use some API integration for that.
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Ah yep - I’ve scraped those numbers and they are indeed impressive, but I’m wondering if they can get larger.
Also to note: Some large communities opted out of being featured in that page unfortunately (such as SDMB).
I also noticed this - forum.cfx.re is a notable example where the numbers seem very inflated.
I figure the numbers y’all have should be much more accurate, especially if the communities you are running are private. If the numbers are covered under NDA though, I understand
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Thank you for sharing!
That’s amazing - it does indeed seem that Discourse has no practical scaling limit unlike other forms of communication.
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