How do you locate active forums quickly?

[peace brainerd]

Does anyone know how to locate forums by activity level?
For instance, even though being extraordiarily active, I eventually found DiyAudio.com through numerous searches and links, but it's not the first thing to come up in Google.

Often I'll look up a forum of interest, only to find that the last post was in 2005. And so on for the first couple of forums that appear on google. I was just looking for a place to ask about odd sized radiators for custom motorcycles and atvs and this is what happened.

It's a bit subversive perhaps, since I'm sure many great forums are working hard to get off the ground, but it really helps to find a forum where at least more than 1 person is going to view your post in the next ten days.

Anyone know any tricks?

[Cal Weldon]

I sure can't help you with tricks but when I went looking for a diy loudspeaker forum, this is what I googled.

http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=...G=Search&meta=

I don't know if you can judge by what order it comes up or maybe it's just that this site has more hits than any other so it comes up first.

[peranders]

bluebeard, I think you are shooting over the target. Since you probably prefer english, try to locate english forums, then visit them regularly. I think you will notice pretty fast how active a forum is. How many motorcycle forums do you have in the world really?

[peace brainerd]

"Googling" is obviously a bit of an art. I often find myself having to coach new computer users how to phrase their searches. It is intuitive, but not really in a way that we're used to in presenting our questions.. to librarians for instance. It's a learning curve that rewards more grammatically logical inputs than parallel thinking. Obviously, you will get "lucky" sometimes. I thought I understood the engines algorithms to rank according to links to sites (popularity of a sort) in one way or another (I know relatively nothing about programming).

I would be suprised (i am) if others never had the similar experience of finding relatively obscure sites/forums listed on the first page of their search. It ends up being a frustrating waste of time. I've been at this long enough so that I'm pretty sure my queries are logical and relevant.

But if there're really no good shortcuts, then that's just that I suppose.

[jnb]

Often, the home page of a forum shows the number of members and posts/threads. If you find more than one forum of a type, compare them, bearing in mind when the forum began.