Success> An obsession or genius?

[strategy]

It's always the programmers earning all the online cash these days.
Myspace's Tom (and his friend), face-book, youtube and even Derek Lui (gaiaonline.com).

Welcome to Gaia Online << Click

It's been noted many times as the internets BIGGEST forum (some of it's posts reach up to 600,000 replies, when most other forums make barely 50). What started as a love he had for both programming forums and the manga books he read, he decided to incorporate both his passions and created something beautiful. Gaia online, as reported by big-boards.com, Gaia is the internets largest forum. With over a million posts daily, over a billion posts total and 2.5 million unique users each month Gaia online also runs many contracts with Anime series' such as Naruto and Scion the car company. Derek started the forum 4 years ago as a hobby and now he has a large office building in Canada. No one knows exactly how much Gaia makes, but Derek boasted on some reviews that it's over 10 million. With advertising, so many hits AND the contracts I doubt thats near the number he accumilates.

This is sheer example of determination. Derek sat at home most days, sorting out the forum and fixing bugs throughout the WHOLE day. He was constantly updating and securing his site, living of energy drinks and his passion. It was stressful and some people considered him mad but Derek took something he LOVED and WORKED HARD because he was DETERMINED it was going to be succesful. Business role-model, much?

So how did he do it? Well, his idea was to create an online community. The forum now includes mini-flash games and various other features but his initial idea was to give them that Anime community. Every user has a fully customizable avatar which can pose and crouch. They browse the site, post on the forums, play games, gamble or enter competitions to obtain gaian gold (the ingame currency) with which with they can visit shops or the marketplace (the marketplace is a nice forum feature where users can sell thier bought or obtained items to anyone else by opening a 'shop') and purchase items for thier avatar.

The users can also 'donate' $2.50 to obtain a sealed letter for that month, which on the 15th turns into a unique monthly collectible. For users these are great items to invest in since the item will never be released again, and can't be purchased with gold. The forum is considered a 'game' where users seek to make gold or just enjoy themselves on the forums, with the games and even in user-created guilds.

http://www.biocrawler.com/w/images/8...ia_avatars.png << Typical Gaian Avatars

[Fred333]

Interesting. I had never heard of forums like that.

[Josephian]

run on phpbb - amazing ay

[strategy]

run on phpbb - amazing ay

I know, it's great. I've seen parts of the code he's hacked to allow such huge traffic including some harsh restrictions on the search script. He's got a couple of his scripts online, if you want some PHPBB scripts for supporting large forums (250,000 users+) just pm me and ask .