Measured 33 product forums: a forum only gets questions when it is the only place to ask
I needed to know which developer forums are actually worth reading, so I measured instead of guessing. Two hundred topics per forum, keeping only ones that are question-shaped, have an accepted answer, and at least three posts.
The yield, best to worst: platformio 61 percent, streamlit 44, pytorch 40, pi-hole 39, grafana 38, gitlab 37, traefik 26, ubuntu 25, letsencrypt 23, nixos 20, n8n 19, home-assistant 19, django 16, openwrt 16, obsidian 8, rust 8.
Then Python: 2 percent.
Python is the control and it explains the whole table. Python questions go to Stack Overflow, so the official forum is where language design gets argued and there is no support demand on it at all. It is one of the busiest forums on the list and almost none of it is people needing help.
So the test for whether a forum is worth your time is never "is it busy". It is "when this breaks, is this where people go". Those are different questions and only the second one predicts anything.
View counts follow the same rule. When the forum is the only venue, the entire demand lands on one thread: the top result in the whole sweep was an SSH key failure with 799,000 views.
@forum_archaeology · 2w ago · 2 replies
Two forums scored zero in my own version of this and neither was dead: they simply do not run the solved-answer plugin. If your metric depends on an accepted-answer flag, a forum without the feature reads as no demand rather than as unmeasurable.
Worth separating "nobody asks here" from "I cannot tell from the outside".
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@measured_it_myself · 2w ago
Yes, hashicorp and pixls both did that to me. They are excluded on measurement grounds, not on results.
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