Hello everyone
I am Richard from ski.com.au and I’ve been running that site since 1995.
This ranking of #1 is news to me too (discovered via this thread) so I thought I’d add my 2c as to perhaps why and dispel a few misconceptions.
Our forum was launched in Jan or Feb 1998. That’s quite a while back in Internet years and that also makes us one of the longest continuously running forums by founders anywhere on the Internet.
I’m also the guy that ‘invented’ snow cams, installing 17 snow cams across 9 Aus resorts in 1998 to create the worlds first web cam ‘network’ with complete coverage of Australia’s snow industry from the get go. (Every dog has its day in the sun and that period was mine).
However, we are not globally popular. Audience is 90+% Australian and always has been. I suspect that annual ‘page views’ and ‘unique visitors‘ (quaint old-school metrics but still somewhat useful) for Pugski already outstrip ours by some margin.
What we do have though with our community is age and history and depth of knowledge.
We have a core of perhaps 100 members who have been continuously active for over 20 years, a half dozen of which are founding moderators and still with us. We also have many threads that have been continuously active for over ten years (they would likely be older except we have had to move forum software three times)
As identified, the heart of our content is the depth of travel info, especially Japan and our ‘Trip Report’ culture by punters is strong. The other engine of our forum is the weather section. Snow in Australia is fickle and as a consequence watching potential snow storms form and roll in is taken very seriously by a great many Aussies. Thus our snow forecast pundits are collectively among the best anywhere and the conversation is very very technical.
We also have a large off-topic après section that motors all year round and the community is very tight and well known to each other, both online and offline (I’ve lost count of the hookups that have led to marriage over the years).
All that said, this forum is the only ski forum I take notice of. I’ve been loosely monitoring Pugski since the death of Epicski and I’m impressed with the ‘Article/Review culture you have cultivated - obviously driven by Phil. I also can see that Phil and Trish have got a very even handed tone with the moderation - no small thing that is waaaaaaaaay harder than it seems to outsiders.
Because of our .com.au domain and the inner workings of Google, we will never attract a truly global audience, remaining AU-centric so I’m sure that Pugski will be ranked by feedspot as #1 in good time - not that spurious rankings by some half-baked other web service means anything. Economic survival is the only thing worth applying focus to. That shit ain’t easy
cheers