F1 Fanatic

F1 Fanatic passed a milestone in the small hours of this morning when @damonsmedley posted the 400,000th comment on the site.

Thanks to him and of course the thousands upon thousands of you who have commented over the years.

You can read Damon’s landmark comment here (note the ID number has no relevance to the total comment count):

http://www.f1fanatic.co.uk/2012/04/18/f1-fanatic-roundup-184/#comment-992069

It’s quite remarkable to think back to the early days of the site and how much it’s grown since then. There was a time when I tried to reply to every comment that was left, which was pretty easy when I got one or two per article.

Now the most popular articles each much get almost 300, and the biggest stories get double that and more. It’s not unusual to get over a thousand comments per day. And this doesn’t include the forums and F1 Fanatic Live!

Of course quality matters more than quantity. I want F1 Fanatic to be a positive place for people to discuss F1. Again, that comes back to the quality of comments we get from readers and again I have to thank you all for it.

This is why we have Comment of the Day to showcase the best comments, and clear rules and guidelines to prevent abuse.

And thanks must also go to the team behind the anti-spam system Akismet has kept a whopping 2,625,525 spam comments from appearing on the site, the vast majority of which is text automatically spewed out by bots.

Here’s to the next hundred thousand comments and the big half million!

@damonsmedley That data’s not readily available – I will have a look later, but I’ve got a bit on right now with it being back-to-back races.

LOL @slr, guess it was being there at the right time! Nice one @damonsmedley and great to see how F1Fanatic has grown @Keithcollantine, up to half a million now!

Well done to Damon, and as Keith rightly said, to everyone on F1 Fanatic :)

@Magnificent-Geoffrey Jealous? :)

Congratulations :) !

As @girts says, this has to go not only to damon but to all of us. F1Fanatic has been my top website for F1 since 2008 and I’ve seen it evolve massively during the years, and the discussion has been improving a lot too. With some exceptions, the respect between users is great and we end up having a nice conversation about the sport we love… though, as @girts says again, nowadays we’re talking too much politics!

But the discussion wouldn’t be there if it wasn’t for the excellent quality of articles, analisis and reviews.

the best thing that F1F has taught to me, namely, that it is possible to have regular and interesting web discussions without getting rude or banal.

I can think of no higher praise. Thank you very much.

@damonsmedley

So you don’t think that my idea of creating a Damon Smedley fan club is a bright one?

By the way, partly answering your question on the number of comments in 2011, this is what Keith wrote in the last article of 2011:

With over 140,000 comments being published on the site since January 1st, I’ve struggled at times merely to read all of them, let alone reply to everyone.

But I guess this includes the forum posts & replies, too.