[jola]

Today CFD Online celebrates 20 years of uninterrupted service to the worldwide CFD community! The first official announcement of CFD Online was posted to the Usenet newsgroup sci.physics.computational.fluid-dynamics on December 19, 1994. It all started as a hobby project to collect links to CFD sites on the net. Back in 1994, four years before Google was launched and just after Netscape Navigator had replaced the Mosaic browser, the coolest thing you could have on the web was an extensive link collection. CFD Resources Online quickly became popular. This was the good old days, the days when a PhD student could start to collect links and launch sites like www.yahoo.com and www.cfd-online.com. Perhaps it would have been smarter to focus on something other than CFD ;-) But hopefully CFD Online has been of some use for some of you CFD people out there.

In the beginning CFD Online remained mainly a link collection. Several interactive services were developed over the following two years. First out in 1996 was the job advertising service, which quickly got a dedicated group of followers. Then in 1998 our first discussion forum was opened. Today this is the most popular section of CFD Online, generating almost 50% of all traffic. The annual growth rate, both in terms of the number of web-pages delivered and the number of unique visitors, has been around 20% per year over the last 15 years. We do not see any signs of a reduced growth. The bar chart below shows the number of web-pages delivered from CFD Online per month since 1998:

Here are a few numbers about CFD Online:

• CFD Online is the largest and most popular CFD site on the Internet. During a typical week the web site is visited by more than 60,000 people, downloading 500,000 web pages per week. In total there are more than 10,000 web sites around the world with links to CFD Online. We hope that CFD Online has helped to keep the CFD world together and create a more homogeneous worldwide CFD community.
  
  
• CFD Online has so far advertised more than 12,000 CFD jobs. Thousands of CFD people have found their jobs on CFD Online. If CFD Online has helped you please feel free to share your story. We like it when people pat our backs :-)
  
  
• In total more than 500,000 messages have been posted on the forums in more than 130,000 threads. CFD Online has become the largest meeting place on the net for everyone interested in CFD. A dedicated group of moderators have been able to keep the forums focused and fairly free of spam.

Please tell us what you think about CFD Online. Respond to this post and tell us what CFD Online has meant for you. How long have you been visiting CFD Online? Have you made new friends here? Have you got important help here? Have you enjoyed helping others here? Did you get a job via CFD Online? Or perhaps you found a new employee here?

Please also tell us what you think that we should focus on now. Is it about time to close down this outgrown old website and let the social networks take over? Or what should we work on in the future:

• Focus on keeping the current services updated and active?
• Engage more CFD-Wiki authors and expand CFD-Wiki?
• Start a new Question and Answers section similar to StackExchange
• Open more dedicated sub-forums to allow more detailed discussions on various topics?
• Make more of our services available to mobile devices running Android and iOS?
• Any other ideas?

Thanks to everyone involved, forum administrators, moderators and users! Without all of you CFD Online would not be what it is today.

[ThorgrimmCFD]

Thanks for the great homepage. CFD-online is one reason why I work in this field right now.

[Naruto]

Thank you for such a great initiative. I owe cfd-online a lot. I hope that it would continue to work as an important platform for cfd professionals.

[windstriver]

cfd-online is very good and helps me a lot.

[macfly]

Originally Posted by jola

• Focus on keeping the current services updated and active?
• Engage more CFD-Wiki authors and expand CFD-Wiki?
• Start a new Question and Answers section similar to StackExchange
• Open more dedicated sub-forums to allow more detailed discussions on various topics?
• Make more of our services available to mobile devices running Android and iOS?
• Any other ideas?

CFD Online is an awesome resource. I find a lot of valuable information here: bits of theory, bits of code (Fluent UDFs, Icem CFD scripting, etc.), meshing advice, tricks on how to use softwares, etc.

My (2 cents) recommendations for the future would be:

• Keep it simple, please don't add subsections, subforums, etc. For example, the Fluent UDF subforum is a fail because a lot of posts about UDFs end up in the Fluent general forum anyway. In the end, when someone is looking for info on UDFs, she/he has to search 2 forums instead of just one (if there was only 1 big Fluent forum).
• 90% of the time I come on CFD Online to search for something, so I use the search toolbar a lot, and I hate the toolbar!! It's totally useless to click the toolbar to expand it, and then click again in the search field to start typing. It should be a typical one-click-in-the-search-field-and-start-typing-right-away toolbar instead.
• I also use the Forum Tools drop-down menu a lot and I think the tools should be buttons at the right of the New Thread button instead, it would be more convenient.

Thank you very much for the good work, keep CFD Online alive and growing!

[ghorrocks]

Happy birthday CFD-online! I was on the forum in 1998 when it first started up and have been a regular ever since. If you have 500k posts on the forum then it looks like 2% of your total posts are from me. My wife always told me I could never shut up

CFD-online is a a great resource and has lots of good people. I am looking forward to the next 20 years.

I agree subdividing into more forums will not work. Better search functions so you can find stuff no matter where is a better area for forum development in my opinion.

[diamondx]

I was on the forum in 1998 when it first started up and have been a regular ever since

.

My hat's off to you

[sbaffini]

Thank you all for the great effort.

I've been here since 2005, when someone simply saved my ass (in contrast to the official support of the code i was using at the time, where nobody knew what i was talking about).

Since then, people here continued saving my ass for several years.

I just feel it is good to maintain this legacy.

[jola]

It is all of you forum users who just "can't shut up" who are the back-bone of the forums on CFD Online. Thank you ghorrocks, wyldckat and all of you who spend so much time helping others on the forums. Without you this forum would just be an empty shelf. I took out a top-5 list of the most frequent posters on the forums and their reputation. Please note though that this statistics is only from 2009, when we switched forum software, and the actual post-count for long-time forum users is much higher. Here is the list of the top-5 posters since 2009:

User; #Posts; Reputation

• ghorrocks; 9,874; 236
• wyldckat; 7,512; 311
• Far; 3,900; 128
• gschaider; 3,889; 136
• -mAx-; 2,861; 92

[wyldckat]

Greetings to all!

And a (somewhat late) Happy Birthday to CFD-Online

@jola: Took me a while to figure out what exact "reputation" that was, and it's in fact the "reputation points" feature that can be seen on one's own private user page .

@macfly:

Originally Posted by macfly

For example, the Fluent UDF subforum is a fail because a lot of posts about UDFs end up in the Fluent general forum anyway. In the end, when someone is looking for info on UDFs, she/he has to search 2 forums instead of just one (if there was only 1 big Fluent forum).

I've been seeing lately references to UDF on the Main Forum as well. As with any problem, many solutions are possible, so my point of view on this is that we:

• Need to do some occasional spring cleaning and pick up brooms to move these posts to their rightful places;
• Or have something like a triaging forum for people who don't know where they should ask their questions... so that they can then be sorted to the correct sub-forum by the moderators.

The other problem with sub-forums is that it's sometimes very hard to pin a thread to a single sub-forum... which is something that tags were meant to help with.
Then there is also the "one forum, many default prefixes" strategy in use at the ANSYS Meshing & Geometry sub-forum.


Personally, on the OpenFOAM forum, I feel the need to have more sub-forums, in order to make it easier to keep things tidy... so one possible guess is that the forum structure also depends a bit on how much maintenance time the moderators on each major forum are willing to put in ... since that can mean that either questions get answered, or they get neatly stored in the right places...

Best regards,
Bruno

[wyldckat]

Originally Posted by macfly

For example, the Fluent UDF subforum is a fail because a lot of posts about UDFs end up in the Fluent general forum anyway. In the end, when someone is looking for info on UDFs, she/he has to search 2 forums instead of just one (if there was only 1 big Fluent forum).

So I had a look into this:

• The Fluent UDF forum has over 2600 threads.
• The surrounding forums, namely ANSYS, CFX, FLUENT, Fluent Multiphase and ANSYS Meshing & Geometry... have over 2000 threads that reference "UDF".
• The Main CFD Forum has 297 threads that mention "UDF".

This is going to need a lot more than just a few brooms... this needs an archaeology team and some heavy machinery

[pete]

When we opened the UDF and Ansys Meshing forums I moved UDF and meshing posts to the appropriate sub-forums for a period. In the last year I have not done this though. Clearly people are still posting in the wrong forums. I will try to move a few threads now to see how much work it takes.

Having more sub-forums requires more coordination and support by moderators.

[hardikramani]

Thanks CFD Online team for this amazing knowledge sharing platform......

[mystic_cfd]

Congratulations to CFD Online. Thanks Jonas for keeping it going with quality content - there is no other way you will get the continued growth.

I have been lurking around, collecting tips and advice since the Netscape days. The site has been invaluable during my early career due to the large amount of knowledge readily available in the forums.

The jobs database is a great way to keep tabs on what is happening around the world and in academia.

I hope that it will continue to be around until we can all solve our multiphase DNS problems on our mobile phones.

[-mAx-]

I discovered cfd-online in 2001 as I was in my last year at the university in Paris.

My first query on the website wasn't on the forum but on the job database, since I was looking for a training period for my last year at the university.
And I found it here in Switzerland.

14 years later I am still in the same company

Thank you cfd-online !

[AndyR]

To make this truly a CFD online celebration we must find...
John C Chien

[nanavati]

CFD Online is truely a Lifeline for the beginners !

Keep Sharing, Keep Growing !

[derz]

Congrats on reaching 20, CFD-Online!

You've been a great help to me over the years, and no doubt will continue to be...

And hopefully I can give back a little more of that help going forward.

[shuai_manlou]

It is a great honor for us to have this website. As a freshman, I learned a lot here, and I hope it will last forever.

[maysmech]

It is the best and first online resource in CFD field.

Happy birthday to you