Most often in conjunction with ranking a specific forum down. Hardly ever in conjunction with the opposite.
Let me emphasize that I am not in any way to interfere with the content of the forums. This is entirely up to the owners, administrators and users of these forums.
Next, I would also stress that all forums contain a mixture of topics that will be interesting for one user, but maybe not interesting for another user.
And of course, the "social" life is a part of a forum too.
I get every day many mails with questions about Yamaha keyboards. Most are about technical issues, such as editing styles, conversion of data, etc.; and hardly ever about songs.
I am able to answer many of these questions, but some are answered better in a forum. As a service to these questioners, I like to point them to a forum that is primarily intended for their type of questions.
The questioner asks in other words, a specific, most often technical, question. That is why I rank the forums from a "narrow" Yamaha keyboard view.
And that is why I do not count welcome greetings, birthday greetings, games, jokes, funny videos, etc. when I draw up the list.
A forum is defined in Wikipedia: "An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages."
Therefore massive posting of songs, song sheets, MIDI files, music videos, computer tutorials etc. are not counted either as there mostly are not added any "discussion" or "conversations" to extend the knowledge and understanding of "Yamaha keyboards" to these postings.
Massive postings of any kind from administrator(s) are not counted either. Again: No "discussion" or "conversation".
Again I must underline that these postings might be interesting, but they are "off-topic" to my ranking criteria.
The next complication is the number of forums. Beside the forums listed at the Forums page, you can find many more forums, maybe close to 100.
I could list all these; but many of these are rather in-active (some even for years) or full of spam.
Therefore I select the forums which have the highest numbers of postings weighted on the basis of the above mentioned criteria.
A minimum of 10 postings per month is required for regarding a forum as "active".
I check all forums regulary; and my observations is the basis for my ranking. I am aware that there are some borderline cases, making it hard to be 100% fair.