chew12 there is no hard limit for how many visitors and users you can have. We have forums with even 1,000 (offline) users and the forum functions normally. That's because these users are basically just a data in the database, and that takes up some space too.
The 200 user limit in the documentation is an estimated average of all offline users on all forums, assuming that they have posted some content. If every user posted 10 discussion and 20 posts, that makes for 200 users, 2,000 discussions and 4,000 posts, which makes the database eat up more space.
I admit that I wasn't around when this limit was introduced (so the user limit is +3 years old and rather outdated at this point IMO), but after a bit of thinking now, I imagine that it was calculated this way. I don't think that the limit is meant to represent maximum online users, since it's average (and if every forum had 200 online users at the same time, I'd expect FreeFlarum to break apart pretty soon).
I'd say that this average for online users (at the same time) for all forums might be at around 50 - 100 users at most (assuming that they actively browse the forum and creating content at the same time). This all puts pressure on the database and server load. But we can't be certain for sure, as we do not have the tools to test this, nor monitor this limit - we can just estimate it based on what we have observed and know. As for me, I've never really witnessed a case where FreeFlarum would not operate normally due to higher traffic of one particular forum, but there is definitely an unknown hard limit somewhere.
Since this is asked for elaboration quite often, I will proceed to make this more obvious in the documentation too. I originally wanted to do this when we rework the entire documentation at some point in the future, but I realize that it is important that people are not confused when it comes to crucial information like this
Speaking of free space, FreeFlarum is about to hit it's limit with the disk space again, which is currently at 95 %. It means that we will unfortunately have to remove some inactive forums (forums that have no visitors, posts or content for a month and more). We do this every once in a while.
Note that your inactive forum will not be completely removed from our system, we will just compress and archive it (and that's why I will do it today). This will make your site go offline, but you can always request it to be reactivated, via our E-mail (info@freeflarum.com), or through our support page.
Also note that if your forum has been destroyed, it cannot be reactivated. And one last note that we aren't keeping archived forums for more than 6 months (an immediate destruction can be requested via E-mail and soon via web by default when deleting forum) - so naturally, forums archived and older than 6 months can't be reactivated.
