Top Harry Potter Forums

Due to the enormous and unexpected success of the Harry Potter books, Hundreds of websites devoted to Harry Potter have shown up all over the Internet in the past decade. Many of these websites also have a forum where people can discuss what they liked and didn't like about the Harry Potter books, what they think will happen in the next book, whether Snape is good or evil (read book 6: Half Blood Prince), and anything else Harry Potter that they can come up with. Some of the sites are just the forum.

A Harry Potter forum can have anywhere between 10 to 90,000 members, depending on how much exposure the site gets. They are all going crazy right now, due to the very imminent release of a the last book, Deathly Hallows, and the 5th movie, Order of the Pheonix. Both come out in July, 2007.

Here is a list of the best Harry Potter forums that I have come across.

The Dark Lord (www.harry-potter-forums.co.uk):This is the smallest forum on this list. It is a newer forum with only 255 members at current count. The site picture is a picture of Ralph Fiennes as Lord Voldemort raising his wand in that weird looking way only a mad wizard could. There are 29 categories to discuss Harry Potter in-something for everyone. There are already 2,000 posts to this forum.

The Leaky Lounge (www.leakylounge.com): This forum is owned and run by the people who own the Leaky Cauldron website-which is one of the biggest fan sites and J.K. Rowling's favorite Harry Potter fan-site. The forum has about 57,000 members which have made over 1,088,000 posts to the site. This forum probably has more written in it than all of the Harry Potter books combined! There are 16 categories to write in. They are the usual ones: one for each book, site news, general, etc.

Harry Potter Realm (www.harrypotterrealm.com): I love the look of this website! It has a night theme that looks really good with the subject matter. This site has 14,000 members who have made 158,000 posts. There are 25 categories to post in-which should give anyone something to write about.

Harry Potter forums (www.potter forums.com): This is a newer site with 2,000 members. It has 32 categories to write in, including one for each book, one for each movie, one for each house, one to sort everyone into their houses, and many more.

Beyond Potter (www.beyond potter.com): This site get points for having very imaginative category names. A few of these names are: Romilda's Gossip Corner (rumors), Rita Skeeter's desk (writing), and Colin's Photo Room (pictures and artwork).Other categories include things like music videos, fan clubs, and normal things like site news. It's no wonder they have over 71,000 members.

The Harry Potter Dialogue Center (http://boards.harrypotter.warnerbros.com): This forum is owned by Warner Brothers, the company that films the Harry Potter movies. Despite having a long, slightly boring name, this site has many thousands of members. This forum has house boards and one of them, Gryffindor, is coming up fast on 250,000 posts.

Veritaserum Forums (www.veritaserum.com/forums): This forum is part of the Veritaserum website. There are 11,000 members, the smallest of any forum that is part of a major website.

Chamber of Secrets (www.cosforums.com): This is the Harry Potter forum that I have visited the most. It is owned by the people who own Mugglenet.com There are 77,000 members, more than 10,000 threads, and almost 1 million posts. Categories include: Hogsmeade (only for those having over 300 posts), Divination Studies (what people think will happen in the future), and History of Magic (discussions about past books). There are many other categories to write in.

HPANA (www.hpana.com/forums): This is part of the HPANA website and is the biggest Harry Potter forum with 87,000 members. There are 16 categories to post into, the usual. For those who don't know already, HPANA stands for the Harry Potter Automatic News Aggregator.

There are hundreds more Harry Potter forums out there- these are just a small sampling of what there is to see.