Making a Successful Forum [Problem]

I thought I'd turn to you guys for this... problem, per se. For a while, I've been trying and trying to "achieve" a popular forum that has its name everywhere, much like this forum. I've tried to experiment with different themes for the forum and advertising my *** off, but eventually come up short. Soon, they die after a while and fade into oblivion and stuff. During its "active days", I've convinced a few people into joining, but soon they just forget about it and never come back; it annoys me ever so. ><

Are there any other forum people who can give me tips on how to make a really good forum that can appeal to others and convincing them to join even more? I'd greatly, greatly appreciate if someone here can help me out. :)

 

Well in my personal opinion, you should just stick with this one, work your post count and rep up and try to make staff. As far as doing your own forum, google knows all. But it's all in yourself if you can make a good forum or not, to be blunt, you either can, or you can't.

 

I would make an official signature for your site, then put a link to the site on it. That's what I did and then we got 20 memebers in 2 days.

 

Well really, the key is knowing the right people. You need to move up the ranks here then when you make a site yourself you'll have friends who will join and be loyal x3

 

Ah, sweet. I might make a signature and put it here... question is, will you visit it? XP

Here it is:

 

Sucessful forums provide a service that interests people.

This website was started by a couple guys who wanted to record all the Cutscenes in the Kingdom Hearts games and host them for people to watch without playing the game, and also to use in AMVs and such. It gained popularity via a simple humorous web series called Dramatic Hearts which encouraged people to stay with the community, and eventually they recruited people to report on Kingdom Hearts news to keep the fans up to date and keep visiting the site, and then the community snowballed.

So basically, unless you're providing something interesting that people want, no one wants to be apart of your ****** community.

 

I'm going to have to agree with TMM here.

The key to a successful forum is having something that keeps people coming and having a reason to want to go there.

Otherwise yes you will have friends join like Cariad said, but all you will have is basically a forum for your friends to hang out on and maybe a couple of others.

So I guess the real trick is finding something that makes your site stand out from the others.

 

Okay, I get it. But there's a problem: what kind of thing would work? ^^;

 

That's just something you'll have to figure out. Try to find something that you like, that other people would like. Or find something that could be useful to people, just like the cutscene videos at kh-vids. Cause if someone wants cutscenes for an AMV, they google it, and it brings up kh-vids. They say, hey, this looks like a cool site, I'll join the forum. So think of something that people want or need.

 

If you can't think of anything, then you've already failed.

 

lol, That's not true, the kh-vids idea probably came to the creators one day, they probably didn't around and think about it.