The reason I brought up the discussion was because, I have noticed that people do not use a forum if it has no members. So if you registered 10 000 members and had them start posting, then people would want to join seeing the traffic. That was the intention behind it.
Yes they would, and that's the premise behind ico-content. However unless your niche is going to be really big people will start expecting to get to know their fellow forumites (as we have come to know you, uniqueasitis) and to learn who to respect etc. You would need to watch for real people posting and ensure they get real, sensible answers otherwise they'll be annoyed at the bot-fodder.
I recently saw a forum seeded by google groups content and the pages ranked right above the infringed google groups pages on google search. Kind of ironic.