Oh, you've never heard of me? Check here: About my site by Google Yes, i keep up with it.. i guess most of my members are shy..
Oh, now I know you. Haha. You have an awesome and monetized site. I think your problem is not with the board itself but with the niche you are in. There are so many "Tech" forums nowadays that the incentive to join & post is not as it use to be. My best advice is to put some hacks and contest to incentivize (i know that is not a word! lol) your community. Also try to make your forum as unique as possible from competitors. What makes your site different from all the rest of the tech community?
wow you guys have huge sights! mines new only been doing seo for about a month on it. I've gotten about 342 members and about 5-10 online all the time. growing 20 -25 new members a day all organic traffic. Hope to be where you guys are some day.
That's a good progress. Initially, my forums also looked like yours. With time I learned that readability and simplification played a good role in making the forum more attractive. Perhaps you would like to try it also. Try removing all that is "fluff" and moving from the black theme onto something that is easier on the eyes, preferably with a wider text font size. The overall goal is to remove as much "static" text as possible. Just keep the active content and interaction buttons and you'll see magic going on. I see so many people filling their forums with all type of features that just get in the way of what a forum is supposed to do: read and write. Use DP as example of eye-simplicity.
i tried a calmer theme before and was only getting like 5-10 signups a week and it sucked. my members seem to like this. soon as i switched to this i have been getting 20-25 average a day and growing so, i think i will stay. thanks for the advice though also with dp they had a keyword tool that helped them get of the ground. I myself dont like the new style layout. I agree with you on some off the "fluff" not all though.
so when did you guys start charging in your forums i am thinkng once i get 5000-10,000 members do like a 5 dollar lifetime membership and full axcess. got 40 new members so far today woooooohoooooooo for me!!!