Make it simple and different than most other forums, so visitors don't feel like they're on 'just another forum'. Contests are good, but games and other incentives are even better... add some sort of 'activity quota' or store system where members can accrue points with participation, from good/bad rated posts, etc. Make sure your site is attracting visitors to regularly updated content, not just the forum.
Alright thank you, we are currently making so of the other updates another poster had said should be done in a few days.
A great way is to give awards to the members who post on your forum like give them awards for the most popular post of the week.
Getting forum members is about as easy as putting a camel through the eye of a needle. Theres simply no easy answer here. I would recommend inviting people from other forums in a polite and non-spammy manner. Try to invite at least 3 people a day. Make sure your SEO it top notch. Use social networking like Twitter to make friends and get a reputation.
the best best of making a forum interactive is to jump into the conversations. If members are finding useful information in threads, they will respond to it. - Tell your moderators to participate in threads - Start new threads which can drive user's attention - Introduce blogs in your forum and motivate your users to submit their blog posts - Acknowledge the most active members - Keep it spam free
Sometimes when we do forums then it goes to moderation so we have to take time for posting our link then member activation is complete.
Work on your site's design. la-noire.net's design, in my opinion, is much easier on the eyes - which is probably one of the reasons their forums are much more active.
What do you think I should change? I got a few members from la-noire.net that told me my forum looked better. Are you sure its the design and not just the fact that la-noire.net has the 1st keyword rank and I am only 2nd?
First of all, the login area just looks strange and out of place. The orange areas are really bright, especially against the black background. Tone them down a bit. I also prefer the Home/Gallery/Search/Members on the left side of the navigation bar and spaced out a bit more. Here's a quick photoshop of what it would look like with these adjustments: Your logo is also 1.6 MB, which takes quite a while to load. You may want to save it as a .jpg instead of a .png. la-noire.net's meta description is more appealing than yours. Theirs is "Your #1 source for L.A. Noire discussion, news updates, game tips and mission guides. Come check us out!" while yours is just "LA Noire Forum an unofficial fan website. Join us today!". I'd suggest rewriting yours. I see you did a contest giving away a few copies of L.A. Noire. When you do contests like that, I'd recommend emailing all members about it too. That way some of the lurkers/people who've forgotten about the site will start participating more.
I changed the META tags and the site description a while ago but google still won't change it. I brought the website about 3 months ago and the old owner did a bad job with the site. I did email off the members about the contest but none of them seemed to care much about it, they said they would just buy the game or they said they weren't interested.
You should move to either vBulletin or IPB with the ability to improve your design and better modification and support.
Disagreed, MyBB is just as customizable in terms of design as any other forum software. It's true that there aren't quite as many modifications for it as vBulletin, but all of the essential ones exist. I've used both MyBB and vBulletin in the past and I have to say, I prefer MyBB simply due to the fact that the admin CP is more organized than vBulletin's (and of course because it's free).
I would run contests with things your visitors would be interested in like if it was a domain forum a free domain if it was about children maybe free crib.
as per information provided, you are lack of content, you need to start more thread, i mean quality thread or hire some quality poster to do that for you. Besides, you might consider to implement some contests, it might help to build up more content and boost your forum traffic in short term