Well I have my forum at http://lethalzone.net and am having a lot of problems with activity. At first they post a couple hundred posts, but they get tired of just coming up with content, so I need a theme/niche to keep them posting. I think about 99% of my community are gamers, but not all play or like the same games. I also had RSS Feeds for all kinds of games and systems to keep my members informed, but I noticed that no one was looking at them. So the obvious was to remove them. So what kind of niche should I go for? I currently have a general chat forum/gaming forum that revolves around community activity. Which means that the forum is updated by members posting stuff they like/watch/disagree/agree with. I'd also like to host some competitions, but I'm not sure what to go for, since not everyone has photoshop/gimp/paint.net, and not everyone likes to make videos or write stuff. So this all revolves around a theme/niche. Please help.
Forums can be tough to get and keep going. I have found controversy always gets people chatting. Competition is also a good motivator for return traffic and movement. There are several places you can get multi-user games. Since they are gamers you could have leagues or some such thing also. Halo Teams etc.. where you play on the Xbox network and combine your teams score. Then challenge other forums to battles or some silly thing like that. Another idea might be to create poker teams where you have regular tournaments. Give out digital trophies or some sort of award. Perhaps poll your members and see what they would like? Good Luck!
What did you do originally to get forum off the ground? Have you thought about continuing to mine people from there? I think with more and more users comes the natural controversy.