4 months and I hit 250 members. If you understand SEO, you can get your site members, quicker!

Using SEO to get members quicker is all up to interpretation. Not everyone believes it makes as much of a difference as other ways do.

Yep, SEO can only get you so far. The new forum I'm starting is less than 2 months old, but with 134 members and 10k+ posts. I haven't even gotten to the SEO part on that forum yet.

I' dont know what SEO is?

However, all that being the forum admin has gotten me is a few other pissed off forum admins from boards members leave just to come to mine

I dont even get to participate in our hosts free gear give away :(

mine bought me a 500gb external drive.

Well obviously SEO can only get you so far. It takes time, patience and hardwork to get a successful community. There are a lot of things I could go into, but I really don't have the time too.

What their loss; is your gain. To be honest, I wouldn't care what other admins think about me. You are in the same niche, competing -- don't let them put you down -- just because their board is a failure.

We're are slowly approaching our fifth year. At five years we have a little over 300 members and 110,000 posts.

May be a lot , may not be. But I'm very happy with the size of my forums. My forum members paid for my vb license when we decided to change from phpBB to vb in the middle of last year.

My site is almost eight years old, and my forums close to seven... started with UBB, upgraded to vBulletin the year after, and stuck with it until now. Throughout the years I've experienced a plethora of reactions from my members, from intense adoration, to grateful appreciation, to extreme loathing, and even experienced a time when a whole group of people left en masse because of politics and drama...

I've gotten several things, from t-shirts and caps, to gift certificates, to personal checks from donating members. The good times were really good, and the bad times always threatened to convince me to pass the admin chores to someone else (more so before than now). But apart from ego, it feels good to have a sense of leadership when you're a forum admin. Makes you feel like you're their big brother (in more ways than one).

It's a thankless job most of the time (my moderators can attest to that), but getting what the OP got is one of the things that make it worthwhile....

- T

My members don't complain because there's no rules except for the legal stuff. But over the years i've sent & received stuff from my internet friends. :)

Seen this thread for a week now...

still can't come up with an answer for it.