How did you get there?
 

For all you "big board owners" How did you get to where you are now? Any tips to attract users and keep them posting?

I have one 980k posts board. It has 5500 members of which about 120 users are always online, it's closed to the public for a year and worth ~1000 posts/day. How I got there?

1) Remove all "kids", like users writing u instead of you.
2) Think ahead, don't always listen to members. It's likely they suggest what's good for themself at the board and not necersarily good for the board to prosper.
3) Spam your website the first year. Get noticed. Then run it passively.
4) Be democratic, always explain bans to the public!
5) Get a crew very skilled in English and what I call write "professional" English.
6) Introduce a new hack, idea or some sort of contest regularly. It will result in a community feeling.
7) Have some form of hierachical system. Give users a reason to be active, reach a goal (higher usergroup).
8) Never runs ads until your board has a big active community at least. Rely on donations! Ads show a board's weakness / capitalistic management.

I keep the above in mind for every forum I start. For me it's doing wonders!

I've run vB's for a while now, and I find that nothing is better then allowing users to breathe a little. Being too strict with things makes people leave, and advertising on sites similar to your own helps a lot.