[edward hamilton]

Originally Posted by BOLT

Two concerns:

1 "Dont pretend you are someone else". I am going to start my forum in a week or so and planned on making like 50 screennames, start making threads and posts and stuff, and change the dates around to make the forum look like it's been around for a couple weeks. I would probably spend a few days on this. This way, people will join because it looks to be a relatively popular forum. No one wants to join a forum with onnly 3 other members

After reading all of the above post, this one stuck out. I'd be interested if you actually did this? This seems like a recipe for disaster especially as your legit members start asking questions of individual fakes. And then keeping the PM mess clear will be a nightmare.

If a forum is interesting it will attract members.

I got very lucky and although I thought the first contact was actually someone trying to sell me some services that I can't afford, I made a phone call and gave someone admin privileges and it has worked exceedingly well. BUT, he owned a vB forum with over 21,000,000 posts, is a programmer, had a real interest in my forum, and gave me a lot of interesting tips that have helped build the forum. I had no idea about administering a forum, banning users, registration problems, etc.

I didn't give ftp access or access to the database and don't plan on doing so. I consider myself lucky as this could have gone south. I now have another moderator and will be adding another in the coming months.