[futureal]

Best advice: stick with it.

Provide a consistent, well-laid out forum along with a site to back it up, and be patient. Good things don't always happen overnight.

Try to keep the forums clean from arguing, flaming, and so on -- those are all big turn-offs to a lot of users.

Try to keep interest in the forums up by adding content to your main site (if applicable). A good example of this is that on one of my sites, R/C Tech, it has always been the forums driving the site, but more recently, it is beginning to swing back. I am receiving thousands of hits on the main site each day and a whole bunch of new forum users are coming from that direction.

And most importantly, try to provide a unique environment. How you do this is up to you, but if you can consistently have a forum that is different from the thousands of other forums out there, you will be on your way to success.