When just starting a new community, do you...?

[deathemperor]

I have high restriction on doing so, even my members who are my friends want to have their 2nd/3rd accounts I would delete it if I find out.

when I first started my forum I asked my friends on the forum I always posted to join and for months their home has been my site from that time.

[The Geek]

On another note:

I would lose your first lead news item on your homepage. If your news items are talking about how slow you are and asking what can you do to get people more involved - people will just assume it’s dead and it sucks. You want to give the impression that you are in DEMAND. Talk about the surge of interest since you have added a couple new features - say it "gave you and your members a buzz" - ask "what else do they want?" instead of “what can I do to make you come back?”.

Spin the negative into something of a bit more excitement - and post more news items. It shows that there is a lot more happening.

The other thing I would suggest is to ditch the requirement to register for all the forums. Who wants to go through the butt pain of registering if they can’t see any reason to register? People’s attention span is too tiny on the net. Most will see that requirement and move on to another site. When I started my first forum several years ago, I made registration mandatory in order to view the forums and threads. As soon as I finally ditched that - my registration rate tripled.

Finally: Start some polls and semi controversial threads that will evoke some type of response (I don’t mean things like Politics or Religious views – crikey – that’s dangerous). Lead them on so that some guest viewing the thread will say: "Hey - I’ve got something to add to this!". Polls are also great because they are an easy participation starter.

I haven’t seen your actual forums as I couldn’t be asked to register for them - however if you have more forums than real members - you are going to have an impossible time building a community. More forums = more effort to find what you want to talk about – people do not have the attention span to do this. If you have 100 posts per day and 50 forums, that’s only an average of 2 new posts per forum per day. More than anything else - that will make your site look dead.
Trim your forums down and add more as you need. A good guideline is if you are getting more than a 1.5 pages worth of updated threads a day (i.e. 45 updated threads in a forum) - add a new forum and slowly build from there.

Just my viewpoint – good luck on building