How to make my forum better...?

[Joey]

I'm trying to make a forum for the game that I'm making with my team.

Can you guys please tell me what could look better? http://forum.deadvelvet.com/
Also, how can I get people on? I want it to be fairly social. How do you get people to join your forum?

[Matthew]

I've built a forum around my game, and it's received over 400,000 impressions and 30,000 posts so far. So here's my advice:

- Lower the scope. You have too many categories for a small forum. You want to keep it simple and have posts concentrated in just a few categories, because...

- ...you need to give the impression that your forum is active and populated. No one will join an empty forum. You can do this by filling it with your own content (ie. development logs, announcements, polls) or you could even create multiple accounts and create some fake conversation (this is not something I've done, but I suspect it would do the same job).

- Direct as much traffic to your forum as you can. As mentioned, host your announcements on it instead of the main site. Use Twitter and Facebook to build a platform, and use them to send traffic to your site and forum.

- You can force people to sign up by requiring them to login to the forum to view a message, like an announcement or patch info. This is especially effective if you have an online game that is updated constantly. Once they are past the initial barrier of signing up they will be more willing to explore your forum.

- You have the easiest scenario for establishing a forum: you have a game! Whereas others have to built a community around discussion or a topic, you have a product that actually encourages the natural development of a community. Use this to your advantage.

I hope this helps. Your forum looks nice, I hope it turns out well for you.