What are the best ways to populate a forum?
 

All in the title!

controversy, piss people off

naked pics of hot women

Nice :thumbsup

News comments
Controversy/provocative threads
Q + A
Straight out trolling (handle with care)

Hire paid posters

:) nice ideas ... more? How to send traffic there?

Get traffic for your forum from existing forums
blogs
blog comments
run a referral contest
if your forum is for mainstream webmasters or webmasters there's a funny trick you can pull

When it comes to traffic--it is as wide as your imagination. :thumbsup

sprinkle crack on it, that shit is pretty damn addictive

porn duh!

post would you hit it threads, make fake dramas, spam webmaster lists

Oh jesus ....

if u spray feces on your cat at 1:34am on every second tuesday or every other month on a leap year... it will populate like you've never seen... trust me

is that your ass dude?

What's the trick?

i wish.....

Once you get the forum designed and functioning well the next step is to get some activity and start developing interest. Go to www.rentatroll.com and hire at least a dozen trolls to get the ball rolling. Hire them to spam similar forums with your url and start posting hyped bullshit threads to peak the surfer interests. Make sure to hire a drama troll once the activity starts as you want to keep the interest going.

After you have it running and growing each day, you need to then hire Juicy to come in for the kill. His barrage of funny pic posting and hundreds of daily useless threads will create even more interest and you've got yourself one popular forum. Then you can start selling ad space and bring in the "would you hit it" troll to post nude pics and keep the posters active.

Fake nics of course.

He said it all.

Also, traffic.

Are they are good source of traffic once you have the members, i mean do you think there is a good ratio that will join a porn site link from a forum

if mainstream, and you want to avoid fake nics/paid posting:

Contests. mix of referral/posting contest.
a "simple" contest works wonders. we used a t-shirt contest to jumpstart one of our sites.

good luck.

sweet stuff

Promote free signup sponsors such as dating, geo ip rotating banners work great in forums.

Pay him and he'll tell you.

Drama, people love to argue.

be a digital gangster
thats a given