Jonathan - 4:31 am on May 14, 2004 (gmt 0)

I agree that impersonating forum posters by using multiple nicks is not a good idea. One of the forum admin communities recently started a "Launch Team" that sends a group of its members to a new community to help get the ball rolling; this seems like a better option.

Tying in discussions with pre-existing site content works fine, as does highlighting quality discussions to a mailing list, or elsewhere on a site. Email notification (turned ON by default) has also been successful on my site. I've found that non-dynamic URLs are crucial for spidering too, but can be difficult, especially if you're hacking up the URL structure of established forum software, rather than rolling your own.

Some out-of-the-box forum software offers an affiliate-type program for current members to recruit new ones. Never tried it, but I suppose it could work. The vbulletin community has various hacks for integrating chat bots into message forums as regular posters. I've seen this generate a lot of initial excitement -- many people don't even realize they're conversing with a bot.

Part of the challenge is also getting newly-registered members to make their first post. I use a dynamic announcement system for this -- if any board page detects a new member with 0 posts, it will display a message at the top of the page encouraging them to make their first post. I also send new members an automatic "sticky" message to encourage the same.