Running a successful forum?

What would you suggest

[universetoday]

Anyone here running a forum on their website, kind of like Webmaster World? I just started on my website and I'd like to make it as successful as possible. I've seen lots of forums with tumbleweeds blowing through from lack of membership and conversations. They look kind of embarassing.

What kind of strategies have worked for you to help build membership, discourage trollers, and have the forum generally contribute to the goals of your website.

What's worked? What hasn't?

[futureX]

Forums can be a difficult thing to get right for a website and it really depends on the subject matter for your site and your audience; some people of certain ages/intrests just may not want to tak. Or it could be that the subject matter requires no conversation.

What i've found that doesnt work for forums:

Buying Ads
You get short term influx of members but they rarely stay to chat for long.

Being Bland
Whatever board software you use, always try and make it look unique, dont stick with the default skin. Otherwise people will think its just another dull forum. I've seen too many phpbb boards that all use the default skin, and it makes me yawn.

Too many forums
Never have any more forums than you need, try to keep the numbers down so users dont have to scroll much and dont get lost, most of the time a max of 10 forums will do, it makes the posts more condensed and therefore the forums more lively.

And some things that do work:

Content
Having content on your website that people want to talk about is paramount to getting members and getting them to post. Just having a forum on its own or having it as a main part of your site is mainly not a good idea, get some thought provoking articles and ask questions.

Google
Get google to index your forum, this will bring in visitors like nobodys business, although sometimes it can be a step in the wrong direction e.g. I have a forum that gets around 6k hits from google a month, but most of those only view one page and most of them dont register, I think out of that 6k only about 30 register a month for that forum, because the results people are getting are not what they expect, too much general chat too.

Keep active
Keep active on your forums, let people know that there is always someone there to get a reply from, also dont reply too much, if people see your name on the end of every topic it makes the forum look dead.

Individuality
Try to make your forum stnd out from the res, get a skin (or make one) and get some mods for your forum to make it more fun for the members and to attract more members.

Integrate
Make the forum part of the website, link articles back and forth from the website to the forums and vice-versa. So people have something to do.

It can be hard to get it right with forums, for instance I have one forum i've had open for over a year and it has around 166 with over 9,000 posts, which is bad, then I have another forum I launched this month and it already has 750+ members but less posts than members.