My forum seems to get most of its members from word of mouth and a here and there member from a sig link or from an ad I have on a graphics forum. People coming from the graphics forum tend to only sign up to get images from the gallery. For a while I was getting a few members from Google because of thread content.

Just seems I don't have what it takes to get a big forum. I'd like for there to be a day where I have over 10,000 members and 500,000 posts. Just don't see that happening.

I also don't have that much money to spend and I have no ads. I don't think ads would bring enough to help me get better hosting. I have IPS hosting and because of that, I can't fit much into the gallery. As my plans are to have a huge gallery and intergration with Wordpress or some site like script where I can have a manga scanlation group. A manga scanlation group being a group of 5-15 people who scan, translate, and edit unlicensed Japanese comics. They then can be put as downloads.

Wordpress is a problem, though. As I can't find a good script for intergrating it. I found one, but it's still a very long way from being complete. Same with IP Coverage and IP Dynamic. There is however Subdreamer, but it's far too expensive. I don't know what to do about that.

My staff is okay. I added a new co-admin. I trust him and he's smart, but I don't know if he has the time to keep the place running while I move to a new living place.

Help.

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Why should I join your forums over any of these?

If you don't have an answer to that question, you need to get one.

The anime forum industry is HUGE. It is probably the biggest next to general discussion. If you want to be successful and you have no money to spend, then you're going to have to come up with something brilliant and unique to offer. Unfortunately, it's going to be hard to get an idea like that from us (the general public)...because ideas are not unique if everybody knows them, and when somebody does have a unique idea, they are more likely to use it themselves instead of give it away.

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You need an anime creator on your site, where a user could create his/her anime character. Somewhat similar to the south park character creator that's out there. Not sure if that's out there already or not but just a thought that could be unique.

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That's basically Gaia. ^

Ryan, most of those you just linked to aren't anime forums. My forums has a somewhat better RSS feed set up. A lot of those forums in that link tried, but the threads that were made were either adverts or stuff about the site it came from. Mine also has an ask me forum. I also have gallery/blog stuff that most of the larger anime forums don't have, except for Anime Online and Minitokyo.

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Even if today is painful
Someday it will become a warm memory

But it certainly works for them. Not saying you should do it, but most forum features aren't unique.

One idea for you is to have a webcomic, a bud of mine runs an anime forum and they have their own comic. Another thing that brings in a lot of members to his forum is fanart and fanfiction.

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