What type of forum should I open?

[smexie]

A main piece of advice I give/stick to is that the admin of the board has to enjoy the forum they have set up. Ok, so there are a lot of graphic and Harry Potter baords, great, but it surely means they are popular boards, right?

There really is no point a die hard HP fan making a Pokemon site or something, unless they enjoy it. Basically, as long as you can keep your forum alive, have the time to build it up and enjoy your board, then you should open it.

[Mr. Magic]

I have given alot of thought to my latest forums which is Magic themed. It's not an RPG or Harry Potter themed forums, but it can be discussed there because it deals with Magic and the craft.

as original as I may think it is, it is extremely hard to get it off the ground now. As much as I affiliate, advertise on the ProBoards, submit my URL to search engines, as much as I invite other wiccans, etc., etc., etc., I still can't get my proboards active. In the month or so that it was up (February to mid-March), it was showing a good sign with the forum's first 19 total members, including me and 2 global moderators. I've been constantly updating the forums, creating new skins, adding tons of codes and updates, made it "ad free", did this, did that, bent over backwards (and this being since day 1), and now I can't do squat.

I put up a contest or two, put up plenty to talk about and debate, put up games, did everything that people had suggested, yet I am having the hardest of times with it.

Some are saying how there are so many RPG and HP forums there are, yet I barely saw anything dealing with actual magic made, so I started one to be one of the rare and unique forums on real magic dealings (you know, the typicak blessings you can get from a church for your house, candles, love potion #9 and so on). So, the question is, why do so many comon forums become so popular yet those that are unique and rare die out before they're even given the chance that they're supposed to get and deserve?

[Blink]

My biggest problem is finding a topic...

My first Forum was a Pokemon Card forum, it was fairly popular with over 100 members. But I eventually decided I didn't like Pokemon Cards any more.

Then I made a General Chat forum that eventually died down.

Now I just want a Forum but I can't think of a topic. I'm currently trying RPing but there are already a lot out there XD.

[Ben]

There’re way too many graphic designing, HP, Football, and GT boards out there these days. It’s pointless starting a new one when people will just go to the official, SSD, G101, Extreme Data, forumforfootball, Mrs Nesbits, Trios Hogwarts and tones of other huge forums. The competition is just too much for a new board to compete with, unless, like Wolfy said that you have something that these forums do not offer.
I look at how many other forums are recognized in the category that my aviation forum is based and how many active forums there are. The way I do it is to search aviation+proboads in search engines and see what comes up. I discovered that they are about three active aviation forums on PBs that I could find, one is slightly bigger but it offers nothing half as useful as my forum does. I have to admit that there are tones of aviation forums made by companies that are not using Proboards forums, they are all bigger than mine. But most lack the sort of resources that my forum has, not boasting at all.