Members and submissions wanted

Hey.

I just set up a small forum and have very little knowledge of running them.

I don't know if I’m allowed to post the link in here and i don't want to be cheeky and do it. I'm looking for some fellow writers to help me out, join the forum, post, etc. Just to get the ball rolling. I set up a poetry and short story contest to help start things off.

 It will have art and photography contests shortly.

Any advice on promotion would be great as well, and i would be looking at people to mod and what not.

Eventually i will be making it far larger then it is with an accompanying magazine, i have the funds for this but i want the initial stages to runs smoothly before i start pumping money into something.

 I'm guessing (considering setting up forums is fairly easy) there are probably a lot of people here who have tried to do it in the past and have plenty of failure/success stories. Love to hear em

http://www.writersblockforum.com

Nice forum. Did you set it up from scratch by yourself, or is it part of some existing site (like a Yahoo Group thing)? The overall design layout is quite good, but could use some more graphics etc to make the whole thing more interesting and attention-catching (of course, these are all easy to say when I'm not the one doing it )

Puayen, the forum software is phpBB. It's free software you can download and install on your hosting service (you need php and mysql support htough). It's also skinable.

pj, the best advice i can give is make sure to have a few friends who are willing to help you grow the community by visiting it almost everyday and posting. The problem often with starting a community or forum is that you need members to generate activity but you need activity to generate more members. So its a cyclical thing. That's why its good to have a few commited members to keep it going.