Hey HN.<p>I usually don't make submissions or comments here, but a few recent posts on HN have caught my attention. Another Ask post was asking about phpBB and why it's been dropped for other platforms.<p>This has sort of sparked me to want to create my own community, similar to HN but different enough that it's not a ripoff. But the point of this post is to ask: how does one promote and get members to their forum (or whatever medium) and have them stay there.<p>I know that people would probably find enjoyment in most communities, but I have never found an effective way to get it known.<p>Thanks.
The initial community of HN was the readers of the blog posts^W^W articles of pg.<p>The initial community of Stack Overflow was the readers of the blog posts of spolsky and codinghorror (the two founders).<p>So the recipe appears to be to make a interesting and unique blog.<p>And after you have a nice technical community, you need moderation, a lot of moderation. There was a lot of work initially by pg and now by dang to moderate the site. A lot of that is invisible, but you can take a look at the recent comments by dang <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=dang" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=dang</a>