Cool, but is it just me, or is it heavily based off of the GDNet Forums? Same sections, even the same text describing what the sections are for.

Edit: Abyss Games Forum

Well, I'd say you'd have to have some material at the site to attract them there, not just a forum, but other content like articles and things. Just my 2 cents.

Just too let you know, this is all pure guesswork, I don't know a lot about websites, I'm just saying, that to get people to come you might want to have something other than a forum on your site. Have tutorials on the different areas of Game Development, Have games you've made, maybe links to other sites. It's those things that attracted me to Gamedev.net, and eventually made me join the forum. And thank you for the offer, but as of the moment I don't have the time to admin your forums, sorry.

Anyways, just look around Gamedev.net, the forums here have a large amount of posters, look around, see what this site has to offer that may have attracted people here, I dunno, and again, I'm probably not the best person to ask about this, you may be better off talking to one of the GDNet Administrators about this, as they would obviously know A LOT more about this. Sorry if I'm not being terribly helpful. Good luck with your forum.

Getting people to come to your forums requires that your forums have something to offer. People aren't just going to say "hey, there is an empty forum, I think I'll post there". When was the last time you tried to start a conversation or asked a question in an empty room?

In your case, your forums are word for word lifted straight from GameDev.net, the single most popular and well known game development community on the planet. Aside from the potential copyright violations, it drives off most people because it forces them to immediately compare your forum to the (vastly superior) forum you copied.

That's not to say your forums can't be successful just because there is a bigger one out there, it just means you can't be successful if you come off as a cheap bootleg copy from the far east. An indie FPS game might sell really well, but if you used the name "DooM [something]" or "Half Life [something]" for it, it would fail because people would immediately compare it to the original; and finding it not up to the standard set by the original, dismiss it entirely rather then discover it's own unique benefits.

So your first step is to make your forums your own forums, and not just a cheap ripoff. The second thing is that you've made a common mistake made by many people who have just setup a forum using some free BB software - you created a ton of subforums for every possible subject.

The problem is that when your forum starts out you won't have many visitors. The vast majority of people will join your forum because it looks like there is a community there. By creating a whole lot of forums right from the start you impede that - activity is spread way too thinly, to the point that half your forums will have only one or two posts, and your site overall will look like a graveyard (as it does now).

GameDev.net didn't start out with tons of subforums (though remember that GameDev didn't start from scratch - it combined several sites, so there was already a forum community to support the forums created). Instead, GameDev had general forums, and created topic specific forums when there was enough traffic to support them (for instance after a while General Programming was split into General and Game programming, the Graphics forum was split into Theory, DirectX and OpenGL).

So remove most of your forums, until you have 2-3 general forums (say a lounge, a general programming and graphics programming forum), along with any "unique" forums (for example is your site going to provide some unique material for this RGSS, in which case you'd want to highlight that speciality). Then get some content. Either create site content (articles, contests, reviews, etc) or get busy on the forums. Either way, expect to be posting a lot on your forums in the beginning.

That is looking better now, I noticed that you've put up a tutorial, very nice. I was wondering if you had a website devoted to your MMORPG? If so, you should put a link somewhere. Good job! See Ya'