Lurker or poster, poster or lurker, that is the question!

I wouldn't worry about that just yet. If there's a secret on how to make a forum come alive, then it's probably that for most commercial forums, the first 10,000 entries are just bots and paid writers. I wouldn't copy that approach.

Other than that, I dunno, maybe you could give the forum a more lurker or newcomer friendly introduction or something. Right now, it's hard for an outsider to make out what it is actually about. Much like Miles' own website, I could add. Like, at the "home" page, you could write an intro that Miles researches fake historic events, or whatever you find most important. For someone who doesn't know Miles at all. Maybe add some links to his top papers, then invite people to ask questions about those and discuss them, with links to the relevant sections. And for a background image, you could perhaps make a collage of some fake photos or portraits in those papers. I mean, Miles' art is great, but we won't discuss his nude paintings a lot here, so I'd say hints to his history research would be more important and on topic. Overall, outsiders should more easily understand what this is all about.

If the individual sections can have intros, you could also add them there, e.g. with a direct link to Miles' science page for the "Science papers" section.

Then there's been a high ratio of bot spamming, and many borderline barf posts, like from that LOLZ account. They clutter up the topic lists, and maybe don't look too good for newcomers. Maybe you can delete the bot posts and downrank the human spam posts. Or maybe that's too strict, I really dunno.

Then this forum's style uses a very spacey layout, like with large avatar images and lots of metadata. That maybe encourages long posts, but it's not suited for scanning quick chit-chat, when the image plus metadata is 10 times the size of the post itself. Maybe the default layout can be changed for easier scanning.

Personally, I don't post too much on current events, because I don't have too many questions on Miles' papers. Miles' research already has made many things pretty clear to me. I most often think about stuff that his research couldn't yet answer for myself. And of course about my own research about ancient times. I could post more of those topics. But maybe that's going off topic.

In any case, don't take this as criticism, it's all just suggestions. Thanks a lot for setting this thing up. I'd say it's already a good alternative to CTTF whenever the spam filter goes haywire on us.

There is a forum I know of that is very alive. Every day the owner posts links to articles or news or blogs, etc with content that might interest members and invites comments. Some get no response but many do. It works very well to keep the forum active.