I dunno how but I'll join your forum, plz.

IMO, that will depend on your subject matter and your promotion efforts.

What are you talking about?

Are you asking me?

Yes I am, I dunno what you're talking about.

I was responding to the question, "how long does it usally take to get a good forum off the ground?"

IMO, the two (2) primary factors that will determine "how long" are:

1. Subject Matter: What is the forum about? Is the content run of the mill "dime-a-dozen" chat or does it cover a niche subject/topic?

2. Promotion Effort: How good of a job the forum admin/owner did in getting the word out.

Yes, they are correct. But as a generic answer, you should look at how search engines do the crawl. They are different for some engines. The META tags being properly set up is important. There are a few programs out there that will help you and if you look here some peeps do that work. They will help to maximize you. Certainly if your site is about pizza you have a tough fight to get up, but still not everyone searches the same way and it takes someone with some expertise to get you to move up. (and hits). The main HTML page will aid you a lot.

Also depending on the kind (brand) of forums, you have to make the search engine friendly some (VB) for instance allow you to make them NOT search engine friendly (along with some others). For the VB you can change that in the general settings. You can check it if you can see a list of your forums with this URL:

http://YOURSITENAME.com/forum/archive/index.php/s-01

Where s-01 would be September 1st, etc.

It will depend on how you advertise your forum, If your forum has threads that are interesting for a guest to turn into a active member

Heh Maybe an RP Forum