Yeah, it's likely different for a support forum/forum that used to be a support forum. In that case, the popularity of your product or service can create a comm

Yeah, it's likely different for a support forum/forum that used to be a support forum. In that case, the popularity of your product or service can create a community without needing to do anything special on the forum side of things. But what I said about fake users definitely applies a lot more if your forum is the entire website and the community is the only goal there. Your average gaming/film/tv/music/sports/whatever forum lives or dies based on how many people appear to post/visit every day. Also, it doesn't take any cash to have fake users/activity. Just a lot of free time to spend posting away under pseudonyms. If you don't have that time, you can always do things like literally edit the forum stats (there are plugins for that[1]), 'buy' services from certain websites to post for you[2] or if you're really morally questionable, set up a script that takes random people's accounts and makes them appear to be online[3]. Really, community management is a lot like SEO. You've got everything from people who don't do anything in the slightest bit 'shady' to build activity and just kind of hope they can market the forum on their own to those who do things 100 times less 'ethical' than having fake user accounts. 1. https://web.archive.org/web/20080905041551/https://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=117933 https://web.archive.org/web/20080905041551/https://www.vbull... 2. https://forumpromotion.net/forum/forums/posting-packages.6/ https://forumpromotion.net/forum/forums/posting-packages.6/ 3. https://xenforo.com/community/resources/th-fake-users.4845/ https://xenforo.com/community/resources/th-fake-users.4845/