One forum to rule them all ? help

[TheMechanix]

Guys i set up a forum a day ago. It's a forum for my city. Basically there is no forum or any platform for that matter for people residing in my city. It will give people a platform to talk about various aspects of the city and to make friends and find people which is difficult in real life. I am trying to take things slow but not too slow. It's not indexed by google yet and i will be doing seo for it thanks to the immense wealth of knowledge here on BHW.
I just need help from you, so please tell me. I only need to know the how to give the forum that initial momentum as in should i create a lot of fake posts and then send links to people and friends. Because i think if i directly start inviting people to the forum no one will register considering there are no post and no members. I just want those initial few genuine members. also, should i post some kind of contest where if a person brings members or does something for the site i'll make them moderator?. Also, should i lure people by offering some free stuffs ? Should i ask the people i meet in real life like in college etc. to join the forum and start posting, or even lure them by offering them moderatorship?
This is the first time i am doing this.
Even a small help will be greatly appreciated. Thanking you in advance.

 

[qrazy]

You can use any forum poster software which scrapes data from yahoo answers and other forums. And use this only till your forum gets some momentum to get it going on its own. And the best way is to give freebies to your initial users for new referrals...

 

[TheMechanix]

thanks for the answer grazy. How exactly does the giving freebees to new referrals works? how will i know who brought who ?

 

[qrazy]

Most of the forum supports referral system in their framework and this can be turned on or off. As a admin you can see the number of referrals each user bring in.

 

[TheMechanix]

Searched quite a bit for referral mod for phpbb but didn't find any.

 

[thejake]

The best way to bootstrap a forum is to have a circle of superfriends that'll mod it with you who each run several fake accounts, and promote it with forum IM spam or social engineering, like c&p'ing posts from another forum to yours and then posting an outraged thread on that forum about another forum stealing content.