In the early days of the internet there was a service started called Usenet, it’s a lot like a distributed forum.

Usenet is still in use today, although a lot of people do not know about it. A number of the forum systems out there have plugins that enable you to import Usenet posts into your forum.

Using this method you can have a forum go from 0 posts to thousands in a matter of hours, some people are concerned that this may be considered spammy and or duplicate content by some of the search engines, but when starting a forum it is a damn good way to get people to join and contribute.

I have used this method, and I will continue to use this method, one of my forum sites is about to relaunch using this and when it does launch it will have at least 250,000 posts!

To use this method you need forum software that supports it, or a 3rd party plugin that does, so have a search on the net for a nntp gateway for your forum software. You will also need access to a nntp server. If your host does not have one available then you might need to pay for access to one.

Once you have that all setup you need to decide what groups you want to import, they need to be relevant to your forums topic - which is easy because there are thousands for usenet groups.

I usually use Google Groups to find the usenet groups I want to import, it’s fast and easy to check out the content of the actual group. You do need to check out the content because occasionally a group falls into disuse and contains nothing but spam.

It is also a good idea to setup some filters so that you stop as much of the spam as possible being imported into your forum.

I’m sure some of you will think this is a dirty and underhanded trick, and it is kind of, but starting a forum is hard if you have no existing site traffic to leverage.

If you do it right the groups you import from usenet will have useful and relevant content for your new users.