[...] Another idea to increase the amount of user-submitted content on your blog is to start a forum revolving around the topics which are discussed on your site. Back in February of 2005, I tried this idea with little success. The forum was quickly filled with very inappropriate spam messages (which I have still yet to fully clean up) and it did not get as much traffic as I had originally hoped. I will be creating a new forum to try this once again and will make the following adjustments to my approach: 1. I will make a mandatory “captcha” spam filter on all forum posts & new registrations. Captcha tests are those fuzzy image boxes with some strange text in them which you need to type out to make sure that you are human. [...]