The whole deal with BBS's systems is getting users to interact with each other. Users come back time and time again to see the results. Site Interactivity Site Interactivity is the word for the day. No matter how good your content is, how compelling your arguments are, there is nothing like putting two people together on the Internet. Look at the popularity of email and Usenet.
Nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd .
If you can engage your users senses beyond the solidarity of setting behind the keyboard and reading, you'll get them to come back and back. Chat Its almost official, chat doesn't work very well from most small and medium websites. Unless you have over 5000 users a day, don't consider building a chat system as a good use of your time. Chats main drawback is that it requires quite a few people to make a system work, and most websites don't have that kind of traffic or support in order to make chat successful - nobody wants to set in a lonely chat room. I recently put my ICQ number at the bottom of several pages.