First of all, IHB was always dead on the weekends. It's not surprising that a forum that spun off of IHB would be slow on weekends as well.
Secondly, there are only two ways to increase traffic in the forum. Increased traffic has to come from some combination of increased activity from existing users and/or introduction of new users.
With Christmas approaching quickly, it's probably not reasonable to expect increased activity from existing users until after the new years. But it probably wouldn't hurt for the community to discuss ways to increase activity. (Given the dominance of housing and economy related topics that this community discusses, it's probably not terribly surprising that being stuck in a "muddle through" economy can sap energy from people after a while. Personally I always love to discuss both politics and economics (and the intersection between the two), but I appear to be out of the mainstream in this area)
Attracting new users is another challenging area. With the feeder system from IHB now being dead, long term viability of the forum is dependent upon getting an alternate feeder system in place. (The subject of the "Death of an Internet Forum" thread I started earlier) I don't know if anyone has bothered to look at how popular IHB is/was, but I pulled some numbers from Alexa.com. When this site started, IHB was ranked something like #10,300 in the US. Given the amount of competition from other websites, that's not bad. Long term, there has to be a feeder system. PeterUK has started a bicycling blog. I don't know if others are interested in doing something similar. (But I do know that between my regular job and work I am doing on a piece of software that I hope to turn into a business I lack time to do something similar) But ultimately success of this forum will be dependent on some magnet to attract people into the forums. (On a related note, the
www.talkirvine.com domain name probably should point towards the magnet(s) instead of the forum. With the existing setup, the forum is the magnet, not the blog(s). Personal experience leads me to believe that this is not likely to succeed. People are more likely to be drawn into a passive experience like reading a blog than an active experience like posting in a forum. A certain percentage of people drawn into the passive activity will eventually be drawn into the active activity)
Finally, I think it would be unreasonable to expect the owners of this forum to finance any kind of giveaways. This isn't a commercial enterprise, and they are giving away an inordinant amount of time as is. Simply put, the success or failure of this community is going to depend on the community.
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