Mike, if I may ask, what's your strategy? I freaking love this place--the freedom, the reload speed, the lengths you all go to accomodate the posters, etc. I'd like to see other teams come on board. Also, what happened with the Nets board here? It's awfully tough to get banned from here.
I'd say the strategy boils down to four things:
1. Work on offering better features
2. Work on the slow and steady improvement of forums (as I described above) by building better discussion and attracting posters. It's hard, but sometimes slow and steady wins the race.
3. Get our name out amongst communities of other posters without spamming them. Example: I'm a regular poster on Blog-a-Bull over on the SBN forums. As long as I'm an honest and regular contributor there, they don't mind that I put a link in my sig to the
BullsTwo page, or occasionally link back to stuff that's written here or the
salary database. Several of the guys who are now regs on the Bulls board got run off of there or didn't like it. So it works for everyone. If any of you guys want to attract posters at other sites, that's a good way to do it. I'd prefer you didn't simply spam people though, because that gives everyone a bad name

4. Be on the lookout and flexible enough to try and accommodate new communities if they want to migrate en masse.
As far as the Nets guys, to be honest, I don't know that I could sum it up into one thing. I think it was a combination of several things. We felt several of the several key nets guys were actively trying to screw up other peoples' good time - specifically you guys coming here. We extended them a lot of leeway and tried to work with them for months. One admin, who was a nets fan got mad and took these guys side rather than making much attempt to deal with them. And the NetsDaily blog decided to open up a forum of its own, which obviously is good for them from a traffic and advertising perspective. So that was definitely a setback, but there's only so much you can compromise on.
If I were to try and summarize it into one thing, I think several key Nets guys wanted a Nets dominated forum and weren't comfortable not being the biggest fish in the pond any more. Probably one of them will show up to tell me what sort of asshole I am for saying that, but I think the proof is in the pudding. We certainly wanted everyone to stay and have a bigger forum where everyone could have fun. They weren't willing to stay if it meant they had to be cool with everyone. Simple as that.