My suggestions

[Quezacotl]

First of all, hello. I've just registered, but I've read most of the stuff here already. This might be quite a long post, but that's good for you, isn't it?

I think you mentioned somewhere that you were trying to recreate the site that was once on the domain www.ffnet.net . The thing is, that site still exists as you may know by now, the new address being www.ffwa.org . Obviously that doesn't mean you should give up on this site, by no means. However, you should jsut expect that an FF site starting up so recently may well never be as popular as that one which has been around since 1999.

Looking at the forums you have, you seem to have even taken the FFWA descriptions for the FF forums from a few years back. I assume you got that from a web archive or something. I'd suggest changing them as I guess this site isn't going to live up to the purpose you originally created it for. Also, it'd be worthwhile to make separate forums for FFX, FFX-2 and FFXI as they are all separate games, as well as FFT (a good game, even if not so many people have played it). Grouping FFX and FFXI isn't really such a good idea. FFV doesn't get much discussion so you can probably group that with FFI-IV.

Somewhere I noticed a suggestion about implementing a forum battle hack thing. Don't do this; it may seem fun in the beginning and will get a few people to stay, but it's also likely to attract more immature people and it doesn't really do the forum much good in the end. It's much better to try to have a good site and a good message board where people will want to post.

Wouldn't it make sense for a forum about FF Trivia to be grouped in the FF Discussion section? Also, Fan Fiction and Fan Art are two different things, but I notice you already have a forum for artwork, so it's probably better to just call that forum Original Fan Fiction. You probably won't get many fanfics posted at an early stage, but as you get more members they may become more popular.

I don't think the forum rules forum should be at the bottom of the page, because it might not get noticed there. If you're going to have rules they could probably go in the announcements forum anyway.

Do you post at any other forums? If you do, then you should have a link to here in your sig. Don't spam advertise, you're more likely only to get complaints. Getting a new forum off the ground can be hard, so any members you do get you need to encourage to post. A good start would be to make lots of topics; just post about anything that comes to mind. Don't worry about spam at this stage, posts are posts, and you'll soon realise if anyone is being a dick and know to do something if they are a problem. It's unlikely you'll have big problems at this stage.

It might be worth making some people moderators. They aren't really needed at this stage, but once the forums pick up a bit, mod a few people in some forums. Ask people who you think would do a good job, and if they want to then put them in certain forums. Don't give any one person too many forums to mod or it'd be pretty pointless, but being a mod should encourage someone to post more, and you can encourage mods to post more topics in their forums too.

*phew* this is getting on a bit. You don't have to listen to everything I say, but I hope it helps somewhat. I'll post around here a bit myself. I hope this helps you a bit.