In terms of the review Site and some of the points Xin Made..
Nothing anyone does to these forums or tries to do will save it. This is NO ones fault at all but with social media and just how the web works - forums are nothing of nothing and unless you have something which then has a forum they stay nothing. Just how it is.
I talked to Nige about tekmonkeys, mentioned before but a fun review and news site.
Review hardware, offer guides and just general news with a number of people who can write to it.
Like I said to Nige, Just think about Alan reviewing a router and as a test watching streaming porn and seeing if it works well or not. People making videos and just not doing a boring review. Real world situation of why you would buy it.
Kinect review and girlfriend breast jiggle rating
With that site you DO NOT loose the forum.
The forum needs to be the key aspect of the community but you need to create an interest and drive to that.
With this being SMF and if you build a site with Wordpress what you can do is for the post comments set it to be the accounts of the forum. If you want to post a comment you need to make an account which is the forum account. With that all here do no then need to make another account on the site to add comments either.
To that you would create limited comments - Kind of like twitter with only so much you can say.
With every post you make with another addon you can have it so a thread is made on these forums.
So your creating a means to discuss stuff on the forums and because you have a cool website your getting visits and driving traffic. With that site you have your google plus, tweet, facebook to get social and you also use them to post stuff that is going on in the site to build those inbound links around the web.
In turn a post has a link to the forum thread for it driving traffic to the site.
As I said to Nige it takes a minimum of 4 people willing to get it going. 1 to design and build basic html, at least 2 to build it and one more working on content. That is minimum as if you ask help here people can not be bothered (no digs, just how people are)
Once it is up and looks great and easy to use and the features mentioned you then get people willing to contribute.
You then build build build. Adverts at some point to help with things, Get some actual hardware to review from companies, look to create some paid service if it gets big to offer something more......
Build from that core concept but have the forums as an integral part of the site, discussion and community.
There is no way what so ever to drive more to the forums just as forums.
