Glad you’re not dumb 
You even made me laugh, thanks 
That’s the spirit! Thank you for posting the links to the lists. I will look through those and add more forums to the website / and the forum community wiki.
What fandom are you talking about? The biggest task as the admin of a new forum is getting new members to join. You need constant activity because people look at the dates of the last entries and when they think the forum is dead, they don’t sign-up. To mitigate this you can hide the post date but be sure to always, at least daily, have a look at your forum and reply if someone has written something. People are not willing to wait for answers longer than a day or two before they move on.
The best way to get a fresh forum going is to have some friends that you can talk to on the forum. Ask questions, answer questions. This way people from search engines will eventually find your forum and sign-up.
That actually sounds nice. It’s a pity that I missed out on that one. Do you know why they did shut down the forum?