Well the WAY TO GO to get a forum started, is to start with a few core people who start to post stuff and start to discuss in a forum, and getting other people in by telling about this forum. Once there are a couple like that the rest will follow I hope.
And we are doing our best to clean up spam here.
Talking about removing spam, I remove around 4-6 spam threads a week & I look as often as I can to keep the forum clean. Really, it's a lot of work!