Being such an old domain and this forum having been indexed by every search engine known to man, this place sure sees a lot of bot activity. At any given moment there is at least 10 or 20 bots crawling the site.

Now.. if only we could milk some money out of that

Only thing that comes to mind is Google Adwords. Otherwise I've never used any advertising revenue system so I have got minimal experience, but I do make up for that with consumer experience and can tell you I've never clicked on any adverts cause it never matches the interests of the sites I visit. Advertising systems are absolutely useless in targeting users IMHO. For eg, for this site certain keywords come to mind, such as games, scifi, space, controllers, developer tools and the advert system just doesn't recognize that.

On the other hand if your talking about something else you've peaked my interest!

If I used advertisements, I would probably do something like Steam, Gog or Amazon offers. Pay for crappy Google Adwords? I'll pass

But those bots I'm afraid aren't going to make us any money. Besides, I've always been opposed to putting ads on Sectorgame.

Where do I sign up for Gog, Steam and Amazon offers - ones that are better than what I'm getting!?

We could bot.ify this forum and it'd look like we were busy

I'm not really one for bots, and I expect that would reduce our rankings on Google - which is why we get so many hits in the first place.
I think we need to focus on getting actual users returning first. Come on people, aren't we great company to have?

Need to read one of those marketing books on converting lurkers to members that boasts an 80% success rate

That guest total at the footer of the forum index, does that include bots? or are those lurkers? or both...

Mostly bots, but some lurkers.

I actually have some mild success at marketing on other websites which generated revenue. It takes a long time, especially when dealing with a new website. But Sectorgame is ancient, so traffic is not an issue here. Usually donations are what kept the site alive during my downtime.

Who you calling a lurker?

I dunno, you look pretty suspect to me.