A more likely explanation is that the proxy service you are using has been used by spammers. I have zero tolerance of spam, so I just block the IP. I know this is harsh if it affects innocents, but I have not come up with a better solution yet.

Where I do think you can have success is including links to monetization pages in your replies. Even affiliate links could work, but AdSense clickthrough rates are very low in my experience.

The best thing to do is to try it, but there is no point in opening a forum just to earn money. You have to spend a lot of time building up regular traffic before you even think of monetizing it.

Thanks for the heads-up on comments. I actually wrote an article on the importance of comment subscription, but somehow the plugin got deactivated. Note that I use the Gurken Subscribe to Comments from Martin Spuetz.

There are 2 parts to this – the page that will be used as the forum, and the setting in Simple:Press that tells it which page to display it’s forum on.

I notice that your forum page is now forum-4. You can leave this as is, or change it to something slightly more relevant, like chocolate-forum. This is changed in the WordPress Page Editor near the top where it says Permalink (Note below). At the same time, it is a good idea to switch off Comments and Trackbacks in the discussions settings for the page. The Introductory text is typed into the normal text area. The forum will display after this text when you change the forum settings…

Go to Forum – Options – Global Settings and change the Forum Page Slug to whatever you set it to above (forum-4, chocolate-forum or something else). The forum will automatically appear when you refresh the forum page.

Note: Sometimes WordPress does not let you change the Permalink (also called slug). This is usually because you have a page of the same name in Trash. Simply empty Trash from the Pages admin screen, and try again.