Revive stagnant online community forum: spark discussions and empower superusers.

[KevinKW]

I'm a community manager for a niche software platform, and I'm tasked with revitalizing our stagnant online community forum to increase user engagement and peer-to-peer support. The current forum is mostly a graveyard of unanswered technical questions, and I need to shift the culture from purely transactional support to fostering genuine discussion and knowledge sharing. For other community managers, what strategies have you found most effective for sparking organic conversations, recognizing and empowering superusers, and measuring the health of a community beyond just post counts? I'm also struggling with how to integrate the forum's value into the broader product experience without making it feel like a corporate-mandated chore for users.