I don't see a seperate forum for rhacodactylus working, for a few reasons. First, if you create a seperate rhac forum that does get some traffic, the regular gecko forum will still be inactive (if not more so) than it is now. You'd be trading one small-traffic forum for another and a little-to-no-traffic forum. Now you might consider renaming this forum to something like "Rhacodactylus and Other Gecko Species" in order to put the Rhacodactylus name out there and more visible, but it still covers the other species.
I do agree with you that the best course of action is to hit up the Leo forum since many of these people are your multi-gecko species crowd. You need something that will help increase awareness that this forum exists and give people a reason to post here; maybe something as simple as a photo contest where people have some incentive to come here and post. Photo contests get pretty old pretty quickly, so maybe not, but you still need to give people a reason to post. At the moment the people aren't coming, and we need to examine why.
My guesses as to why people don't post here:
- Not enough traffic (they think they won't get a response or that people just don't care)
- They can already (get the info faster / are signed up) somewhere else. There's so many forums already set up for geckos (geckosunlimited, Repashy, pangea, KS, etc) that getting people here and involved is kind of tricky.
- Not enough meaningful discussion (my main reason). I don't mind looking at picture posts but in all honesty, they don't encourage me to get involved. If you look at the front page of the forum there is very little discussion of sales, care, genetics, species descriptions, ect. This might tie into number two (get the info somewhere else faster- eg. Repashy forums), but it's not like the leo forum where the majority of posts encourage active participation and debate. Photo posts just don't tie people emotionally to the forum. Because of this, people tend to avoid real discussion because it will be covered by photo posts which, in all honesty, I don't think many people really care about.
All this info is merely speculation and my opinion, but I hope it helps a little bit.