Editor... Take a look at the forum on www.tt-forum.co.uk for a good example of a well designed/managed forum - granted for a totally different subject matter. It's intuitive, simple and the search functionality gives users the ability to quickly find the subject they are looking for without any indexing functionality - which makes it highly effective and useful.
The TT forum regularly generates 100+ postings per day from a limited number of participants. The Top-Consultant forum generates just a handful of postings per week, many of which do not get a response. The question is why does a site with a very small number of potential users (a couple of thousand) generate vastly more traffic than a site with a very high number of potential users (one hundred thousand ++ ) ?
Rather than a Forum functionality/design problem I suspect that the true problem is that the Top-Consultant site simply is not well known enough to generate enough traffic to make the Forum useful.
A UK based Web Forum for the consulting community would be an extremely useful tool if managed and used correctly. It's a shame that this useful web site cannot provide that service.