The website "Strawpoll" is most likely not owned by them. I've seen that site used many times in the past when someone wanted to make a quick poll and didn't have a forum that had that feature such as a Reddit post or Discord chat.

I do question however their selection of sites that they has chosen because a few of those are proven scams and many I've never heard off and there are a few legit ones. Sure its possible that they want to promote their site, however since they posted this poll publicily and want us to vote, most people will vote for the legit sites and not their site. And I don't think its that easy for them to just fudge the results on Strawpoll, what will they do? Keep changing their IP just to make a new vote, don't think so.

Like I said a few days back, just make a new thread on bitcointalk and use the Poll option instead and that way it would be more active and get more participants.

You forgot many great dice sites.
And it will be hard to fight against shills (organized voting)in the poll.

But attracting new posters and GOOD posters is a different thing and a difficult one.

It is true that the main page has nothing to do with gambling. But if we look at the subforums they give a list of crypto gambling sites there.
About the terrible domain, they also plan to change that and change the name of the forum to Crypto-forum.net but when I visited the Crypto-forum.net page it was redirected to the previous domain. I don't know if they will continue using the old domain or will replace the new one.

This could be a bad start as the OP cant keep his own words (about the time) especially it is just for few bucks. Maybe he will send it eventually but unable to keep his own words does not sound good at all. His forum members may start thinking that forum payment might be delayed for longer time than expected as well so it will make them think twice to be active in the forum.
At least OP should try to fulfil his promises, once he says "in the next xx hours" then he should try to do it before xx hours passed unless there is an issue that cant be avoided so the payment need to be delayed a little longer.

It would be excellent if they could implement moderation in the forum and control the spam that is generated, at the same time the level of the forum would increase and people would look for it for quality.

Was not it expected ? I told from beginning, that's not how promote a forum. Paying for post and competition for posting will just encourage spam in your forum. Your giveaway will just worst for you. It won't help to build your forum this way. Perhaps you will not believe now but you will realized very soon then you will remember my word. You should choose some other way to promote your forum like social campaign, banner ad, Google ad and so on. Paying for make post means they will never post when you will stop paying. That's it and will happen.