Traffic to the Site

I get a small stream of visitors coming onto my forum, however, it could be spam bots.  I can't really understand how to sort types of traffic.

IP addresses can help a lot.  If your forum isn't targeting India or China, but the vast amount of IPs are from those nations, it is likely spam bots just crawling your site looking for a way to post.  

Forums also do well over time and with vast content.  The more posts and the older they are, the more likely you are to appear on search results and this builds traffic.  This is also why you see a lot of old forums still open with no active users, the owners are likely still making income from the sites without really any input.