Large Forum Review
First Impressions
When I first click onto your forum I am greeted by a theme, which in my opinion, actually looks quite nice. The light colours catch my attention and do draw me into your forum, which is a good start for the prospective visitor. The only thing I would say though as per the theme on a first visit is that the boxes down the side really do not compliment it. They just look dull, squashed in down the side and unneeded in my opinion.
Moving on though, as I do on any new forums I have a quick scroll down and look at your sections, the posts and whatnot. On your forum, I can see a good selection of sections for me to post in yet not many posts in a lot of them. For me, that is a turn off. For me, content is crucial, especially on a new or re-opening forum. If you don’t have the content, members don’t have anything to get into and therefore, post. People need content in which to immerse themselves into the community straight away, without many threads for them, new members will more than likely just leave your forum.
Overall though, I would say that your forum is easy on the eye, and in a way, such a theme does sort of attract people in my opinion. The only thing that really puts me off your forum at a glance is those boxes down the side, especially the ones that just say ‘First Box’, ‘Second Box’! Another thing is the amount of content you have, I personally wouldn’t join your community just yet due to the lack of content. As I’ve said, members need content in which to immerse themselves within your community. Content is key, just remember!
(Score: 7/15)
Appearance
The appearance of your forum is crucial in many aspects, mainly due to the fact that if people have to sit and look at something that is ugly, they will not want to return so it is crucial that you get your appearance correct and spot on and you have done this, to a certain degree. I’ve already mentioned that I like your theme and the reason why is just the light colours and the diagonal stripes just seem to accentuate the nice colours and makes it more, homely.
I have already raised the issue of the boxes done the side and that is the main thing that detaches from the niceness of the main theme itself. Looking down the side of your forum, many boxes are rendered useless straight away in my view. People don’t need to see how many new announcements, posts or threads that have occurred since they last visited. I don’t know anybody who goes ‘Oh, I was last here two hours ago, I wonder how many posts have appeared since then’ which is why I think that first box is irrelevant. The second box is also irrelevant, people can just search using the link in the main navigation menu under the logo, who do they need two search options? Latest threads, I do see the point in this one but feel it would be better suited elsewhere on the forum. As I’ve said, it looks squashed in an adds to a ‘busy’ or ‘rushed’ feeling in my eyes. I feel it would be better suited either gone from the forum or just at the bottom of the forum, maybe in the board statistics. I know of a MyBB add-on that displays posts/members/latest posts and threads all in the bottom area which you may want to look at. If you have to keep that box though, you do need to find somewhere else to place it, it just makes the whole appearance look strange in my eyes. The box one and two speak for themselves, they serve no purpose currently. Remove them!
Moving on to your logo, it does need a bit of work. All it does for me is say the name of your site. I like a logo with a slogan underneath, an explanation of the site I am on. I just feel it adds a bit of character. As for the logo itself, whilst it fits in well it could be improved overall and been looked at better before uploading. I can see a patch of white on the left hand side of the ‘T’ whilst I can see a little bit of pixilation around the speech text bit. I would clear up your logo, get a slogan added and play with the colours a little. Give your logo some identity, make it memorable.
On a side note, your ‘Chatoblue’ theme still has a ‘Chatoholikz’ logo on it. That definitely doesn’t look good on your forum, change it now!
Overall though, you have a nice colour scheme and overall appearance but aspects of it need to be improved before it could be considered actually acceptable in my eyes. They are minor improvements though.
(Score: 10/20)
Statistics and Activity
Your forum currently has 799 posts, 154 threads and 48 members. Looking over your activity, it is not ‘great’ for a forum of around 4 months old but is not unheard off certainly. I would say though, that your forum may have been ‘destroyed’ in a sense due to our constant closures/fixing etc that you appear to do. Whilst I’m sure these fixes/upgrades are in good faith for the forum, maybe you should continue trying them on local host first, getting them fully done to the best of your abilities and then porting them over to your live site. This way, you do not have to close your forums and annoy your members.
Anyway, onto the numbers. Between your members they have made 799 posts, which equates to around 16 posts per member, which is an all right number to have. You and your staff team however amount for 140 of these posts which give your actual members an average of 13 posts per member which still isn’t too bad but could be improved. It also seems that you have a few spambots signing up, you may want to have a look at that.
It would seem that the majority of your posts and centred within 3 sections. General Discussion, Website Discussion and Forum News & Updates. Website discussions I can understand and it is good as it is pertinent to your niche but Forum News and General Discussions shouldn’t have that much in my opinion. Due to your forums age I would be inclined to say that you personally, along with your staff should make the majority of your posts within the niche areas of your site and not the two areas mentioned. You have 4 pages in one announcement thread that just seems to be mostly fighting, why would you leave that there? A waste of posts if you ask me! You should try to post a lot more topics in your niche areas, I always hate to see a General area take more posts than the niche areas of a site.
Your activity does need to be sorted out, I would say do my localhost idea. This way you get to mess around with your forum but it doesn’t mean you have to close it and therefore ‘reject’ members. Can be improved, definitely.
(Score: 5/20)
Ratios
Now, by my count you have five sections composing of 26 boards with 15 subsections also. For a new forum, that is quite possibly the most amount of boards I’ve seen for a forum of your age/activity. It is my belief that a small/new forum should always start with the bare minimal sections instead of adding everything they think somebody could want. (This has probably contributed to the ‘content’ issue I spoke about earlier) If I were to start a forum, I would have as little sections as possible and then add sections if needed and/or suggested by the community. By having minimal sections you are limiting how much content you have to post for one thing but it also helps make the forum look a little bit more active. This is because obviously, you will be populating the forum with content; do you want to have to fill your 41 boards with threads? No you don’t, would you much rather fill in something like 15 boards? Yes. Hopefully you see where I am coming from, If I were you I would go over your board and look at what you can live without and what you need to get your started. As a gesture of goodwill, I’ll message you my personal opinion of a board layout (As it would be too big for here!) The amount of forums you have are actually quite intimidating, whilst I said you have a good selection of places to post, you do have too many for my liking.
Looking over your staff page, I first thought ‘Oh, no Moderators, a good start!’ and then I saw the three green names that indicate Administrators. For any new forum, one Administrator is enough, and that should be only you, the owner unless you have a technical guy behind the scenes but I know you’re capable of that. I don’t see the need for you to have three Administrators at this stage; even big forums don’t even have three, let alone two! Look at Rybo, what has he/she done for your forum? They seem to have contributed nothing whilst Grim appears to have done the bare minimum and made a few posts. I would just get rid of them and be the only Administrator. Should you cut down the amount of sections you have, only you would be needed to moderate the place anyway at this current time. You should only add staff when the activity gets too much for you to handle or you need a pair of eyes to oversee things when you get activity whilst you sleep if you get what I mean.
To be quite honest, this part of the review is a travesty. Being brutal, you need to cut off those two staff members unless you are sure they are completely needed for your forums running, even if they are I would demote them anyway. Three Admins on a new forum never looks good in my eyes and the amount of boards drastically need to be cut down.
(Score: 3/10)
Content
In this section, I am to look at your content. Content is everything on your forum, including rules, TOS, announcements, board descriptions and so on. The problem is that straight away, I can pick out a few errors, which is never good. The one thing with websites is that once a person spots an error, they concentrate on that error and not the site. This is something you would want to avoid so let me get my critical grammar hat on.
One thing that caught me when I was looking at your rules is that your first rule is that people should try to use correct spelling and grammar and even advises them to use a spell checker. It is obvious that reading over the rules that you have avoided this rule yourself! I understand that English may not be your first language though which is understandable but I am here to help!
In your ‘Bumping’ rule point, you have an error where you say ‘may only bump your topic every 24 hours’; I feel that if you added ‘once every 24 hours’ it would look better. In that same sentence, you have another error why you say ‘a again’ instead of just ‘again’. To be quite honest, If I was correcting your errors in that thread alone I would be here for quite a while. Whilst you have the fundamentals down, they are just not explained correctly or words are not joined as they should be as well as punctuation being misused. You seem to use commas in the place of full stops in some areas whilst some areas just need to be re-worded totally. I would ask you to talk to me in PM’s if you want my help on grammar and stuff, it would just take a lot of room saying it here (Without trying to be harsh!)
Another thing I have noticed is that you seem to have bundled your TOS/Privacy Policy into the Rules thread, which presents an issue. People have TOS/Privacy Policies for a reason and they need to be easily viewable and yours are not. It took me a few minutes to distinguish your terms from the actual rules post. If you really do need to have them in one post, please ensure that they are separated or at least made identifiable. Usually though, you would play such documents in the footer of your site, not a post in your Announcements section.
Still in your Announcements area, I am looking at the quality of the threads that are in there. Straight away, I can again see some fundamental errors with the content that is in there. For one thing, look at the threads you currently have in that section. Should people care that you have made 690 posts in 121 threads? Should they care about an old competition that doesn’t seem to be running? You get what I mean hopefully. The Announcements area is reserved for threads which hold information surround topics like updates to the forum, forum software, staff member appointments and upgrades/downtimes and the like. Of course, you can have stuff like ‘1000 posts’ and the like, but I’ve never seen someone celebrate 690 posts before!
Looking over your board descriptions, they do not entice me at all. In fact, one or two look like they have been compiled and marginally edited from ForumPromotion’s own descriptions, which looks very bad on your forum and certainly does not go down well with members if you have to copy stuff. I would advise changing them immediately to make them look more ‘unique’ to your site not and someone else’s. You have errors littered all over your descriptions, which to me look rushed and boring. Your descriptions need to entice people in, you have a sentence and a bit to get people rushing to your sections and posting content and these descriptions aid you in that. Try to add a little humour, explain the benefits in quick and sharp manner and most of all, look over them for grammar/spelling mistakes! Just to point out one or two. On your General Discussions description ‘chill out, from..’ No comma is needed there! Your Review descriptions (One of the ones I suspect of copying) says ‘forums or blog, and forums.’ Why is forums mentioned twice? You get where I am going. Inject some humour, again something I am happy to help you with.
The content needs a lot of work on this forum. Your announcements lack spark and creativity whilst your board descriptions make me think I am in a bleak, dull Soviet era country. Inject some humour into them, use words that catch the users attention and most of all, spell check and proofread everything!
(Score: 5/20)
Navigation
I must say, the navigation is the high point of your forum, next to your appearance of course. I can easily access most of the stuff I would/should need but I would like to see the TOS/Privacy Policy rewritten and placed in the footer. I find it easy to navigate back to your forums main index, which is always good, and it is easy to access all aspects of my UCP. Good stuff here.
(Score: 12/15)
Total Score
42/100
Final Remarks
A forum in desperate need of a helping hand to get it going. You have too many sections and too little content to grasp your members. You need to stop taking it in and out of maintenance mode and look at the prospect of doing the maintenance or changes on a non-live version so you do not disrupt the members you do have/may get.
TLC ois needed on all levels and I would implore you to look at possibly running your rules/descriptions etc through several grammar/spell checkers and ensuring they are up to scratch language wise. I do it all the time just to ensure that I’ve got it right. Please PM me for further help as stated in the review.
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