Your Forum Review
First Impressions & Appearance
When I first visited your forum, my first impression was pretty good. You have a nice, simple, black and white theme that is easy on the eyes. Your banner works well and the Live Support Online image looks good as well. You have a nice favicon with C for Caliber Hosting. This makes it easy for people to find you in their bookmarks. There is not much wrong with your appearance that I can find. The only thing I can see that needs improvement is your topic icons. When I go into each board the icons for no new replies look plain and boring. I think they would look so much better if they were similar to the board icons. I notice you have a shoutbox, which has been known to decrease activity in the forums. People tend to just chat in there instead of making posts on the forum. You may want to consider removing it if you want members to stick to posting in the forums, but it’s not really a big deal. Other than this, you have done a really good job with your appearance.
(Score: 17/20)
Site Layout
I see you have 18 boards, which can be improved a bit. The first thing I noticed is you have 3 off topic boards, from what I can see. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I can not see any difference between Community Discussions, Discussions, and Off Topic. Another thing you could do is remove the board for support guidelines. I don’t think you need an entire board just for guidelines. I think it would work much better if you merged them all into one and created an announcement in each support board. I think webmaster would look better as a sub board for webmaster and administration. Forum based games would look better in the General Category, and as it is games I think post count should be off in this section to avoid people making quick +1 posts. I would make this a sub board for off topic. Other than these things, your layout is okay.
(Scored 14/20)
Statistics and Activity
You opened September 16th 20011, 12 days ago, and since then you have managed to accumulate 1030 posts with 37 members. For 12 days, this is really good! I see you have been building since the 1st, which will have contributed but still this is really good. It is good to see you did not open too soon before everything was ready. However, I noticed some boards have a very low number of posts. Web hosting only has one topic, and there are a few other boards with very few topics. Before opening every board should have at least 5 topics. Members need something to reply to, people don’t join and start creating content for you. You could buy some topics from Exchange or FP Cash Exchange to help. Other than this your activity looks really good.
(Scored 16/20)
Staff Moderation
According to the forum team page, you have 16 total staff members, I see you have 6 administrators (including Junior), and 5 moderators, and 4 support staff. I have never reviewed a forum with this many staff members before, this is way too much. Do you really need FIVE administrators? You should really need 2 or maybe 3 at most for a forum of your size. You should consider demoting some of them, Matt R doesn’t have a single post! You definitely need to talk to him, and the other administrators about their activity. Dante and Wofleman are not doing much better with only 9 and 12 posts. You have 298 which is a good number for the total posts, it shows you are dedicated. I’m not sure what the difference is for junior admin, I don’t see the point in that rank, but I’ll get into that below. He has 46 posts which is okay considering the other staff members. Your super moderator has 60 posts, which is not bad but could be better. I see you have assigned moderators for individual boards which for small forums in my opinion is not a good idea. Your staff should be able to deal with the whole forum while it’s new, then when it gets more popular you may want to consider this. The only moderator with a decent amount of posts (80) is ThinkChange. One of them only has 6 posts. You also have 4 support team members while you really should only need one or two, considering not much support has been requested anyway yet as far as I can tell. You really should cut down on the number of staff members.
As well as your huge number of staff members, I can see a huge number of ranks. You really do not need 13 ranks, it is way too much. What is a junior admin? If you don’t trust them enough you really shouldn’t consider them for admin in the first place, I assume that’s what a junior admin is – admin with less permissions. Also you have three VIP ranks, when you really only need one. You could give all the VIP’s one rank and use the member title to show which class they are, similar to member, assistant, and leader here on Forum Promotion. I can not tell the difference between Guests, Awaiting Activation and Junior member. I see Junior members can not use PM system and UserCP to avoid spam which is a good idea but FP does this as well and a new rank for it is not necessary. I think you should remove them all as I have never seen guests on a rank legend before, and move all junior members in members. You really only need one members rank. If you taking my section of removing individual board moderators that will be another off the legend, which reduces it down to 6 ranks which would look much better.
On the bright side, I can not see any trouble between members or any spam, so they must be doing their job.
(Scored 4/20)
Spelling/Grammar & Professionalism
Your spelling and grammar looks pretty good, but your board descriptions not so much. The majority of them start with Discussions which seems boring and repetitive. You should work on making them more interesting and more details, maybe switch discussions to something else for a few of them. Again, I don’t see any spelling mistakes which is great.
(Scored 16/20)
Total Score - 67/100
Final Remarks
Good start, just make the above changes and stay dedicated and your forum will be sure to succeed.
Strong Points
Your appearance.
Things to Improve
Staff and layout.
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