Name of Site: Chat Socially Site Genre: general Site URL:http://chatsocially.com Type of Review ( Full/Quick ): Quick Opening Date: June 8th Additional Notes: Not Jadaster Please
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The activity.
First of all, I feel like the best thing your forum has to offer right now is activity. Without a doubt, your forum is thriving. In about three months, your forum has accumulated 3070 posts, 241 topics, and 45 members. So, that comes out to about 1000 posts a month. When you look at it that way, it does not sound very good, but I do not think that this accurately reflects your forum's activity. I am betting that this has to do with the fact that your forum started off struggling. Looking at your forum today, things are no longer like this. Your forum is receiving plenty of activity, so this is something that you should definitely be proud of. Overall, if you keep members motivated, this activity should hopefully continue. Great work so far.
The theme.
Next, I think your theme is very attractive. I remember when I first saw the theme your forum is using, and I still think it looks great. It is a basic theme, but when it comes to free phpBB themes, I feel like this is one of the best themes you can find. Even though your forum has an awesome theme, I do know a few people that are not big fans of the color scheme. It is a great theme, but there is a lot of gray in it. If you want to please everyone, you should add an alternate theme as well. I think you should at least have a dark theme available, but a light theme with color could be a nice alternate theme too. Overall, I personally love your default theme, but not everyone is going to like it. You should really try to please everyone by adding a could extra themes. This makes phpBB modifications an even bigger pain, but your members will love you for it. Anyways, you have made a nice theme choice.
Weaknesses:
The icons.
To start things off, I would just like to say that I had a bit of trouble finding weaknesses on your forum. I think that pretty much says how great your forum is. Even though weaknesses did not stand out in front of me, there are still a few minor changes that could be. Firstly, you need to get your forum a favicon. As of right now, it does not look like your forum has one? This is a feature that just about any website on the internet should have, so you should work on getting this added. As long as it has to do with your forum, it should be fine. Your forum's initials would be good as the favicon. A basic "CS" that matches the logo would look great. Finally, I recommend changing your board and topic icons. Right now, they are just the default ones, and they are not very appealing. If you could get some custom icons made, that would be excellent.
The board layout.
Lastly, I think you could change your board layout a bit. Your forum has sixteen boards in three categories. Three categories is the average amount that most forums have, but I feel like it would be good if you removed a few boards. Just by quickly looking over all of the boards, the "Homework and School" board stands out. It has only had 32 posts in it, and there has not been a post in it in nearly three weeks. I feel like it would make sense to remove this board or something. If you do not want to remove it, perhaps you could combine it with the "Teen Chat" board. This board has not been very active, so maybe you could solve two issues with this one change. Also, the most recent topic in the "Teen Chat" board is "How do you like school?" so it looks like these two boards are getting mixed up anyways. Also, "The Funnies!" board has not been very active lately either. It has not had a post in nearly two weeks. Maybe it could be made a sub-board. Overall, you have a decent board layout. I recommend making a few changes based on how your forum has gone so far.
Final Remarks:
Chat Socially appears to be an interesting forum that is currently thriving. It looks like your forum has struggled in the past, but I feel like you have made a lot of progress towards establishing it. General discussion forums are one of the hardest to establish, so I wish you the best of luck keeping things going.
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