Your Forum Review
First Impressions & Appearance - (Out of 20)
- Aside from the fact that the style you’re using is quite overused I must say it looks nice. The buttons and colors are amazing and that's what brings me to love Absolution. The only thing different from every other forum who uses this style is your custom banner. You made it look nice and slightly energized. You could have used a standard and sometimes boring font like Times New Roman but instead you chose a funkier font. Nice call. :great:
- For some reason I just feel your banner needs a touch more. I hate to say this as I know it doesn't help you but I really don’t know
exactly what it is that I think it needs. It just seem a bit “blah” with simply funky text on a blue background. While it’s not the worst banner you could have I would say it’s far from the best.
- As a guest viewing your forum I can see that your ad free. :cheer: I can bet you that nobody will complain because your forum is ad free as everyone loves ad free forums. People spend a lot of time on active General Talk genre forums and there experience browsing and posting in your boards would be
so much more enjoyable without ads. If you don’t need ads I recommend staying away from them.
(Scored 18/20)
Site Layout - (Out of 20)
- Like always you have your important "News and Information" boards above everything else. I believe that’s how every forum should be set up. The boards that contain things you want your members to read and the boards that make your forum appear more friendly (Feedback – Shows your open to member opinion and don’t appear to be a dictatorship and Introductions – You want your members to be welcomed into the community) are all placed at the top.
- You then placed your wide, broad general discussion boards that are open to a larger variety of discussion below those boards. If you planned that good strategy. After they see your important boards on the top they can simply go and jump into some general, open discussion. After those boards you break it all down into some more specific discussion boards like technology and forums, website, and blogs.
- I think you might want to break it down even a
little more. I told you the boards towards the top were broad and less specific but I feel that members, myself included who have specific interests would like to be able to locate the topics and discussion that interest then more. Maybe consider adding a "Food and Drinks" board or a "Gaming" board to narrow down discussion. Don’t narrow it down to much though. Just a little bit more would be perfect.
(Scored 17/20)
Statistics and Activity - (Out of 20)
- You opened your forum shy of about a month and a half ago. In that amount of time I was impressed to see that obtained 2,225 and 45 members. Each one of your members averages 49 posts! That’s pretty great considering how long you've been open.
- While you have 45 plus members I was unimpressed to see how many have been online in the past 48 hours. Only a mere five members were online in the past 48 hours and three of those members were staff members. You need to work on bringing back those members that you have and more importantly try to get them posting and active overall again. You obviously spent a lot of time getting those members to register on your forum and post but all that pretty much goes to waste if they don’t post or contribute to your forum by posting and being active members of the community. Now of course people will leave but it's your job to try and keep them there.
(Scored 14/20)
Staff Moderation - (Out of 20)
- You currently have three staff members. With you’re currently activity levels I hate to this but you are indeed overstaffed. You really only need one staff member and that would be yourself, the owner. However from reading some posts you've made on other forums I understand the other administrator is mostly a "Tech Specialist" no? If so that's a good reason to keep him. However you simply don't need the global moderator at this point in time.
- Due to the fact that you have primary staff in your active user list there is no reason to not have the boards on your forum moderated and spam free as you currently have one staff member for each member. So, staff moderation of the boards has to be an A in my book. However like I said above the ratio shouldn't be like that at anytime. You
never a staff to member ratio of 1:1.
(Scored 13/20)
Spelling/Grammar & Professionalism - (Out of 20)
- Your board names, descriptions, and category titles have no grammatical or punctuation errors. I’ve read through several and found no errors at all. This is impressive and shows you’re pretty serious. Nobody will (or at least not me) join a forum that uses slang and short hand in those there areas.
- I'm not sure how professional you want to be on your forum but I myself am a very professional person. I proof read everything. From posts to tweets. I noticed a few things that weren't proper and I listed a couple of those things below. It's up to you, like everything else mentioned if you want to fix it.
- In your rules thread number 3 says "3. If you're gonna criticise people, do it in a constructive way." There are two things I want to point out here. 1) "criticise" is not the correct spelling. It is "criticism". and 2) Instead of "gonna" you should "going to".
- In your "Promotion Sites" thread there is an error in the first sentence. It currently reads "HEre are the sites we are currently promoting at: Feel free to actively promote on others as well: " It should be "Here are the sites we are currently promoting at: Feel free to actively promote on others as well."
(Scored 15/20)
Total Score - 77/100
Final Remarks:
Your running a forum with a lot of potential. The things I mentioned are simply minor things that once corrected would really help your forum out. Remember to spend time focusing on the basics: Advertising and Activity. Nobody will want to join an inactive forum so make sure you load the boards up with topics and discussions for everyone to participate in.
What was most liked about the website/forums: What I liked most about your forum was the style. Even though it was simply downloaded I must say it looks very nice with your forum and the colors work together very well. Like I said Absolution is one, if not my favorite style. A suggestion would be maybe changing it up a bit by redoing some parts to make it unique from all the other forums who use the style.
What was disliked most about the website/forums: What I disliked most about your forum was Staff Moderation. Your just way overstaffed for your current activity levels and like I said you never need/should have a staff to member ratio of 1:1. There simply is no need for that. Consider letting one of your staff members go but hire them back once you become more active and could use an extra hand.
How could I get you (The Reviewer) to join my website? What you could do to get me to join your forum would be to increase activity. I rarely join inactive forums, and yes that may sound mean but nobody wants to go to a forum where there isn't anything going on.
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