Number of Members: (3/10)
71 - To be honst this is pretty bad considering posts on your board date back to January this year. Although members aren't everything, it's still good to have a large base of members to attract members and make your forum look a little more active. A high member count also shows people are interested in your forum and want to be a part of your community. There are lots of pretty good ways to get members: Member exchanges, post exchanges and packages are all a great way to score extra members. I would really encourage you to work on building up registrations, as member count is a small factor that has a big effect on how people look at your forum.
Number Of Active Members: (3/10)
Based on your memberlist you seem to have a pretty decent base of active members. About 9 of your members all have over 100 posts and viewing through your topics those members appear to post quite a bit. I would do your best to find something to hold onto those members with a slightly lower post count. You need to offer something to your members to make them want to keep posting on your forum. If there is nothing unique about your forum then you will find people do not want to stay there. I can see in about 10 seconds that there is nothing really unique about your forum, to me it looks a lot like any other general chat forum. It will be hard to find unique ways to get new members to stay active, maybe you could offer a special forum dedicated to members with over 150 posts or something similar.
Number Of Posts (Spam or Otherwise): (2/10)
8,769 can be considered as a very low post count for a forum with posts that date back to January. Considering forums these days can get that kind of post count in just a few months I would have thought that the post count would be higher. Again, you need an incentive to make members post. If they do not benefit from posting, why are they going to post? For example on this Promotion Forum people post to earn cash to buy services. On some forums people post to get free hosting. On your forum, there is nothing really to post for - it's a general every day chat forum and with only a handful of active members then discussion isn't going to be very interesting. Increasing your member count will effectively get posts on your forum. Maybe if your active members really pulled together to make new members feel part of "the family" then they would enjoy the forum more and perhaps stay and post more often.
Appearance (First Impressions): (3/10)
Unfortunately, I am not overly impressed with the look of your forum. That colour pink in the background and links is not attractive at all. The forums icons are not impressive either, you have made no attempt to use custom ones so the boring default ones are still there. Finally I am sorry to say I am not overly impressed with the forum banner. Although the graphic design is fine, the actual banner is not wide enough to fit the forum style, nor does it reflect upon what your forum is about. When I first went to your forum "Dashing" meant absolutely nothing to me, your banner, domain name, site title did not clarify what your forum was about. I had to look down the forum descriptions to work out what the forum was about. I would get some custom forum icons made, or find some online. There are lots of sites that offer free graphics for forums (buttons, smilies etc...), I would really recommend going through Google and finding some. Also, I would really recommend changing the skin, the one you are currently using is not attractive in the slightest, and may be preventing members from joining up.
Layout: (10/20)
You seem to have a pretty stadard layout, all the regular forums you'd expect to see on a general chat forum are there. I would perhaps rename the "Newbie Realm" to introductions..why complicate a forum name that should be simple?. I would then move the introductions forum to the more general forum area with News and Feedback.
Moderation: (10/10)
All seems fine, no problems in this department.
Activity:(3/10)
Please read above (Active members) regarding activity.
Spelling and Grammar (10/10)
All fine.
Overall Mark: (44 / 100)
