ForumHour
Full Review by Red Herring
Scoring:
First Impressions & Appearance – (10 out of 20)
Now this is a review request I've been eagerly awaiting to arrive at the Review HQ. Forum Hour. I'll admit to wanting to take a crack at this one for quite some time. It's a promotion board that I have been familiar with for a little while now; having watched it from the shadows in which I lurk. The first time I encountered this website, I had fallen dead over heels in love with its namesake, "Forum Hour." It was such a fervent little name, one I admired so much that I had actually considered making an offer to buy the website, though I ultimately decided not to. Nevertheless, the name charmed me so much that this namesake alone made me recurrently make a return to the website every now and then to check in. I suppose you could say I was stalking a domain name.
Needless to say, your forum's name intrigues and enchants me. Let's see if the rest of the website can manage the same. I am aware that you have recently made the conversion from MyBB to XenForo for Forum Hour. The question is: does this conversion inspire a feeling that Forum Hour will withstand the test of time and weather the ages? Or does it serve only to quicken the hourglass of Forum Hour's lifespan?
Time to find out.
Well, let's see. First impressions. Truth be told, it's a bit difficult to grasp that first impression feel when I'm already familiar with your website, but I'll see if I can't recreate them.
Let's start with a place as good as any, and one that's always a major factor in first impressions. I am referring to your logo. Simple. Bold. Boring. The design consists of a small clock icon situated next to strong text reading out as "ForumHour", with a noticeable gradient shade implemented into the entire logo, clock and text alike. It's not a bad logo, by any means. It's actually rather sleek, but I find myself severely disappointed in the lack of innovation invested into its design. If your website used a name where clever imagery was difficult to put into concept, I would understand. But this is Forum
"Hour", a name clearly associated with time; a concept where imagery is abundant and creativity should be easily found. For instance, one idea that immediately came to me was to use your standard clock with the "Forum Hour" name as clock hands. I drew up a very quick diagram of this.
Obviously, this would assume far more effort be put into the design itself than I did my little diagram, but this is just one of the many ideas that could have been executed delightfully into logo design. Sadly, I see no such ideas having been put into implementation. An opportunity is truly being missed in aesthetic design here, especially considering you have so many options available. Such a shame.
Enough about the logo, however. Let's move on to the rest of the theme itself. Your design aesthetics primarily make use of four colors: white, light grey, dark grey and a most peculiar shade of sky blue. They're a pretty good choice to blend together; however, your forum implements them poorly. Returning to the topic of the logo, the sky blue does very little to accentuate it. In fact, quite the opposite; this shade of blue pacifies and subdues your logo, making it blend into the background. It's as though your logo is screaming "Help me!" as loud as it can, but no one is able to hear it.
Speaking of your logo, let's take a look at your header. It's pretty much the bare-minimum XenForo standard, but it's not unpleasant to look at. Bland and not particularly exciting, but nothing to complain about, poor color blending with the logo set aside. I must also express that I am really not fond of the empty advertisement banner in your header, but given the website's purpose, this is forgivable. Overall, I find myself wanting the same thing I wanted in your logo: innovation.
Moving on to the board and forum index themselves, I've found them to be one of the few aesthetic elements I generally appreciate. Their designs make use of a strong minimalist theme with some beautiful gradient work being found in the category headers on the forum index and mostly table lineless design for the individual forums themselves, an element I always find myself in approval of. The forum icons, however, meet with a very uncreative standard, much like the logo. Sheets of notebook paper for forum icons? Dull and uninspiring. Again, a severe disappointment in regards to innovation here. It's another missed opportunity to put the "time" theme into aesthetic practice. Missing these chances to add that interesting aesthetic appeal only serves to make your board feel about as generic as it can get.
Well, I have one final bit of criticism to make before putting this section to rest. Why on
earth is your board index so compressed? I'm honestly feeling a bit claustrophobic just looking at it. The XenForo side bar is a clear contributor to this, and that's not particularly your fault. But the board container is still set to such a thin percentage. What is it, 60%? 65%? It feels far too thin when there's no reason to warrant it; the sides of the board are completely empty and barren of everything except that shade of sky blue. It's as though it's threatening to devour your enter board just like it did your logo. So it could definitely benefit from being wider. At least 75%. Perhaps even 85%. Give it some breathing room, because the board is
suffocating.
Well, I think that about wraps it up. Overall, the design is not displeasing, but it feels claustrophobic and cluttered due to the board width. Secondly, you have all the elements for a good design, but nothing seems to blend together correctly. All the curves are in all the right places. The colors seem as though they would make an excellent blend, but it's all executed somewhat poorly. It's like a child that can't complete his puzzle. The logo is almost drowned out by the sky blue and the sides of the index are a vast sky blue wasteland. Lastly, there's a very sad lack of creativity and innovation to match the namesake of "Forum Hour" when there are so many opportunities to do so...ending in a very generic feel to the board. It actually feels as though it's a dumbed-down version of the theme you were using when Forum Hour ran on MyBB.
"Disappointing", if I could describe it in a single word.
Site Layout – (13 out of 20)
Righto. Moving on to layout. With the conversion to XenForo, Forum Hour has inherited all the functionality that XenForo has to offer, and of course, the navigation of that functionality. This is quite enticing, as navigation is one of the many elements that XenForo excels in; with every page and configuration functions being accessible with one click of the mouse, thanks to its superb header navigational elements.
If there's one thing I absolutely despise about XenForo, however, it's the fact that most XenForo boards tend to have "Watch Thread" on by default. This tends to result in needlessly watching every single bloody thread that you post in or create, subsequently spamming your e-mail address
every time some random user also decides they want to post in that thread. So let's go turn that off real quick, so that I might preserve my sanity.
Much better. Now to ensure that I'm not needlessly watching anything already. I checked my watched threads. Empty. Good.
On to watched forums.
Errrm.
Well then. I suppose we're
not checking watched forums. Is this perhaps a side-effect of your recent forum conversion? Or just a mod conflict? Either way, I'd suggest getting that fixed. Ah well, I suppose it at least means I'm unlikely to have my e-mail account brutally assaulted.
Interesting errors aside, I had no issue navigating the functionality of your newly converted XenForo Forum Hour. Not that I really should have, your theme design did not deviate from the XenForo defaults. All is well and in tip top shape.
Now let's take a look at your forum index and its organization.
From what I can tell, your board makes use of the standard promotion index formula. Announcements / Community category at the top, followed by promotion services, thereafter is general webmaster discussion, then the marketplace/exchange and finished with the off-topic section. The only deviation from the promotion formula you've made is switching the webmaster category's position with the marketplace/exchange section, to which I am not making any complaints towards, mind you. It's a tried and true tested index formula and maximizes the efficiency of a promotion board. Trying to be adventurous in this regard would likely only lead to disaster or inadequacy at best.
It's not unique, but it works; flawlessly, even. There are no issues to be found in navigation. In the end, that's all that matters.
Statistics and Activity – (10 out of 20)
We now arrive at the section covering the most important aspect of a forum. Statistics and Activity. After all, this is what every forum sets out to achieve; without a community to back it, a forum is pretty much pointless. Icing without the cake, as it were. It may taste very good, but it doesn't last without the cake itself. So how does Forum Hour fare on this end?
Let's have a look at statistics. Forum Hour appears to have been established back in mid-2012. Since its creation, it has garnered a grand total of 40,000 posts, 4,800+ topics and 409 members. These are not bad statistics, I'd give them a 6/10 based on my rating system
(slightly above average). Not bad, but not particularly impressive either. However, you can't expect every created board to become the next big thing in the forum community and Forum Hour has still done reasonably well for itself.
My primary concern is not with the statistics, but with the activity itself. Forum Hour appears to have once had a decent following, but these days it seems to be in the decline. Now, your forums certainly aren't breathing through a ventilator for life support, but they seem to be a bit on the wheezy side. This is not to say that you have a complete lack of activity. Posts are being made across the entire board, not at a particularly rapid rate, but it's quite stable. Your daily membership is bantam, but it's certainly present.
However, it simply isn't enough for a promotion board to properly function. For starters, you essentially have a 1:1 staff-to-active-member ratio. Half and half. It's not a particularly good prospect for a promotion board to have so few regular members compared to its staff, as it means few service requests and results in some staff members twiddling their thumbs with hardly anything, if anything at all, to do. At least all current staff members are reasonably active and are indeed performing their duties.
An effort should be made on the advertisement front. A very large effort, as advertising is quite a tedious process, but one that needs to be made in order to in order to inspire community growth. Work hard and break your back on it, and you might just heal Forum Hour's own backbone.
Content – (6 out of 20)
Ah. Content. This is one of the most absolutely difficult elements for a promotion board to successfully execute. Promotion boards set out to achieve one purpose: the advertisement and promotion of its community members' websites, offering them services to help them succeed. They have secondary purposes dependent upon the board, but this is always their common goal. Unfortunately, it's difficult for a promotion to offer unique services that others can't, mostly because their available resources are often limited to the promotion board itself and limited third-party applications. When a promotion board does manage to come up with a unique concept for a service, it's often one that's rather gimmicky and impractical to use. In order to achieve unique content, a promotion board owner is required to think carefully and creatively on unique services that the community can make use of. Failing that, their standard promotion services need to offer great service quality in return for their users' time.
Forum Hour does
not achieve this.
Not only could I not find any services that set it apart from other promotion boards, but I could not find any unique categories of discussion either. All discussion forums were
the basic standard that all promotion boards live by. Unlike most others, however, Forum Hour makes no attempts to mix it up in some unique or interesting way. It mirrors this standard
exactly and makes no attempt to add unique discussion categories of its own. It's not a particularly bad thing, but it has no counterbalance to make up for it.
The included services, much like the forum index, use the basic services that the majority of promotion service boards tend employ, offering no unique services of its own. The only "twist" is that Reviews and Packages have both been merged into a single category, "Service Portal." It's a bit unusual for two teams to handle to very different services, although this is offset somewhat by the fact that there's only one review package available. They're still very different animals, however, and might decrease the quality of services due to lack of specialization.
Lastly, and this is something that somewhat irks me, because it happens more often than it should; Your services themselves are not unique and are a bit too "inspired" by other promotion boards' service templates, rather than trying to offer a unique Forum Hour experience. The Forum Hour review template is quite literally the Forum Promotion Full Review template without the use of some icons, a slightly different rating system and a couple sections stripped from it. Part of what I find silly about this is the fact that Forum Promotion's review templates are
not really that exceptional; they're rather flawed, actually. The review sections are very imbalanced and manage to leave out several important areas while simultaneously putting too much focus on elements that don't need their own sections.
I digress. The point I'm trying to get across is that not only does Forum Hour completely lack in unique services and discussion, but even the individual services and categories themselves are mirrors of other promotion boards and their respective templates, offering absolutely no unique experiences to its userbase. In that regard, the only really purpose in being a member of Forum Hour (beyond the community itself) is if you're simply aching for outlets to advertise.
For a promotion board, this is a truly crippling flaw, one that should be alleviated ASAP.
Spelling/Grammar & Professionalism – (11 out of 20)
As part of my evaluation process for this section, I read through Forum Hour's entire index and also read through some of your announcements, completed services and miscellaneous threads. I've always felt writing to be one of the most underrated elements in a forum, because if written with the proper penmanship, it can add so much flair, personality and even genius to your forum. Not only that, but clever writing can unconsciously inspire your userbase to create a wide variety of discussion; by listing potential topics, or simply through creative writing.
Sadly, this is another flaw that Forum Hour suffers from. You are by no means lacking in terms of proper grammatical structure and professionalism. You and all of your staff members perform very well in that regard. I am once again disappointed in lack of flair, however. No forum on the index manages to excite me with clever or ingenious writing. I've seen only bare minimalism at best, with writing in your forum descriptions that serve only to describe, and barely at that.
There's not much else for me to really say, so I'll go ahead and wrap this up. I suppose you don't really need to, but it'd be nice to see some more creativity in your writing. It really does add an attractive appeal to a forum, a very underrated one. After all, if your board index isn't appealing enough, it'll end up turning off users who put value into such.
Total Score - (50 out of 100)
Final Remarks:
I'm sad to say that my experience reviewing Forum Hour was a disappointing one. For such a delightful name, "Forum Hour", it certainly doesn't flex it about, avoiding practically every opportunity to add to the forum's appeal through the namesake's theme. Aesthetics in particular had many opportunities to implement such themes, all of which were completely avoided.
Everything about Forum Hour felt either standard or sub-standard. Activity was stable, but minimal, feeling as though there wasn't enough activity to cover the ambitions of the website. But most especially of all, it was completely lacking in any unique service content or even discussion content. I often felt as though I were staring into a mirror and Forum Promotion was looking back at me. Services and service templates are all mirrored from it, with only slight tweaks and I'm left without a unique patented Forum Hour experience. I really hope effort is made to change this, as right now my thoughts sum up to "Why should I bother with this when I get the same exact thing with Forum Promotion?"
Nevertheless, I wish this forum the best of regards, as it uses quite an innovative name that has a lot of potential for theme, it's just not one bit of that potential has been unlocked yet. So I implore you, find whatever key(s) unlock that door and bring out its true ambitions. Best of luck, Forum Hour.
Strengths:
Weaknesses:
- - Claustrophobic and Generic Design
- Lack of Creativity
- A Bit Lacking in Activity
- Lack of Unique Content
- Dull Writing
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