Your Forum Review
First Impressions & Appearance
First off, you have a very nice theme. Your default theme just looks like the type of theme you would see on a gaming forum. Considering your forum is a gaming forum, the theme fits your forum perfectly. The color scheme is appealing for any average gamer. Being a gamer myself, I can say your theme is great. It may not be appealing to people who aren't gamers though.
I somewhat like your default theme banner. It serves its purpose. I feel you could do a lot more with it. The banner doesn't really match your forum theme. The colors don't flow together very well. It's a simple banner on the default theme. I like that you can select the theme you want to use between a few different themes and that it's easily changeable. I like the banner on the Mario Forums Red theme. You need to do something with the Blue theme's banner; the Blue theme needs a lot smaller banner. Also, the board icons have Mario on them. That's good, but they really need to have transparent backgrounds. Also, the images are low-quality images being JPG images, you should have them as PNG images. That being said, you can't even tell what the favicon is. I suggest changing the favicon to a "M" or "MF." It's simple, and it's your forum's initials.
(Score: 18/20)
Site Layout
Looking through the forum, I have noticed that your layout doesn't seem to be very organized. You have four categories. That may be one too many categories. You have thirteen boards. I feel you could narrow that down a bit. I think debates should be a sub-board in General Off Topic Chat. I don't think you need the "Other awesome stuff!" category. It only has one board, which is the forum games board. I think you should make forum games a sub-board of General Off Topic Chat as well. Just by doing those things, you would have narrowed your forum down to three categories and eleven boards. I think the Introduction board should be renamed Introductions and then be moved to the Site Stuff category. That would make the board much more noticeable to new members. I also don't really understand the Movies and TV board. Is it only for movies and television? I think you should expand it to things like music, by changing the name of the board to "Media," "Entertainment," etc. I also think you should move the Other Gaming board to the Nintendo board. Then you could rename the Nintendo category to "Nintendo & Other Gaming," or something like that. By making these changes, I think it would make the layout much simpler, which would be a much more effective layout.
(Scored 14/20)
Statistics and Activity
Your forum has accumulated almost 13,000 posts and 100 members. Those are some pretty good statistics considering is only a bit more than five months old. That's good. It's easy to tell that your forum is pretty active. There is new content on the forum everyday. It seems like Mario Forums has developed an active member base. That will be a great in the long run for your forum. That means statistics are only going up from here on your forum. You have over 2,500 posts. That's between 1/4 and 1/5 of the forum's total posts. That shows how devoted you are to the forum. Keep up the good work. If you continue posting, the active member base you have will post as well. So, what does that mean you should? Just post yourself, and motivate your active member base to post whenever motivation may be lost. Every board has had a post either today or yesterday. That is excellent. You should still try to get your other members active though. From what I can see, there are about eighty inactive users. You need to do whatever you can to get them active.
(Scored 18/20)
Staff Moderation
Staff moderation is going great. It doesn't look like there is much moderation necessary. From what I can see, there are three staff members. There is one administrator, one moderator, and one designer. Moderation is going well, but considering how active your forum is, I really think you could use one or two more moderators. I don't think it would hurt your forum, only help it. I don't see any reason to ever have another administrator. You should keep it with you being the only administrator. I personally feel that the best amount of administrators is simply one. I don't really think you need a designer. Why would you? It's a Mario forum, I don't think you need to have any staff member primarily focused on the graphics, design, and appearance of your forum. The whole staff team seems devoted. Great job on selecting your staff members. You seem to know what you are doing.
(Scored 18/20)
Spelling/Grammar & Professionalism
You seem to be posting around with professionalism for the most part. I see a few of your posts don't have proper capitalization. I can somewhat understand that considering your forum seems to be so laid back. You should still probably step it up though, and be a bit more professional because you are the administrator; you influence how regular users post. I also see a lot of your posts being pretty short. It's okay to have some short posts, but don't have too many of them. Your moderator and designer seem to be posting around with professionalism; good grammar, spelling, and punctuation.
You need to work on your board descriptions. Most of your board descriptions are small and don't really explain much. You should spice your board descriptions up a bit. "Find the latest information about the board here." That sounds really bland. You could make it sound a lot better by maybe starting it off with a question or even a quotation. I noticed the Personal Announcements board description; it says "this category." It's not a category; it's a board right? If so, that needs to be fixed. Next, there is your Consoles board description. It says "Talk about the wii and its games here." You should change "wii" to "Wii" because Wii is a proper noun. Finally, there's your Handhelds board description. You need to add the word "the" in between the two words "about" and "DS." You should work on all your board descriptions, including the board descriptions I didn't mention. Remember, the little mistakes make a big influence on whether a guest will actually join the forum. So, fix these small mistakes in the board descriptions.
(Scored 16/20)
Total Score - 84/100
Final Remarks
Mario Forums is a pretty active forum with a strong active member base.
Strong Points
Activity and theme.
Things to Improve
Layout and board descriptions.
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