Game Rebels
Review by Geoffrey
First Impressions
On first load, I like what I see. You've got a distinguishable logo, your theme is well-made and seems to fit your forum well. It is immediately clear to me what your forum is about as I glance down the index and see that you are a gaming forum and your own gaming servers certainly stand out. Someone that is into Minecraft or Garry's Mod would certainly appreciate that. I can see that being a big drawing point for your forum. As I scan the layout, it seems concise and your forum sections make sense - you haven't gone overboard with creating forums.
A lot of gaming forums turn me off with a theme that is too dark, too many images on the page, too many forums, etc. Your forum, however, is one of the better gaming forums I've come across and you should be proud of that. If I was more of a gamer, I would certainly be an active member on your forum.
Excellent
Design Quality
Going more into the design of your forum, your theme works rather well. Your gaming forum is certainly a minority by using a lighter theme, but that's not necessarily a problem if your incoming members are okay with it. If you start to see more guests coming and going without registering, you may want to consider having a darker theme on board.
As for your current theme, I have noticed some loading issues with your header slider. It loads fine at first but when I change to a new page (forum, topic, etc.), the slider makes the page jumpy and doesn't seem to load right away. It looks like, from what i can see at a glance, that it's loading multiple images and showing them all briefly while loading. It's a bit annoying for a member to see while going through the site, so I suggest looking into that.
My last comment on design quality is your logo. Your logo features what I assume to be your mascot, which is a nice, unique touch. My one problem is that the mascot is overlapping the submenu. This could be intentional, but to me it looks like poor alignment/coding. The whole logo, including the mascot, would look better if it was all in the header (not the menu) space in my opinion.
Good
Site Statistics
Based on your welcome announcement post date, you opened your forum on October 11, 2014. In 8 months, you have accumulated just over 3,100 posts in 446 topics at the time of writing this review. This is fair, but could be better. I'd expect to see a forum at the 8 month mark approaching 10,000 posts, give or take a few thousand. I recommend that you and your staff team post more content yourselves to boost the topic count and then that in turn will increase your overall post count.
You do have quite a few members however; 237 at the time of writing. That's a pretty good number for an 8-month old forum, but it also makes me wonder what all those members are doing if you only have 3,100 posts. I'd imagine you have a lot of join-and-run users, who have made 0 posts and contributed nothing, making your stats look unrealistically inflated. If you're okay with it, I suggest removing some of those members with 0 posts from the early weeks/months of your forum to make your stats a more accurate reflection of your community activity.
Poor
Originality
Gaming forums are quite common, from general/broad gaming to specific forums on specific games and consoles. Your forum seems to be of the broad type, but your community undoubtedly has its preferences of what they like to play. I suggest narrowing down your niche to what your community likes, what you like, etc. and using that to bring in a more interested group of new members that will stick around and post more.
I will give you props though on the things you're doing to make your forum original now. Your own Minecraft server is certainly a perk. I also see mentions of live streams, shops, etc. across your community which all help you bring in members. Additionally, having a smaller community is in itself a perk given that a lot of gaming forums are huge and it's hard to be noticed on them. Use that to your advantage when promoting and sharing your forum in those larger communities.
Good
Site Structure
I'm a bit confused by some of your structure, honestly. At first glance (as mentioned earlier), your layout makes sense. But when I started to look for places to post topics, I realized that Gaming Platforms and Platform Games seem very similar. I deducted that Platforms is for console-only discussion and Games is for discussion of the games on those platforms, but to me, I would think you could combine (especially at your current activity/content level) those two forums and put both console and game discussion in the same section. For example, put topics about the Xbox One and a game on the Xbox One in the same forum and then put topics about the PS3 and a game for that in the same forum. The one problem would be games on multiple platforms, but I think that structure would still work out nicely for you at this point in your development.
Additionally, even without any forum changes, it would be greatly helpful if you had forum descriptions on each of your forums. This way I wouldn't have to guess and try to figure out on my own where a topic should go, I could just read the description and know right away. Descriptions don't need to be long; one line of 1-2 sentences would suffice in most cases, but they would certainly help members become more acquainted with your forum.
Average
Spelling & Professionalism
Spelling in your announcements, rules page, etc. seem to be above average, so I have no critique there. That is certainly something that makes you stand out from other forums. As for professionalism, I see no signs of anything unprofessional on your forum and it seems you treat your members with respect and the community seems to get along.
Excellent
Final Remarks
You have a good set up on your forum and a nice custom theme, but you need to do more in the area of content creation as well as promotion. Adding descriptions to your forums should also be top priority moving forward. Overall, your forum has potential and can certainly compete with the big boards with a few tweaks.
Your Score
