sapper, you do not need to pay me the extra 100FP$ if you find my review about organic search not satisfying. I was confused myself and I don't think it is what you wish for but since I don't know what else to do I wrote it like that. I'm sorry about that, will improve it next time. I hope you enjoy the other parts of the review.
Large Forum Review
First Impressions
First time visiting Manutreds I was welcomed by the big banner. I think it looks great and inviting, the idea to add trophies there is a great one. The general appearance of the forum looks appealing, in my opinion. I just think that as a fan of a soccer team, I would love to quickly see what is the latest thing happening to them when I visit the site. For this I really didn't find anything new at the forum from first glance; latest about the team, latest about the site, new and interesting posts, and so on. There is a "New Posts" button in the bottom of the index page but it is way too "hidden". I would suggest to add more info at the top part to invite members in, to let them know that you are an active community with up-to-date news. I'm not familiar with soccer so I can't tell if the names and descriptions of your forum is already clear enough; maybe you want to cross check that again and make sure the forum is easy to understand for first-time visitors.
(Score: 12/15)
Appearance
Starting from the top, the banner/logo and the favicon looks great. They blend together, with the site's idea and with the overall theme of the forum. You may want to have a slogan; I find that helpful and since soccer fans usually have some kind of quote to support the team, or name of the fan base, or something like that to add to the banner to perk things up and strengthen the atmosphere that your site is a site by fans and for fans.
The theme is very.. general. The colors matched the team, but not very specific as to resemble sports or soccer team in this case. Perhaps you want to change the color scheme; keep the red but change the combination, add a background related to soccer or to the team, and change the background of the body which looks like a pile of triangle at the top right corner. A while ago I visited a site which uses exactly the same style you are using now; that's why it feels like it is not specific. Perhaps you don't need a custom style made from scratch; instead you can tweak available theme to make it more personal and resemble what the site is about more. The icons too. While red works with the theme, yellow feels rather different there as it is the only different color from the rest. The icon resembles the sport, true, but maybe you can try another color combination which matches the theme even more. I still think the general theme of the forum is the one you should change by adding more colors.
I like the welcome box at the top-middle part of the index page, however it doesn't look perfect to me. I'm not sure if this is a resolution problem, but to me there is a scroll bar to the right of that box and when I scrolled it there is only empty space at the bottom. The text color is not very contrast so the text is hard to read. Hard to spot the register link too since it's not very different from the rest of the text. You ended up having a register link and sign up button; I think that is redundant. Pick either one to save space. I also think that you can use this box to promote more part of your forum, as I pointed above: put in latest news of the site, info of the team, games, matches, reviews, results, competitions, or interesting/trivia posts from the forum. This help to introduce not-so-known part of the forum, invite members, and let visitors know that you have activity around and are alive.
The footer is okay. I think the "New Posts" button is rather out of the context there. Perhaps it would be better of as an information box at the side widget, showing latest threads and posts from the forum. Or you can move the button to the side widget, like how you placed the "Sign Up" button.
For the posts layout, the red area around user name and title is a good idea, but with the user name colored in red it becomes hard to read. Same goes with the shadowy-blue for administrators name. Find a better color contrast (yellow or green for example) or reduce the red a bit so it would only be a pale red, almost like transparent, so we can see the text in that area more clearly.
(Score: 12/20)
Statistics and Activity
Manutreds has 6,509 posts with 31 members. Judging based on this only, you have around 210 posts per member. Unfortunately, when you look into the members list, there is an imbalance in terms of post count. There are 11 members with no posts at all. The post counts varied from below 20 posts, to around a hundred posts, to around 800 posts, and lastly more than 1,000 posts and there are only two members for that (one of them is you). This shows not a good sign, that only several people are actually interested by the site, that the rest might just come for fun. You will have to improve on this a lot. Also because your site has been opened for 4 months. Dividing it roughly you have 8 members per month. Not a bad score, but considering the idea of the forum is very popular and common, about a famous soccer team, I believe you could have had it better. Improve on the content and advertise it at the right place and to the right audience to help grow this area.
(Score: 10/20)
Ratios
In general, the ratio of the forum's categories and forums are good enough, not too few or too much. My concern is aimed mostly at the first category, "All About United". You have many forums there, though more or less some of them cover generally same thing. For example you have two forums to talk about matches/competitions and another two forums to talk generally about the soccer team. You may want to merge them together first, so you only have one forum for the games and one forum to talk about the team generally. To start with they don't really have so many posts that they can have their own forum; merging them will help to make your site more packed with posts and threads, meanwhile you work on to add more content and encourage discussions. Same goes for "The Global Game" category. I'm not sure the exact difference of "British & Foreign League" and "International", but from what I see in the descriptions they more or less cover the same topics which is about other international competitions so they can be merged together.
For staff members composition, in your forum with 31 members you have 2 administrators. Frankly speaking for such a small forum you don't really need 2 administrators unless the job description for each one of them is clear and significantly important. I cannot see the posts at the forum so I couldn't say much about the second administrator's interest in the site since compared to several other users, the post count is far different. Then again, as I stated, if there is clear distinction on tasks of the administrators, that you really need the help of another administrator, I think it is fine too.
(Score: 6/10)
Content
From visiting the board rules thread, I notice you use comma a lot. Even when you should have used full stop instead of comma. Take the first sentence of the board rules: "Every community has to have some rules, ours has but a few, we are quite tolerant of most things, but the few mentioned below will result in an instant ban should you transgress them." You see, you turned that into one single sentence by using comma. Whereas you can phrase it better by changing the comma into full stop and turn it to: "Every community has to have some rules. Ours has but a few. We are quite tolerant of most things, but the few mentioned below will result in an instant ban should you transgress them." That way if you read them, it feels more natural and clearer. Not that the meaning doesn't go through when you use comma, but it just doesn't make sense to use comma when you should use full stop instead. This happens in some other sentences as well so I advise you to proofread and re-check the post.
Other minor grammatical mistake involves usage of capital letters. You wrote "Do Not", "Cultural bigotry" when they are inside a sentence. Capitalized letters are only to be used in the beginning of sentence or when it refers to a name or title.
For descriptions, I mentioned this a bit in the back but since I am not familiar with the soccer team I can't really tell if the naming is proper or not. I just think you should make clearer descriptions. For example, you mentioned "Senior team" and "Academy team" in the descriptions. Do visitors who are familiar with the soccer would know about this? If not, you should elaborate it a bit so visitors would not be confused and left wondering what this section is actually about.
In general, some forums are more populated than the others by large margin. Take for example "The Glazers" which is very small compared to the rest of the forums. Other forums are behind too but not as bad as this one. You would have to continue adding threads and encourage discussions so not only area of general discussions about the team would grow well, but the other parts too.
You requested to check organic search. I put it here in content section since I think it relates to the content of your forum. I tried with the keyword "Manchester United", "Manchester City", "united kingdom soccer", "red army hooligans", "Manchester United red", "British premier league", all to no result to your forum. I'm sorry I can't come up with more ideas of keywords as I'm really not into sports and soccer in specific.
(Score: 13/20)
Navigation
The navigation is easy and simple. The top navigation links are clear and stand out that it makes members and visitors can find important information, especially access to the site wiki easily. You may want to put the terms and rules to the top navigation link; I don't see why it would hurt to put it there. You still have space, and terms and rules of the site are quite important for first-time visitors. You can combine it with an "about us" page if you feel the terms and rules pages solely give the impression of the site being too strict.
(Score: 15/15)
Total Score
68/100
Final Remarks
From my search around, I found there are other sites acting as fan-site of the soccer team your site is about. Thus it turns into a hard competition for you to make the site flourish and grow well. Add content, find places where you can let your site reach other fans, and keep on updating the forum to keep visitors and members interested. You also need to think how to make your forum unique compared to those other sites, maybe with competitions and events so it will be able to thrive.
After reading your review, please click here to rate your review.