Basic Review
Site Name: The Mario Forums
Site Type: Gaming
Age: 1 year 11 months
Appearance
When I first open your forum the logo catches my eye. It is very well designed and the ghost Mario fits very well with it. A header background is not something that I see very often and when I do it is very rarely executed properly. This is not the case for you. I love that it is a level layout from an actual Mario game. Moving over to the menu, I notice that there a quite a few links. Maybe merging and removing a couple would shorten the menu a little. Is the
Calender used for anything important? If not then I would suggest removing the link to it from the header. The
FAQ and
Rules could be merged into one and you could include the rules in the FAQ or the other way around. There is a link in the top right hand corner that says
AIO Links. A member that does not know what AIO may get confused and ignore that drop down all together. If there is a way to rename it I would suggest doing so. Something like
Coin CP would work well. I also noticed a link in that drop down to access the ACP. I would highly suggest making that viewable to only admins. The scrolling news is usually something that I would advise against as it is usually misused, but you have kept it short and to the point. The big banner that says
ZetaBoards is an eye sore and does not match anything on yuor forum. If there is a way to remove it I would suggest that you do. The overall style of your forum is very well designed and the colors flow well together. The on/off icons are well designed and very unique. The topic icons are also well designed. Overall, great job on the theme!
Layout
The layout of your boards is very good. I only have a few suggestions to make the scroll of the index a little shorter.
- Make Introduce Yourself!, Ask Me and Personal Announcments subforums of a new board. Name suggestions: The Hub or Community Hub
- Make The Zone! a subforum of Off Topic Chat.
- Move the Shoutbox to the bottom of the board list, above the Board Statistics.
I think that those suggestions would both make the index shorter and easier to navigate as well as boost the total post counts for those boards, making your forum look even more active.
Statistics and Activity
You currently have 168,859 posts with 533 members. That is an average of 317 posts per member. That is a pretty good spread of posts. I noticed that there are 4 pages of members with 0 or 1 posts as well as quite a few banned members. My suggestion would be to removed those members. If not all of them, at least the ones with 0 posts. Your activity overall is very good. Since I started typing this section 3 minuets ago your post count has increased by 7. The overall topic spread is very good. One thing that bothers me is that your off topic boards has a total 79,495 posts. If posts in
The Zone! doing count then is would be 33,625. The Gaming boards only have 21,289 posts. These numbers don't include the topics. I am not sure of how to do it, but find a way to bring attention to the gaming boards, especailly the Mario ones!
Content
Your content is amazing. All of the posts that I have read have been on topic, excelent spelling and grammar with no excessive use of puncuation or smilies. The one thing that I would suggest content wise is to hide the shoutbox for non staff, ex staff, donator or VIP members. Those things can take a lot activity and posts away from the actual forum.
Organisation and SEO
Your forum is well orginized and rather easy to navigate. I am able to find all the important information and topics that I would want to post in. Your Google page rank is 2, which is pretty good for a forum your age. The average that I have seen for a site the same age is about 3, so you are not too far off. You have an Alexa rank of 5,808,341 with only 36 sites linking in. This is not very good for being almost 2 years old. You need to get your name out there to grow and get bigger. I would suggest looking at gaming and Nintendo related sites, expecially link directories and those sites that accept affiliates. The more sites you put your name on the more that you are going to grow.
Words from the Reviewer
Your forum is overall very good. Work on focusing the attention away from the general boards and onto the Mario and gaming ones. Something that I forgot to mention earlier is that you only have two boards for Mario related posts. I think you need to add some sub-boards in the Mario board for more specific discussions. Best of luck with your forum and I look forward to seeing it grow even bigger!
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