Your Forum Review
First Impressions & Appearance
Your forum is very classic forumotion style. The dark background gives a feeling of doom and boredom, it doesn't feel very inviting. The logo you use I have no problems with, it is nice and sharp but doesn't give me much of a clue to what your forum is about. The size of it is however an issue. When someone visits your site, they don't continue scrolling down until they have gained an impression of your site. As most of my screen is filled by your logo it doesn't give me much to build my impressions on. This would make me much more unlikely, as a new visitor to your site, to scroll down, I would instead exit the page.
The menu bar is made in the same style as the logo, which is nice and shows you have put some work into it. What would be nice is to make it less clear that the menu options are actually images. The easiest way to do this would be to have the image change when hovered over, either the text changes or the colour changes. This makes the menu look a bit more professional and thought through. The information bar underneath the menu bar feels a little odd to me. At the moment it is two lines high and the text sometimes places itself in one line and sometimes in two. I would suggest making it shorter so it is only one line high or removing it all together. The reason I suggest you remove it is because you have far too much going on at the top of your forum. I haven't even seen your first board yet, but I have already had loads of information thrown over me.
There is then yet more information for me to take in before I can view the forum. I have now scrolled down over half the page and I am still not at the place I want to be. You really need to look into shortening down the information given before the boards start. The information box that I am viewing here is a little bit of an eye sore, not because of the text, but because of the image.There is nothing wrong with the image itself, or the text above it, but the colour doesn't work. You have chosen a cold colour scheme of blue and black for your forum. Choosing to suddenly use a warm colour clashes too much and steals all of the eyes attention.
You have rules here and there and everywhere. Create a rules page and have a link to it instead!
I really like your forum design. Each category has a great board title bar with a custom patterned background, its own image with the title and a well laid out description. The design is good, but I am going to be a little picky. You have the images with the category titles on, look into making these the click links into the category, instead of having to have the title above the image, the way it is now the title looks squashed. As you have a very large box for each category, the post, topic and latest posts sort of get lost due to their size. I suggest making the numbers a couple of sizes bigger or making them bold. The same goes for the latest post. You have loads of space to work with, so this shouldn't be an issue.
The who is online box also has a nice title bar, but the rest is just too hard to read. The image in the box isn't well aligned and isn't a fitting size for the box. The username colours make everything just flow into one huge jumble. Maybe you should look into a different way of laying this box out. You have a custom favicon, which is always a nice extra.
The left menu with all the information doesn't work for me, affiliates would work better along the bottom, as for the other adverts. There are too many latest posts and other such information along that side, a New posts button would work much better.
(Score: 12/20)
Site Layout
As your forum is an RPG forum I understand that your layout needs to be a little different. I like the layout you have now and I can't see any issues with it. What you do need to look into is do you really need all the sub-boards you have for each category? Some boards have only around 1000 posts in them, yet you have around 12 sub-boards. There can't be many posts in each of these. The suggestion I can give you to solve this problem would work well in such boards as the Other Villages. Instead of having a board for each village, have a sticky topic with the boards title, or maybe even two sticky topics if needed. A whole board containing 3 or 4 topics isn't worth the effort.
(Scored 18/20)
Statistics and Activity
Date Forum Opened: 2010-01-09
Our users have posted a total of 61225 messages
We have 432 registered users
These stats give an average of 2700 posts per month and an average of 141 posts per member. The posts per month stats are alright, but I would expect a lot more from a forum like yours as it is a RPG forum. 141 posts per member for a forum that has been open as long as yours isn't very good. One of the most probable reasons for this is you are using forumotion on a free sub-domain. I feel that one of the most important things for you to do right now is to take your forum away from forumotion and get yourself a TLD. This can do a lot for your forum and may give it that final activity boost that it needs.
Most users ever online was 38 on Mon Jun 07, 2010 10:07 am
This tells me that your forum has seen its height of activity and now lacks it. It seems that lately your activity has dropped. When your forum first started out there weren't as many forums around and due to this things like where the forum was hosted and what domain the forum had were not as important as they are now. The feeling I get from your forum is that it is stuck in time. You need to put some time and effort into bringing your forum into the present, or activity will start to slow even more.
(Scored 15/20)
Staff Moderation
The forum seems to be well moderated as I can't locate any spam bots as such. The staff in this sense seem to be doing their job. But there are other issues that the staff need to deal with. The main issue I see is the short posts being made by your members, even if they are contributing. The staffs main job on a forum is to support activity, get people posting and post replies that get your members posting more. When I click into a forum I don't see one single reply from a member of staff and over half the topics I view are only one sentence long. This really isn't good and your staff should not be allowing this to happen.
In your request you have specifically mentioned that you required the amount of staff that you have. I don't feel that you NEED any of the staff you have currently as they are NOT doing their jobs. Get them working or replace them, that is the single option you have. Staff should be boosting activity, posting and helping to bring the community together. If they aren't then get rid of them.
(Scored 5/20)
Spelling/Grammar & Professionalism
From the forum index, I get a feel of professionalism from the board descriptions. They are well written, detailed and contain a great amount of information. Yet, as soon as I go inside one of these boards many of the sub-boards inside lack descriptions all together or only have a few words. This looks really bad and nearly feels like you have tried to trick me into joining your forum.
The spelling and grammar you use is perfect, but you really need to go all the way and put just as much effort in all over your forum. What you are doing now doesn't work and when new visitors see this they are more likely to hit the exit button instead.
(Scored 8/20)
Total Score - 58/100
Final Remarks
Strong Points
Things to Improve
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