Medium Forum Review
First Impressions
Your forum loads very slowly which doesn’t give me the best first impression. You use a lot of large images, especially the main background which can be a major issue for users with slower internet connections. The first thing I notice is the odd hover affect you have added for when users move their mouse off the main board it goes semi opaque. Even if this may be a nice effect the first time around it soon becomes very irritating and I feel it should be removed.
When I actually look at your board I notice the huge forum goals box which is really off-putting. Forums are meant to be an enjoyable place, not a place where the admins are obviously pushing growth all the time, also some of the goals are outdated. There is nothing about your forum that grabs my attention or makes me say WOW. You really need to work on making new visitors want to join your forum.
Appearance
Your theme looks like prosilver with a few small edits which isn’t very impressive. You are using many of the default icons, the only ones you seem to have added yourself are the board markers. The logo is about the only thing I can comment on that is something you have actually done yourself, yet I have no idea why you have the forum name and description on the header too when you have a good logo with the forum name. The logo is of a pretty low quality though.
My suggestion is a completely new theme which is Nintendo themed. The Nintendo theme gives you so many possibilities and ideas. There is a broad variety of images and such that you can use, so why not? You could make this forum look so more interesting with a good theme!
Ratios
Your forum has been open for around 6 months and has in that time gained 7400 posts which gives you an average of 1233 posts per month which is completely normal, but I have seen a lot of forums with much more than this. From a forum with such a wide niche that is easy to discuss I would expect a lot more posts being made each month.
Most of your posts are in the forum games area which isn’t very good and shows me that your members are not interested in your niche at all. I feel the whole board layout is a mess and needs re-structuring. The Dump should not be visible for members. The introductions and announcements should be in their own section. Have one on topic section and one off-topic section. Any boards with fewer than 200 posts in them should be merged into another board or added as a sub-board.
It was hard to work out how many staff you actually have but I got it to 2 admins only. This makes it hard for me to understand why you have a global moderator group and a Guides group when you don’t have anyone in them. Remove them from the board index until they are actually needed. 2 active admins seems fine for this board.
Posts
Most posts are the classic favourite game, most played game and such. While these may be easy to post in they don’t create any real discussion or create any real interest. A lot of discussions go off-topic very quickly and usually it is the same 2 members that keep replying to each other instead of a large amount of members being involved. The posts are usually a good length with proper grammar and spelling which is something you should be proud of.
Content
You lack any real pages that inform, there is no overall staff page, terms of service, privacy policy or contact page. This isn’t very good as these are key pieces of information that your site requires to legally function. I had a read of your announcements, this board really needs pruning. Only new and active announcements should be in the board, the rest should be archived. Most of your announcements are very short and written in bullet point form. This doesn’t look very professional. I expect a good announcement to be a couple of paragraphs at least with proper grammar and spelling.
Final Remarks
All in all this is a board that needs a lot of work. Activity is low and the activity that you are getting isn’t where you want it. Maybe removing the forum games all together for a while would help. The board itself isn’t very appealing to new visitors, a new theme is a must. Advertise, advertise, advertise that is the only way to do things right now. In complete honesty this board is one of the worse I have seen in a while, but with some effort and commitment I believe you can get there. You have a good base to build on, you just have some work ahead of you.
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