Large Forum Review
First Impressions
The first impression for Play-Connect is actually not very bad, although after looking around I feel like I miss the atmosphere of gaming at the forum. Only the banner gives the feeling, but none the rest feels so. Activity wise, as it is hard to judge from the number of posts, I can see that latest posts are dated today, which is a sign that your forum has quite active members. That could be quite inviting for new members, although from gaming wise I think you need to improve and give more gamers feeling at the forum.
(Score: 10/15)
Appearance
(This mainly applies to the current default theme.)
Appearance wise we can start from the top. The banner is quite good. It gives something different for the title of the forum, with the addition of the characters from various games put there. What you probably lack is an icon to represent the forum, which you can also use for the forum favicon. For icons, make sure to pick something unique. Gaming forums usually use consoles or games series to resemble them; brainstorm for something unique and it might help to spread your forum's name out there. Your forum's name and the address is "Play-Connect", and that is rather different with the forum's banner. You might want to keep the consistency of the forum's name until the banner as well.
User navigation link at the top is too small and unclear. The width of the bar is small, the font is small too, and ultimately the color of the text is not in contrast with the background that it becomes unclear that there is something there. It took me a while to find user navigation links and when I found it on the top I wondered why the color is not very bright. You can use the white/gray color used for the text of latest posts at the forum section, clear enough for me.
Coming down to the forum body. I think the category/forum icons for new posts, no new posts, and redirection boards are not designed well. First of all they look 'glued' to the left border of the table. In my eyes it gives the impression that it is not tidy. The difference between no new posts (where there is a word "Never") and redirection links (like to your forum rules and gallery) is not clear. At first sight I considered them all as sections with no posts. Now that can be confusing for members. The icon for new posts, which is a brown icon with "G" on it. I think "G" represents "gaming", but it doesn't truly work with the banner. There is a lack of synchronicity there. Use something which resembles your forum's idea more to give strong impression of who you actually are.
(Score: 10/20)
Statistics and Activity
Play-Connect has 11,256 and 646 members. It means roughly that you have 17 posts per member. You will soon reach one year anniversary in few months time, and while the number of posts is good, the post rate for each member is not very good. Given the total amount of posts, that is very small for each member. Proven with the number of around 440 members with zero post count; including banned members and unactivated accounts. That is around two thirds of the total members you have! If you think they are not interested, I think you can delete the accounts to restore the balance. You wouldn't need to keep banned accounts as well especially if they are bots.
The names listed in "Forum Team" page consists around half of the total forum posts, and there is a huge margin between you as the forum owner and administrator compared to the next top poster. This would be okay for young forums, but for a forum which will reach its first anniversary soon, you till have to think about why this happened. This shows as if your fellow staff team members are not interested enough, and so are regular members. Or maybe you need events or features or involve the members more into discussions.
(Score: 11/20)
Ratios
The ratio of the forum is good enough for me. The marketplace section is very quiet compared to the other areas. if it is really not so active, I would advise to merge it if you insist on having them, or simply remove them. It shows that members do not have interest in that area. For number of staff members, you have five moderators on the site. For the size of members solely it might be okay, however given the number of your active members, I'm not sure you need that many. If you concentrate them on bringing discussions to the sections they are responsible to, that might work, though it may not necessarily important to have such member added to the staff list.
(Score: 7/10)
Content
Grammatical wise, I don't think I have found a grave mistake you need to improve on. Well done on that. At the forum rules thread, I don't understand why you divide "rules" and "guidelines" as they more or less cover the same thing.
Content and posts wise, the distribution is more or less quite balanced. There is big difference, though, between activities in PC gaming compared to other sections. As far as I know, Play-Connect covers all kind of gaming. And while it is not impossible to keep all sections active, you need to try a little bit harder on other sections too to close this big difference. It gives impression that you don't truly care about other sections and that you emphasize on the PC gaming only. You have moderators you can 'exploit' to help yourself with that, This actually happens generally with other sections too. To encourage more posts coming you can try doing contests or send newsletters and keep the forum itself up to date with information regarding various consoles and other gaming topics.
A little bit about organization and layout: I'm not sure if you should put galleries as redirection link in forums, and to be placed as second category. Why? Because it is one of the categories you see on first click without scrolling, and to see it empty doesn't give a very good impression. You can turn it into a menu, a big title like "Gallery" and insert drop-down menu for more categories at the navigation link. It can replace other unimportant links like staff list or statistics. You need to give more exposure to what your site is about and choose carefully.
(Score: 12/20)
Navigation
(This mainly applies to the current default theme.)
Navigation wise, it is not very bad although there are areas to improve. As I mentioned in previous section, you will need to first work on the user navigation link (those who linked to your profile and your User CP). The forum's navigation link is quite clear, although strangely I don't find the member list menu. Instead you put the "Forum Team" link on top. I had to type it to the address bar to use it to write previous section. While it might not be very significant to have one, I think it will not hurt to have it displayed. I didn't find Terms of Service and Privacy Policy page; given your site is game-related you may need to write it down somewhere noticeable just to let visitors know about it.
(Score: 12/15)
Total Score
62/100
Final Remarks
There are a lot of gaming sites in internet. Play-Connect is one of them. Without proper maintenance and options to keep yourself up-to-date and unique, you will have a hard time fighting with those other forums. What you need to concentrate now is to see the strong points of your site and let everyone know about it by giving ir proper exposure, as well as taking in details and polish the site slowly but surely.
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