Revolution Of Gaming
Review by Atrox
I've seen many forums using IPB before and so I know what the default theme looks like. I was very disappointed to see that this forum was using the default IPB theme especially when I saw in the first 5 forums that there were so many posts. Also, you weren't even using your very own logo - you were using the "IPS Community" logo. You'd expect such a big board to be using it's own logo, at least. The first impressions really would have put me off if I were a visitor considering signing up. This is simply because I'd think that the Owner didn't really care that much about the forum enough to give it it's own logo and theme/skin.
Poor
What can I say about the Design Quality? Really, nothing. You're using only what I can assume is the default IPB skin/theme with a few slight modifications if any. Because you haven't bothered to change the skin/theme of your forum or even add a logo, I can't say much. I think that this should definitely be one of the things high up on your to do list.
Very Poor
This is one part of your forum that I really liked, the statistics. Almost all of your forums seemed to be active with recent posts besides the "Rules & Information" forum since I guess that didn't need updating since. When I got to the very bottom to see the bigger set of statistics I was blown away! 1,251,628 posts, 13,483 members, that's extremely impressive. I then dared to look down even further to see that you had 17 members active in the past 15 minutes which is very good and a total of 174 members online in total today. Those are some very nice statistics indeed, however when I looked at the "Today's top 20 posters" statistics I wasn't very impressed to see that the number one spot was held with just 7 posts followed by three's then two's and then finally, ones.
Good
I wasn't really impressed when I looked at "The moderating team" page because of the fact that it was cluttered with many different categories and members. I mean sure, you had the first three categories looking good but then, the rest of them seemed to be just clans or something of the sort. Many of them didn't even have a forum to moderate and they were just cluttering the page up. A staff team that big would have to be for a forum that was getting thousands and thousands of posts every ten minutes, not for a forum that was getting a few posts every half an hour. A staff page is for members to use so that they can find someone to help them when they need it, not for listing clans or whatever it was.
Poor
Your forum didn't have it's own logo, it was using a default IPB skin and it's just like the many thousands of other gaming forums out there. I guess that it's somewhere near the top of the pile with the amount of posts that it's got but still, if you can afford to run a forum of that size then surely somewhere along the way you'll have saved up enough money to get the forum a custom theme or at least a logo? I can't really call this original at all.
Poor
Most of the site structure makes sense, the top two categories were the community forums although they could do with a merge and you could make better use of the sub-forums so that it doesn't take up so much space. Nonetheless, they still made sense. After that you have the Gaming category that seemed a little small compared to the community forums which is why I said I think you need to merge them and make better use of the sub-forums. After that, maybe you could expand the gaming category a bit more so that it looks a lot bigger as it is the main focus of the forum. Then, you have the Off-Topic forum which is exactly where I'd expect it to be and then it's followed up by the Community Relations category which should probably be at the very top with the rest of the community forums.
Good
Your grammar and spelling is decent. I am of course talking about in the categories & forums naming and descriptions. There are a few minor errors but nothing massively noticeable. For instance, the "Click to Sign up!" forum has "Its" rather than "It's" and in the "New Member Introductions" you've put "Maybe your an old member" rather than "Maybe you're an old member". Correct these minor errors and you should be all good to go. 🙂
Average
Final Remarks:
Your site statistics blew me out of the water but I was disappointed to see that such a big forum didn't even have it's own logo or it's own theme (or even a premium theme). I think it'd be a lot more attractive if you did get your own custom theme made and a logo was added, but you've done just fine so far, so only these minor improvements can help really.
Your Score
