Basic Review
Site Name: Malibu Lounge
Site Type: General Discussion
Age: ~7 years
Appearance
On first visit your design caught my eye. It is very clean and crisp. There is a lot of blank space in the header that could be very valuable to you. Being on Zetaboards I'm not sure how but it could be of use. If not, you could reduce the amount of empty space in the CSS of the style, if you have access to that. The colors on the forum list are a perfect contrast to the light grey of the background. The forum, topic and post icons are nicely designed and complement the design well.
Layout
Your board layout is very consolidated. I really enjoy that, especially on a board that is as old as yours. By this stage in the game most forums would have 15-20+ boards for members to post in. That is good in some cases but not in all. I think that you have found the right balance between content and boards. I really have no suggestions for your board layout except for maybe removing the advertisement board. But in the same breath I will say that there is hardly any activity in that board compared to the rest of the forum so there is really no harm in keeping the board there and in use.
Statistics and Activity
Your statistics and activity are great. You have over 100,000 posts and almost 1,000 members. You are doing great in keeping your members happy and coming back. You have a small staff team of you and 2 moderators. From looking at the mods profiles they have been on the board for a very long time. Looking through the memberlist, there are 12 pages of members with 0 or 1 post and most of those accounts have never logged in. You could prune those members and bring your member count to a more accurate count of those who are active. This will also help boost your member-to-post ratio and make your forum seem that more active.
Content
You have a great amount of content. The posts are well spread out over the 7 discussion boards, not counting the announcements and introductions. The grammar in posts is great as well. From the topics and posts that I have looked at I have not seen a single one with horrible grammar, spelling or short, 1-5 word posts. This is very hard to achieve with the many different types of people who use online forums like yours for communication. Great job!
Organisation and SEO
I am not sure what can be done about SEO on a Zetaboards forum. I have not seen any codes or mods or anything that make URLs more SEO friendly. Maybe this is something that you could request on the Zetaboards Resource forum. Your domain is ranked PR 2 and you have an Alexa ranking of 2,531,800 with only 5 sites linking in. This is not even close to where a forum of your age should be. Your target Alexa rank at 7 years should be <200,000 with close to 1,000+ sites linking in. Your advertising needs a boost to get these numbers up. Many promotion forums and directories place the do-follow attribute to all links so these are the sites that you should be focusing on advertising on.
Words from the Reviewer
Overall you have an amazing forum. Zetaboards is one of the very few platforms that I am not familiar with at all. My only suggestions to you are to look into removing some of the blank space in the header and to work on advertising and SEO, if possible. Keep up the good work and I wish you the best of luck for the future.
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