Large Forum Review
First Impressions
The first thing I see is another Admin/Webmaster forum, in a default Xenforo skin, which does little to inspire me to join, my feeling is that someone has sat down, thought "I need to run a forum" and pick what many consider is an easy genre.
The problem there is that this genre is very cluttered, with good, mediocre and bad forums, this I feel at the moment fall into the mediocre, so it is not going to stand out without some serious work.
It looks as if it has just been uploaded and hey ho left to survive, you need to put a lot more effort into it, if you want it to grow and succeed.
Xenforo is great software, it’s a pity you haven’t yet used it to it’s full potential
(Score: 7/15)
Appearance
Why is it that blue seems to be everyones favourite colour at the moment ?. The eye can distinguish between 256 colours, if you are going to stand out in this genre you need to be different in some way, a more radical colour would be a good step, or even go really plain.
I cannot see any customisation in the index page, the forum icons are Xenforo default, it’s fairly easy to replace the sprites that Xenforo uses, I managed it, and my graphic skills fall below zero lol.
For me the banner is good, the logo is good, I would just like to see them a little larger, I prefer a banner that shouts, not whispers, it definitely needs to be larger.
Your mood icons look a little pixelated on dark backgrounds, they look fine on the forum pages but on the Member card they have a white ring around them.
I see you are using the notices add on?, did you know you can use that to produce a great welcome notice, you also have all notices viewable by guests, that may be intentional to draw them in, if it’s not, then as you add notices the welcome message will get lost. (guests cannot dismiss notices).
Apart from that the index page is quite well laid out, I would suggest a couple of tweaks to the order but no more than that.
My only other problem is a personal one, I’m not that keen on fixed width, I prefer a fluid width, that is a personal thing however.
(Score: 12/20)
Statistics and Activity
For a forum that started in January the number of posts is quite good, just over 3500 to date is very good, from your members list it would appear you are having problems keeping members, quite a few have low post counts, so it’s obvious that you need something apart from the general admin forums to keep them hanging around. I see that you have not actually been an admin there for long, so you will need to put a lot of effort into building that post count, finding new members and thinking of ways to keep them.
With 56 members I can see no reason why you need to employ moderators.
One thing to consider is offering a few services, Reviews are popular and are a good place to start a service, you are already experienced enough to do this service, plus there is already a monetary system in force so use it, members love spending forum cash.
(Score: 15/20)
Ratios
The posts are very evenly spread out on the board, your busiest forum is of course promotion, it may be worth expanding that section to offer a paid service using the sidebar add on block, again it gives members a reason to keep coming back, and somewhere to spend all that forum cash.
(Score: 7/10)
Content
Since the demise of phpBB communities there is a gap in the market for a good admin discussion and promotion site, with a few tweaks and by improving the content you could possibly be challenging for that spot, the ideas you have had for content are very good and there is a large amount of it, most of what is being written is well researched and well informed, very helpful to the green admin. I would definitely expand on this, and break it down into sub forums for various genres of board software.
When I look at the what’s new list, I see a lot of threads that exist on all the other forums, "countdown from 1000, 100, etc", whilst these are good fun items, you need to introduce some better threads on a regular basis to keep interest up, plus these countdown threads do not really add anything to the board other than post count, it may be a good idea to exclude them from bots in your robot.txt.
(Score: 11/20)
Navigation
Navigation is typical Xenforo, once you get used to it, it’s great, as Xenforo is new to most members you have to limit the amount of clicks they need to use to get somewhere, this can be done by avoiding too many sub forums, which I see you have done, somehow I don’t think that was intentional though.
One thing I would dispense with is the hover information on the index, yes it’s a nice toy, but you need to generate interest in the board without prospective members having to move a mouse around to find out what forum is for what.
My advice with add ons is first to think "Do I really need it" then think "Will it be used, or will it become work I do not need"7yu
(Score: 12/15)
Total Score
64/100
Final Remarks
That’s not a bad score for a relatively new forum, you have been helped to that by using Xenforo software, which does a lot of the work for you, it’s much easier to install add ons than with phpBB for instance.
My feelings are you have the makings of a good site, it does need a lot of customisation to remove that “out of the box” look, that can be remedied easily by going through the resource forum on the official Xenforo site
http://xenforo.com/community/.
I would certainly look into expanding the knowledge section, this could be easily expanded for snippets, tweaks and tips.
As I said the width is a personal issue, some people love fixed width, I don’t.
My biggest issue though is the theme, there are some great custom themes out there, and installing them is really easy, I’m not saying you should go for something as radical as Advertise Hotspot, but it does need a re-think in my opinion.
I know you will have to discuss all of this with your fellow admin, convincing him it needs change is not going to be easy, good luck with that, and good luck with this project.
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