The Blog of Suedama

Review By: Santos
Date: April 29, 2006
Original Review: Never Released

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Forum: SBS Forums
Number of Members: 7
Number of Posts: 10
Quality of Staff: 2
Appearance: 3
Originality: 7
Activity: 8
Layout: 5
Overall: 6 [Good]

Comments:
Thought you probably aren’t aware of it, this forum was randomly chosen to be used in a review evaluation last February for the InvisionFree Skin Zone. Though I am far too late to take an active part in this evaluation, I have decided to review your forum anyways, let’s begin. In 2004 SBS Forums was created, and in that time you have managed to attract over 600 members. This rate of registration is ok, but ideally after two years one would think that you could have more members that this. The estimated post count for 600 members, however, is way lower than the 100,000 posts you have now. In fact the amount of posts SBS Forums has is rather amazing. These factors reflected in your number of members and posts scores.

The biggest issue about your forum is your current staff force. It looks to me that you have 20 or even 30 staff members on the entire board maybe… for 600 members. A good portion of this number is on the administration team, the others moderators or graphics designers. It’s good to have co-administrators but your board simply has too many of them. There is also a point when having too many moderators can hurt badly too, such as your quality of staff score shows. This isn’t the biggest issue within the staff force problem. Apparently there have been problems among the administrators recently. Administrators deleting their accounts and then getting an administrator account again shortly after. It’s not good to have this Administration Scandal occur and it’s not good to let it continue to occur. There is only one or two staff members that are inactive, that member being CrimsonSkies036. You should also keep the temporary administrator group hidden as well as those password protected forums. Of course someone is going to crack into those forums if you let the world see it exists…

I am quite disappointed in the appearance of your forum. One of the worst things to have on a forum is a ton of skins to select from, it makes it hard to keep everything matching overall. Get rid of all of those skins and choose the best one and stick with it. The biggest factor in a low appearance score is all of those default graphics. Having default graphics on a forum is probably the worst thing you could possibly do to the forum’s appearance. The banner even stretches whatever skin is on the selector, nothing seems to match with the other well at all. The member team icons that you use are inconsistent with the skin and theme and they are inconsistent with the other member team icons. The member team logos could be better but they are probably the only working part of your appearance. As for those moving forum descriptions… they are super annoying. Your forum seriously needs work in this area.

To be short and simple: everything on your board that involves forum resources is unoriginal. Forum Support, Plug Your Forum, Request A Banner, GFX Showcase, GFC Help, GFX Chat, GFX Battles: those features are on every single resource board out there, why is that needed? Sure you can have a graphics showcase but what’s the point of having this stuff if your board doesn’t focus on it? There are some interesting things on your forum though, like the Dream Interpretation, Health, and Poetry Corner features. The big thing would be to get rid of the unoriginal stuff and reorganize the current original stuff, which will increase the original stuff that is your originality rating. The thing is this hasn’t really effected your activity. The forum has great activity despite what I would think after looking at the board appearance and layout. In fact there are only 100 members of your 677 members registered that haven’t posted. Many forums have numbers higher than half their total members who have never posted once, I must congratulate you for this excellent activity. The amount of posts per day is ok but it could be better, and there are forums here and there that have topics that haven’t been posted in since March 20, 2006. Try to keep all of your forums active. Overall your activity is pretty good and SBS Forum’s activity score reflects on that.

The layout needs some work, and this is the organization that I was talking about earlier. The very first category has only one forum: News. It is not wise to have categories with 1 to 3 forums in it, it makes the category seem small and insignificant and a waste of space. Move some forums around so that you have more than 1 forum in the first category; the first category is supposed to be the smallest of all of the categories though, so by adding a single forum to that category should do the trick. The biggest thing your layout needs is to be condensed. The layout has so many forums that it is a bit overwhelming to a visitor, even with all of the activity in these forums. One of the things you could do to help condense your layout is to delete the “Chatroom” redirect link and add the link to a forum description of another forum. I see no point in having forum support and graphics on your board, you would do well to just delete those features as it just adds to unoriginality. The forum is mainly a general discussion board, so having InvisionFree stuff is pointless. You should condense all of the graphics topics into a single Graphics Showcase if you wish to preserve them. The other thing is that your layout is so outrageously huge that categories 2, 3, 4 and 8 seem to have no difference between them… Try to make the forums within these categories stand out from the other forums of other categories, and please: HIDE THE STAFF FORUMS! As for the battle features, may I redirect you to what I said previously about small categories. You should move the forums around to prevent puny categories. There is quite a bit of organization to do on SBS Forums, but it will effect every scoring area in some way, and especially your layout score. I wish you the best of luck with your board, SBS Forums!

Checklist:

• Admin CP hacks
• Password forums hidden
• ”and your dick account isnt baned!” –Andy
• Administrator trouble… Vexicated and deleted accounts scandal
• Unorganized Graphics Requests and Forum Support
• Some staff not active, CrimsonSkies036
• Too many staff members in all teams
• SBS Shame?
• Temp Admin group hidden
• Default graphics
• Banner stretched page
• Member team logos
• Affiliates scrolling bar
• Member team colors
• Skin Selector
• All forum related stuff unoriginal
• Dream interpretation, Health, Poetry Corner etc.
• Only just over 100 members with 0 posts!
• Good amount of posts per day
• Occasional forums that need posts
• One Forum Category = not good
• Move chatroom to a link in a forum description
• Condense graphics to a single forum
• Many forums, try to condense
• Forum Support and Advertising omit
• Difference between categories 2, 3, 4, and 8?
• Hide staff forums!!
• Put battles in a different category

Review By: Santos
Date: April 24, 2006
Original Review: Here or Here

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Forum: SODesignZ
Number of Members: 8
Number of Posts: 10
Quality of Staff: 4
Appearance: 7
Originality: 7
Activity: 6
Layout: 4
Overall: 6.6 [Average]

Comments:
First of all I’d like to apologize for the delay. My school has been pounding me with projects and I keep deceiving myself into thinking I have time. And without further delay let’s begin the review. It’s been 9 months since the creation of SODesignZ, a board that seems focused on graphics and freestyling. In those nine months you have managed to attract about 350 members. This rate of registration isn’t perfect, but you are doing a good job at keeping up, you just have to keep up a bit more. This decent rate of registration results in your number of members score. After doing the math I found that a forum of 350 members should have about 14,000 posts. SODesignZ has about 1,000 more posts than that, this is great. Just get more members joining and keep them posting and your number of posts score will stay good.

There seems to be a large problem regarding the quality of staff. It’s not that they don’t all do what they are supposed to do, it’s that their attitudes are curious. One of the first things I noticed when I was viewing the forum was that SharpeE had an avatar with SpongeBob Square Pants smoking dope. I’m sorry but having the lead administrator promote this behavior is not good at all. The curious thing is that you have two teams that are completely empty, the Graphics Designers and the Games Moderator… If your forum focus is graphics then it makes sense to actually have Graphics Designers as part of the staff, you need to get those staff members as soon as possible. I don’t quite understand why you would need a Games Moderator, your regular moderators can do the job just as easily. Delete the Games Moderator member group as well as the Debating Moderator, that member is inactive anyways and the group isn’t even necessary. And you should probably demote the test account BetMachine from the Moderator position, assuming that this account is a test account. On another note, I know that your forum has freestyling and whatnot as one of the main features, but that doesn’t mean that you ABSOLUTELY MUST USE CUSS WORDS OR ELSE. Restrict not just regular members from regurgitating cuss words but also your own staff. I shouldn’t be able to see a random topic and find criminalminded saying “^thx dogg, im so fuckin happy!” That’s not professional at all and his statement was unnecessary. Visitors are more likely to join your forum if they don’t find vulgar language on the board. You would do wise to take these suggestions, they will make your board more professional and give it a better quality of staff score.

The appearance of your board is good, the skin is very interesting and unique. The only problem is there are graphics such as the banner and some other graphic in the upper right-hand corner of the page graphics that do not work. I am not a particular fan of the forum markers, they just seem way too small… you have about a centimeter and a half of space to use and you use 5 millimeters… Ok so I’m a dork but the point is you have space you can use, use it! Another big thing is I check topics and posts and see a line or two of post and then I have to scroll past this huge mass of stuff to see the next actual post, this mass of stuff being the signatures. Make the signature length limit lower, people want to read posts not the same long signatures every time. Just fix the details here and there and your appearance and its score will be much better.

Originality-wise I have to say that your forum isn’t bad at all. It’s not everyday that I go to resource boards and find freestyling I wonder why newspapers aren’t used on forums anymore, I really love that idea and I think that it’s great that you have that as a feature. Your clan idea is good as well but it doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere anytime soon, work on the organization of it and advertising it more before you have that feature. Another thing is the marketplace, it’s an interesting idea but for some reason I don’t want to see that on the main forum. If you could hide it from the main forum page then I think it would be much better. You have this thing called the IRC Chat. It’s an alright idea but I don’t think that your forum is active enough for that to actually work, the last time I went in there it was completely empty. I also like how you have the writing section of the forum, but I don’t like the cussing in it. Try to keep professional even when you’re freestyling… This is one of the more original resource boards and its originality score reflects that, good job.

Eh, the forum isn’t so active except maybe on the staff level. There are 4 pages of members, 50 on each page, that have not made a single post. That’s around 200 of your members. It is typical of forums to have such activity, but it isn’t such a great sign when half of the members don’t post and don’t visit the forum. Be more professional and reorganize the forum and maybe members will come back and help improve your activity and its activity score. I stated previously that you should do well to reorganize your forum. Here are some suggestions that will make your layout more condensed; in turn condensing the amount of forums will improve your layout score:

You may have noticed that I condense everything into three easy-to-use categories. Three is a magic number for forums, it’s good to have everything on three forums in many cases, four is alright too; if the forum is huge then you can have six or seven even, but you have a ways to go before you reach that point. Anyways it’s been entertaining to review this forum, I hope that my comments come of aid. If you have any questions feel free to PM me or comment on my Reviews Blog. Good luck with SODesignZ!

Checklist:

• SharpeE avatar not professional
• 9 months since board creation
• 14,000 posts for 350 member board
• Team pips not good
• No Graphics Designers
• No Games Moderator
• BetMachine Moderator with 0 posts
• Debating Moderator inactive
• Debating Moderator not needed
• Broken image upper right hand corner
• Small forum markers
• Default member colors
• Interesting skin
• Signature lengths too long
• criminalminded “^thx dogg, im so fuckin happy!”
• Newspaper good
• Clan idea good, needs work
• Marketplace good
• IRC Chat good but inactive
• GFX Learning Zone good
• 4 pages of members with 0 posts, 50 per page
• Posts per day = ok
• Writing = good but stay professional