Review By: Suedama
Date: May 29, 2006
Original Review: Here
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Forum Name: The Uchiha Clan
Members & Posts: 6
Appearance: 2
Board Staff: 7
Layout: 2
Overall: 4.3 [Fair]
Comments:
Suggested Members for 1 Month: 40
Suggested Posts for 25 Members: 1000
The first thing a visitor would notice when viewing boards is the appearance of the board. You’ve chosen a very good skin, one that is often used for anime forums. The problem is the other graphics don’t match the skin well at all, or the other graphics are simply default graphics. When running a forum it is best to not have any default graphics at all, and here you have default statistics markers, default buttons, and default pips. You should definitely get some graphics to replace the default statistics markers and buttons. Even the team colors seem to be default colors, try to choose team colors that match the theme of the skin better. If you need help picking colors, try using the InvisionFree Skin Zone Color Chooser to get some non-default colors that match the skin well. The small pictures before a member’s name is interesting, but if you’re going to do that then you should make sure that the pictures have great quality and that the background of the picture is clear. The Cbox currently at the footer of the page makes the board look way too crowded. Just take the codes for the Cbox and post them in a pinned topic in a General forum. To do this just use dohtml tags and then paste the html within the tags. Lastly, the banner(s) of the forum is too large and has very poor quality. Try requesting a banner either here or at InvisionFree Skin Zone. Only use a single banner for the entire board, having a different banner every couple of refreshes prevents a consistency about the forum and passes the administration off as unorganized. You have quite a bit of work to do in this area, but it’ll improve the forum and its appearance score greatly.
I have to say that I have almost no idea how to figure out who your staff are… it really isn’t obvious because I don’t watch those anime shows a lot and I don’t know the vocabulary too well. You should make a topic in the Announcements forum that states exactly who of your clan is staff at the forum, this makes things easier on the guest that happens to be viewing your board. I tried my best to figure out who the staff was and I found some sort of list that I don’t really think is your staff list. On the list was a screen name Aznboy92. I searched for that screen name and saw nothing. Just make sure that your staff are very noticeable to guests and make sure that they are active and post, your board staff score and situation may improve.
With just a glance I can already say that your layout is way too large. There are some forums that don’t even have to exist, like the Applications forum and the Apply For Higher Rank forum. You can just have a single pinned topic in an Announcements forum where all new applicants post in the Applications topic and all new rank promotions posted in an Apply For A Higher Rank topic, instead of having these as forums. Another thing is it isn’t good to see a category with a single forum in it and it isn’t good to see a category with a ton of forums in it either. What you can do is combine all of the sports forums into a single forum called the Sports Forum. Simple enough isn’t it? We can condense the other forums as well, like combining the Signatures and Avatars, Fanart, and Photos into a single Art Gallery Forum of some kind. You can and should even combine all of the video gaming forums into a single Video Gaming forum. Since anime is the main feature of your board I don’t dare touch on that, except you really ought to include Naruto in the main Anime category. Also be sure that you only add more anime forums if that particular show is popular among your members, that way you have forums that are active as opposed to a ton of forums that have a few topics in them. You’d have to undergo some major changes regarding the organization of your forum, but I really do think that if you take these suggestions the your layout score will be much better. I apologize for the long wait, I hope that this review makes up for the time gap. Thank you for choosing InvisionFree Support, good luck with your forum!
Checklist:
- Music player shouldn’t be at header if anywhere
- News box on header makes forum too large
- Default statistics markers
- Default pips
- Default buttons
- Team colors don’t match
- Pictures before member names should have no background
- Put Cbox in a topic in a forum not at footer
- Banner too large request new
- Aznboy92 doesn’t exist?
- Staff situation looks ok
- Make staff more noticeable
- Official List forum not needed
- Applications forum not needed
- Apply For Higher Rank forum not needed
- Categories with 1 forum is bad
- Categories with lots of forums is bad
- Combine all sports forums into a single Sports Forum
- Combine Signatures and Avatars, Fanart, and Photos into a single forum
- Combine all video gaming forums into a single Video Gaming Forum
- Move Naruto forum to the Anime category
