[Announcement] TSC 3rd Party Review

I don't want comments such as "That b**ch don't know what he talkin' bout" or... "Whatever, he's stupid" or... "Who cares, he's not a real critic"

This is very much a reputable critic and should be treated as such.

The following is a review of TSC by Reviewers and Critics:

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First Impressions

•Activity (Score: 5/5): When I logged on you had 8 other members online which is awesome, plus you've had double or triple that logged on within the last 24 hours. Couple that with the fact that you do have almost 30K posts and I'll say your forum looks very active in my first impression.
•Template (Score: 2/5): While I do sort of like it, I can't shake the free and thrown together look of it. Your tabs don't really flow with the theme and you have huge blank spaces on your skin that make it look unsightly. Also your board icons, while custom and that is a plus, could be way better and could help out in the forum look. As for the giant Sonic at the end, it's fitting so I guess it's fine and not really tacky.
First Impressions total: 7/10

Site Layout

•Organization (Score: 2/10): No real organization. Everything is in one catagory and not really split up. I'd suggest making one category for annoucements and intros, another for all sonic related boards, and then a Misc. catagory for your Off Topic board and all that.
•Index Length/Number of Forums (Score: 8/10): You don't have that many boards which is good but you do have some boards that aren't needed. Your 'Contribute' board, could simply be a pinned topic in your Annoucements board for instance. Also your first two boards are really the same thing and should be merged.
Layout total: 10/20

Style

•Template Layout/Color Scheme (Score: 5/10): I like the overall template like I said above it's just that the different parts don't really seem to flow. The board icons, the tabs at the top, sort of the banner, the skin itself and the background.
•Logo/Images (Score: 6/10): First off, your banner is awesome very good. As for your board icons, it's great they are custom made or at least fitting to your forum but maybe get real graphics for them instead of a shape of Sonic's head and whatnot.
Style total: 11/20

Site moderation

•Number of Staff (Score: 1/5): You have way too many staff. You have basically 6 admins when you really only need two, and you have 5 mods when you really need two as well.
•Staff Activity (Score: 5/5): While you do have entirely way too much staff, I will admit they are active. Good job on that part.
•Staff Professionalism (Score: 5/5): No real problem here that I could see.
Moderation total: 11/15

Site activity

•Posts Per Day (Score: 20/20): Like I had above, very active site, members logging in wise and posts wise.
•Number of Members (Score: 9/10): Decent number of members for your amount of posts but still it's great to have almost 200 members.
•Post/Member Ratio (Score: 2/5): Hm.. with your 20 some thousand posts you only have 183 members, which means that each member porportionally has 142 posts. Which means to me that you have a great userbase but it could use some expanding before your site gets too cliche.
Activity total: 31/35

Overall mark: 70/100

What could be done to improve the site: Fix up the template to make it more flowing and perhaps more polished. And try and expand the userbase a little more.

What is the best thing you liked about the site: You do have lots of activity which is a plus.

Here's what I get out of this. I think our boards could use a little cleaning up, but not a mjor overhaul by any means. I agree that we are somewhat unorganized in certain areas. As you've mentioned before, we need to get the number of members up considerably. For example, we could cut out the Contribute board along with some other forum, merging it. We do have too much staff, unfortunately. That's only because of the times, though.

Whoever you are, I would like to thank you for taking the time to review our small forum.

I heartily agree with your review, but there's just one thing I didn't fully understand.

•Organization (Score: 2/10): No real organization. Everything is in one catagory and not really split up. I'd suggest making one category for annoucements and intros, another for all sonic related boards, and then a Misc. catagory for your Off Topic board and all that.

I'm a little uncertain about this point.
I like New Users as a stand out category because that's the first thing new users will look for. To have it readily accessible, rather than hidden in some subforum, will make it much easier for newcomers to introduce themselves and feel welcome. Unless the combined forum was named "Announcements and Newcomers", which wouldn't make any sense.
But the "Contribute"/Suggestion box should be tucked under something else, as you said. Basically, the Forum boards: Announcements, Suggestions, and Forum Management, can be grouped together.

The way I understand it, you're wanting to split all of the boards into three categories: Forum, Sonic, and Misc.
But for under Sonic, we only have Sega, the games, and characters. All three of these are key draws to this Sonic forum. Putting them together would be grouping together the biggest chunk of the forum under one category, which I think is overkill. Especially since the characters board contains many subboards already. The games are different enough from the characters to deserve their own board, because, after all, that is what this forum is for.

Fan media is where our members express their creativity. Since we have a big collection of artististic members, I don't see any problem with their four subforums.

Consoles are like our Misc. section. I don't really know about this part. It could use some work, but I have no idea what it needs.

Off Topic is where some of us live. I personally would hate to see that changed in any way.

All in all, from the home page, I can see all the boards on my 12.1' monitor without scrolling, unlike the Sega of America MONSTROSITY. I think combining Contribute, News, and Forum Management could help our organization. The other boards I think do fine as they are.

RAWR :Oh No:

That dude in a way totally sucks, but in another way totally rules!

What I have to say in the intelligent matter though is that he is totally right on how we have way to many staff and how these boards are cluttered and un-organized. I think that we just threw things into places they didn't belong and we just added unnessicary detail to others. On this note i'd like to make a few suggestions tha i'll poblely PM to Zezima. Anyways we're doing good guys gettng our first review from a fourm critic and on our way to being the best Sonic fourm in the nation!!!!!!!

Now back to the randomnezz....

RAWR :Oh No:

I like the design for the most part though. I guess we are doing all right. Where did you find these though?

sykog77 wrote:I like the design for the most part though. I guess we are doing all right. Where did you find these though?

A place whwere you get your Forum injected with steroids basically. They will advertise the sh*t out of your forum.

Zezima wrote:

sykog77 wrote:I like the design for the most part though. I guess we are doing all right. Where did you find these though?

A place whwere you get your Forum injected with steroids basically. They will advertise the sh*t out of your forum.

'
I know that, but I dont know how to improve it though.

sykog77 wrote:

Zezima wrote:

sykog77 wrote:I like the design for the most part though. I guess we are doing all right. Where did you find these though?

A place whwere you get your Forum injected with steroids basically. They will advertise the sh*t out of your forum.

'
I know that, but I dont know how to improve it though.

Improve our forums? I'm working on it right now.

Change the reply butons to fit the template.

Shadow122 wrote:Change the reply butons to fit the template.

I like them by themselves, they are supa bombz, but when you compare them to the rest of the forum you gotta think...

"How exactly, does this....

fit..


with the rest of the forum... ?"

Shadow122 wrote:Change the reply butons to fit the template.

Yush, like the quote, edit PM, and bla bla ones

sykog77 wrote:

Shadow122 wrote:Change the reply butons to fit the template.

Yush, like the quote, edit PM, and bla bla ones

\

Exactly. ^

And the new topic/rply

I agree with Omnihush. Three categories seems insane. Maybe fusing Forum Management with Community News and Suggestion Box (since Contribute only has that forum), but combining everything else seems extreme. All I have to do is press PGDN to see all the categories anyway.

Duh....

The Freedom Fighter wrote:I agree with Omnihush. Three categories seems insane. Maybe fusing Forum Management with Community News and Suggestion Box (since Contribute only has that forum), but combining everything else seems extreme. All I have to do is press PGDN to see all the categories anyway.

The Contribute as already been fused with Forum management.

Where is this review from?

I agree with basically everything the critic said.

Here's what I drew up for a forum layout: (sample)

Forum Issues
-Announcements (includes rules thread, suggestion thread, intro/outro thread, and general forum news; see no need for seperate news and forum management boards, unless one is staff only, which would be a great plus)
-Community Dump

Sonic
-General Sonic Discussion
-Sonic Characters
-Sonic Comics/TV
-Recently Released Games (one for every recently released Sonic Game, and when a certain date is passed, the board can be shuffled back into general Sonic for less clutter)

Video Games Discussion
-General Gaming (mobile, other consoles, and just general discussion)
-SEGA
-Sony
-Microsoft
-PC/Mac

General
-General Talk
-Entertainment
-Fan Creation
-Off Topic/Random
-Junk

I feel that the Hall of Fame and The Joe memorials should definately be toppled. While they may showcase posts you guys liked, it also gives off the impressionthat you care for Joe or the hall of famers more than others, and that their opinions matter more in your eyes than that of the new poster. They may also think it's creepy to have a shrine to a guy you met on an internet forum.

All of the Sonic discussion should at least be under one parent, makes for less clutter.

Fan Media section could be condensed greatly; instead of having four forums with little activity in each of them, which turns people off, you can just have one Fan Creations board for all media (sites, forums, art, music, etc. ) and make the place look a bit bigger.

Forum Management and News basically serve the same purpose, see no need for two of the same boards.

Community Dump should be moved to Forum Issues, IMO. It could show stuff that this forum DOES NOT condone and give users bad examples that they shouldn't follow.

Oh, and the order of which I pitched those forums is not random, it's set in a specific place as well.

What do you think?

I will enact this layout immediately! :D

I still don't understand why we are compressing so much. If you merge everything together too much, it will actually make finding the right place to post -harder-.

SupaSEGA wrote:General
-General Talk
-Entertainment
-Fan Creation
-Off Topic/Random
-Junk

Ehh... I have a bad feeling about this part. I don't like splitting our Misc talk onto three boards (general, random, junk). Random is general enough.

Media:
-Fan Creation (fiction, art, sites)
-Entertainment

General
-Off Topic
-Junk

Also, rename "Community Dump" to "Community Archives". It's not really a dump because we can't dump anything into it. Dump just sounds bad and not professional.

And add Nintendo to Video Games.

New Member deserves to be separate.

Hall of Fame might nice to have. Move joe board over there if you plan to keep.

Once again I disagree with that design SupaSEGA. This is a Sonic forum, why should Sonic be shoved into one category? I pretty much agree with Omnihush on this.

Ringtails, I can agree with everything you said, except for two things. A seperate board for new members only increases post padding. Why have a seperate board when you can have it all in one thread and it still can save the same purpose? Also, the HOF makes it look like we value some members over others, IMO.

@ TFF: We currently don't have enough discussion to sustain so many different Sonic boards. It's great for a huge forum to have many places to post at, but with a place like this, we don't have the luxury of having hundreds of members making hundreds of posts a day, like SEGA, Xbox, etc. We should start small, as to leave room to grow, and then, for example, when character discussion rises (it's near flatlining now), we can make new boards and allow room for growth. If we keep up like this, IMO, the population and amount of discussion will fall flat, and new members will look and see the amount of boards here that have no activity, and may decide not to join if nobody posts in the places they want. However, if they see fewer boards, that means there's always room for growth, and it makes us look more active.

I see your point with the hall of fame. Oh well.

But for new members, letting them have a topic for themselves makes it much more personal. When it's just contained inside one topic, it's hard to get to know anyone since you have to sort through intros and responses from others.

Personally, I know that if everything was in one thread, I'd rarely ever take the time to read through it. But the way it is now, I try to visit every new member topic at least once to get to know everyone.

SupaSEGA wrote: We currently don't have enough discussion to sustain so many different Sonic boards. It's great for a huge forum to have many places to post at, but with a place like this, we don't have the luxury of having hundreds of members making hundreds of posts a day, like SEGA, Xbox, etc. We should start small, as to leave room to grow, and then, for example, when character discussion rises (it's near flatlining now), we can make new boards and allow room for growth. If we keep up like this, IMO, the population and amount of discussion will fall flat, and new members will look and see the amount of boards here that have no activity, and may decide not to join if nobody posts in the places they want. However, if they see fewer boards, that means there's always room for growth, and it makes us look more active.

I support this idea. Perhaps an absorption of Characters into General Sonic Discussion?

I will be very disappointed if that happens. I like the character boards very much. Perhaps my favorite portion of the site.