Table Top Roleplaying Game Discussion Forum

[The Referee]

I was looking for a review of my Table Top Roleplaying Game Discussion Forum. It has been around since early 2015 and I was curious as to what people like or didn't like about it. The prime focus is on the original 1974 version of Dungeons & Dragons, but we cover the whole scope of old school gaming.

The Ruins of Murkhill

[Kami]

Hello! Just wanted to offer my 0.02 on the forum. I also dabble a bit in the TTRPG space, though not quite as old school, so this should be fun.

Preface: None of what I'm about to say is a must-do, nor should you take anything I have to say personally. Ultimately, you know you, your forum, and your intended audience the best; take what you can use, and disregard anything else. If you need me to dive deeper into something I've said here, just let me know!

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First Impressions: It's a little plain, since most of the layout is still default. Not inherently a negative, since the forum isn't about any sort of web design / graphic design topic, but still not particularly eye-grabbing.

• Suggestion: Maybe a pre-made theme, or a custom made theme (should you be able to find someone to commission), would help entice new members. We eat with our eyes, as the saying goes, so considering that it takes between 10-30 seconds for someone to decide whether or not they're going to leave a new site it might be beneficial to have some sort of aesthetic appeal to encourage them to stay and browse the content.

First Time User Experience (FTUE): When I review a forum, I always do so from the perspective of being a potential new user. This basically covers the flow from load the forum > review the content > register new account. I think my biggest issue here is that, while I know how to register and I am informed what the forum is about, I don't quite know how to get started participating especially considering that my "old school" TTRPG experience is lacking.

• Suggestion: A board with content / information for new members / new-to-old school TTRPG members would probably go a long way in increasing the likeability of the forum for prospective members. I do see that you have an 'Introductions' thread, but it's got 90 pages worth of posts and looks to be primarily forum staff @ tagging new members to say hi. I would actually discourage that because a) some folks do not like being put on the spot, and b) I am a firm believer in encouraging members to create their own content — IE: post. Being able to create their own introduction would probably feel more welcoming, and less nerve-wracking. In addition to that, I would also recommend just a couple of stickied informational threads about how to get into OD&D if they've only played AD&D or newer (like me! I've only done 3.5e and 5e).
  
  
• Suggestion: That explanation on the bottom is... odd. It looks like a disclaimer for copyright, but when you look closer it is a wall of text explaining the forum. I'd get rid of that entirely (especially having it all-bold; all bold text is awful for folks with reading disabilities like dyslexia) and replace it with the aforementioned "new member" board.
  
  
• Suggestion: In whatever 'new member' section (or if you decide to not have one, in whatever common off-topic content board) I would advise having a stickied thread with some rules and expectations. With a forum just under 500 members, I'm really surprised you haven't needed to as of yet. It doesn't need to be particularly expansive, just a few bullet points on what behaviour is and is not permissible. If the desire is to grow your audience, people who may be unfamiliar with forum communities or who are more familiar with different social interaction styles than what your forum engages with will struggle to understand the unspoken rules of a community.
  
  

Content Review: Broadly speaking, I think the content is okay. There's a lot of terminology and module names I'm not familiar with, but it at least looks to make a bit of sense. That said, I do think it's a little overwhelming to face such a long list of content right away, as a new user. Joining a new forum can sometimes be daunting, especially if the community looks to be well-established & pretty close knit.
 

• Suggestion: Reducing some of the content that appears by default could help -- subboards are infinitely nesting, so you can use that to your advantage. An example off the top of my head would be combining the two different "Advice" boards into a single parent board, and having the current boards act as subboards. The subboards that already exist would remain sub-subboards. I don't have too much else on this, since I'm not familiar with the community or what your goals are, but looking at all of this is really overwhelming as someone that doesn't know what's going on.

SEO: We've discussed a little bit in private about how "organic content" and encouraging indexing bots to crawl your forum works, and I want to expand on that specifically for this forum. I think the biggest problem as far as SEO goes here is that, at the end of it all, I don't see enough key words being used in a manner that would be indexed well. For example, a lot of board descriptions start with "This is the board for..." or something similar. That isn't super searchable, so less likely to be indexed. I only see OD&D mentioned in a handful of ways, and I do not see any mention of the acronym a huge chunk of the community uses: TTRPG (Table Top RPG). Additionally, due to a lack of "new member" oriented content, there aren't a lot of places where OD&D, TTRPG, and other such key words are being used constantly since everyone on the forum already seems to know what's what and folks just shortcut to specific modules.

• Suggestion: I would definitely encourage a re-write of board descriptions to be more search-friendly, as well as doubling down on a 'new member' board where informational threads using all these key words could go without disrupting the flow of the conversation elsewhere.
  
  
• Suggestion: Another way to handle this is through affiliations and link exchanges. You could have a guest-friendly board for folks to post links to their forum on, and in exchange, you can post a link on their forum to yours. You can also exchange affiliate buttons — which are just little 88x31 images hyperlinked to your forum — with other folks (I can help walk you through how that looks / operates if this is something that interests you). Basically, the goal here for both affiliations and link exchanges is to increase the likelihood that an indexing bot finds your link and visits it, especially if the forum or website your link is on has organic content and a 'trustworthy' status (no spam / scams). 

Final thoughts: Overall, seems like you have a lovely community here. It's probably not for me in particular, at least in this incarnation, since I don't really know what's going on and I am still struggling to understand 3.5e/5e nevermind something older. BUT, my personal tastes aside, this could be a huge community with a little more aesthetic appeal + better SEO practices + a clearer welcoming for new members.

Hope this helps!

[The Referee]

Kami

Thank you for your feedback!

-First Impressions

• Early on, I tried quite a few different themes and got really negative feedback on them. I also tried to make changes directly to customize it myself and kept doing something that would make the screen jump so I had to revert back to the default. I also had a lot of trouble trying to figure out how to change the color of somethings, but not change the color of something else. I wish I could afford to pay someone to do it, that would be my preference.

-First Time User Experience (FTUE)

• We have discussed a new user board a little, but have not gotten it done yet.
• I had no idea that bold print is tough to read for dyslexia, I thought it would be the same as it is for my older eyes and make it easier to read.
• As for rules that is found here it has grown over time and been added to due to necessity

-Content Review

• A lot of subboards exist and I have tried to do that as much as possible. But outside eyes, see things I don't see. Over the full run of the forum, getting feedback from the members has been an uphill slog.

-SEO

• It never occurred to me that board descriptions would have any affect on SEO or search engines. Even the link I followed on here after you previous SEO comments was saying the key words are obsolete and not really useful anymore.
  
  I looked at the Affiliations and could find no instructions about where those affiliate links would be posted or how to install those button links.
• List item 2

-Final Thoughts
Thanks, this is helpful.

[Kami]

- Themes can be a little hit and miss with the community. I might be able to help you out there; nothing too fancy, but something more "on point". We can discuss this via PM, tho to levelset expectations this year is super busy for me as there are a lot of work-related things + I am currently planning my wedding for later this year :) It might be a bit before the theme can be completed.

- I definitely recommend having those rules a little less hidden; a new member board would be a great place for that ("Getting Started" as a for instance), or linked to in your announcement box.

- Re: dyslexia, while there are solutions that address some overlapping needs for people with low-vision, the primary issue with dyslexia is not that words are hard to see but rather the letters and words get jumbled to form nonsense. Bolder text makes letters looks more uniform, and that tends to make it more difficult to read for people with dyslexia. There are some general guidelines that should prove helpful, but it's important to remember that there isn't a one size fits all solution for dyslexia / low vision as how they impact individuals is a spectrum.

- We can probably discuss sub boards via PM as well should you take me up on that theme. If not (totally OK!) then I would definitely try to think of the boards that show up on the home page as "topic buckets". You started doing that, but I think you can generalise more to help cut down that initial experience.

- Re: SEO, I think I know what you're seeing, so I just want to be clear: there are keywords in a broad sense (words that are about your website that you would like to appear in searches for) and keywords as in META keywords (words that you add into your HTML to specifically define what terms you want to be searched for). Meta keywords are 100% obsolete, because people were spamming them for unrelated topics to try and game the system. The keywords I am talking about are naturally-occurring words that show up in the course of your site existing. As an example, a Harry Potter forum would likely mention "Harry Potter", "wands", "wizards".... etc quite frequently. These would become that forum's keywords to a degree, and the rest of it is up to how informational threads are structured (using the forum name repeatedly, the forum genre, along with the other organic keywords). These are the keywords that are of interest to indexing bots, which is why it's so important to make sure that you don't spam / are associated with reputable sites & why you have to make sure that you are creating content that mindfully uses the terms you want to be known for.

- There are quite a few ways to handle affiliates and link-backs, happy to discuss in further detail when you know which you'd like to do (or both).

[The Referee]

May 2, 2023 17:48:18 GMT -8 Kami said:

- Themes can be a little hit and miss with the community. I might be able to help you out there; nothing too fancy, but something more "on point". We can discuss this via PM, tho to levelset expectations this year is super busy for me as there are a lot of work-related things + I am currently planning my wedding for later this year It might be a bit before the theme can be completed.

- I definitely recommend having those rules a little less hidden; a new member board would be a great place for that ("Getting Started" as a for instance), or linked to in your announcement box.

- Re: dyslexia, while there are solutions that address some overlapping needs for people with low-vision, the primary issue with dyslexia is not that words are hard to see but rather the letters and words get jumbled to form nonsense. Bolder text makes letters looks more uniform, and that tends to make it more difficult to read for people with dyslexia. There are some general guidelines that should prove helpful, but it's important to remember that there isn't a one size fits all solution for dyslexia / low vision as how they impact individuals is a spectrum.

- We can probably discuss sub boards via PM as well should you take me up on that theme. If not (totally OK!) then I would definitely try to think of the boards that show up on the home page as "topic buckets". You started doing that, but I think you can generalise more to help cut down that initial experience.

- Re: SEO, I think I know what you're seeing, so I just want to be clear: there are keywords in a broad sense (words that are about your website that you would like to appear in searches for) and keywords as in META keywords (words that you add into your HTML to specifically define what terms you want to be searched for). Meta keywords are 100% obsolete, because people were spamming them for unrelated topics to try and game the system. The keywords I am talking about are naturally-occurring words that show up in the course of your site existing. As an example, a Harry Potter forum would likely mention "Harry Potter", "wands", "wizards".... etc quite frequently. These would become that forum's keywords to a degree, and the rest of it is up to how informational threads are structured (using the forum name repeatedly, the forum genre, along with the other organic keywords). These are the keywords that are of interest to indexing bots, which is why it's so important to make sure that you don't spam / are associated with reputable sites & why you have to make sure that you are creating content that mindfully uses the terms you want to be known for.

- There are quite a few ways to handle affiliates and link-backs, happy to discuss in further detail when you know which you'd like to do (or both).

That is all of interest to me.

[The Referee]

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