Hello! I'm Kami, and sometimes I rate forums.
How I Rate: I rate forums in three stages: initial impressions, aesthetic, and content. As a rule, my thoughts on each stage come from the perspective of "random internet user that may be interested in this type of forum", followed by opinions that are informed by both my hobby (RP forum admin of ~20 years) + my profession (I make video games for a living). The latter is especially helpful for RP-centric forums, but can also provide valuable insight on "new user" habits and common pain points.
The Rating: Once I go over each stage, I'll sum up my thoughts and provide a numerical rating between 1 (forum needs a lot of work to meet its goals), and 10 (forum needs minimal to no work to meet its goals). This scale is weighted differently based on the genre of the forum; eg: aesthetics will have a higher impact on overall rating if the forum is a web design community, but lower impact if it's a general chat community.
Suggestions: I might offer suggestions as part of the rating. These suggestions can be either what I would personally do, or what other similar forums have done with success.
Any and all suggestions are always optional. At the end of the day, you are the vision holder for your forum, and if something I suggest doesn't sit right with you or doesn't have the right vibes, feel 100% free to disregard. There is no "right" or "wrong" way to make a forum community, after all, it's about what
you want this space to be and what vibes that space to have.
With that out of the way, let's dig in!
First Impressions: On the plus side, it is very obviously a roleplaying forum on a first glance. The sort of... abstract-ish banner depicting what appears to be a struggle between the forces of good and evil (presuming from the clash of red and blue) helps sell the idea. That said, design-wise it feels perhaps a little outdated, visually, like I'm looking at a forum that was designed maybe ten or so years ago? This isn't necessarily
bad, and doesn't inherently discourage me from joining, but I am taken a bit aback by it, especially considering that other fantasy- or supernatural-oriented RP forums tend to skew more contemporary in design choices [examples:
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5]. There are three other things that stand out on this first impressions: a) there's no sort of summary that tells me what the plot of the forum is about; b) the background image is set to repeat and tile, which is very noticeable on my ultrawide monitor; and c) the board organisation "before the fold" (read: before the bottom of my browser window) isn't particularly helpful for that visitor / new member flow.
- Suggestion: broadly speaking, it only takes a guest / potential member a few seconds to decide whether or not a website is "worth" continuing to explore. While I don't think these first impressions completely discourage people from exploring, I don't think it encourages anyone; my suggestion is to try and keep a "new user" mentality in mind when you set up your forum — approach your setup as if you knew nothing about the goals of the forum, or even how forums work as a whole, and try to put that mindset into consideration when making changes.
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Aesthetic: It's okay. I don't hate it, by any means, and it's mostly perfectly serviceable, but I don't
love it. Since this is an RP forum, it's not totally a make-or-break that the aesthetic doesn't blow me away, but if I'm browsing for a new community to invest as much time into as RP forums (especially original settings) require, I am more likely to stay and explore a forum that has a more pleasing aesthetic that I can look at for hours. The biggest problem I think is there's just a
lot going on: the font choices on the banner, as well as the board images, combined with the bright colour contrasts of purple boards, a bright blue background, a bright blue-and-red banner, dark board images and fUnKy FoNt choices. It almost feels, visually, like a mish-mash of ideas, like the admin took a bunch of dissimilar elements and put them together because they
individually felt cool, rather than because they
work together to create a
cohesive aesthetic.
- Suggestion: perhaps decide on a colour scheme that's a bit more cohesive. It doesn't have to be monotone, but having 4 different colours that are all vying for my attention (not including the link colours or user group colours scattered throughout the page) makes it really difficult to focus, and may cause eye strain for users with vision impairments.
- Suggestion: I would rethink rethink the text on the non-RP board banners for the sake of accessibility. While I love that there's alt text on these images (which is great in the event images don't load, or if someone is accessing the forum on a screen reader), if someone has a vision impairment or a learning disability like dyslexia, these blocky and hyper-stylised fonts with no space between letters makes it incredibly difficult to parse the text. If you really want to use images here to replace the standard text-based board names, I would make sure that these are as easy to read as possible.
- Suggestion: I would really recommend away from using any sort of neon / ultra vibrant / "hot" colour for links, especially on this background. Eye strain is very, very real and the more your theme strains people's eyes (even if they don't have any vision issues) the less time they'll wind up spending looking at things on the site.
Beyond this, it's really a matter of personal tastes, though I would be mindful that people (especially creative types like roleplayers) are very aesthetically inclined. If you're struggling with the theme, you can always check out the
Theme Library for either ideas or a premade theme that fits your forum theme.
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Content: After a deeper look into the content, I definitely have a few thoughts on the structure of the forum, from the perspective of a potential member. As previously mentioned, the lack of a summary / plot snippet somewhere immediately visible throws me off. I also feel that the hierarchy of information isn't optimal. Let's consider the general flow of a new user joining an RP forum: first, they visit the link; then, they'll try and figure out if the forum is to their tastes in content / management; afterword, they're liable to look at character sheets/profiles and in-character content; lastly, they'll look to see what the out of character community is like just before clicking register or navigating away (presuming of course that they didn't already leave due to either first impressions, or anything they saw within the rules / story / in-character areas).
Here, what I see is a different flow: they visit the link > figure out content / management > see a board for guests > see lore submissions > see old posts > see character sheets > see OOC content.
If I'm a potential member, I'm probably bored already. This flow doesn't guide me toward the purpose of the forum (ostensibly, roleplaying) because the order of information I am fed starts off new-user oriented, but then shifts immediately to current-member content rather than helping me find my way to join. The idea behind hierarchy of information is to draw a user toward the flow you wish them to take in order to convert them from a guest to a member. While a setup counter to that won't inherently be a negative to all users, there is a reason why user experience and user interface (UX/UI) design is a much-sought for discipline.
As far as actual game-related content, I think it's mostly fine. While this following issue is to me not a big deal, it is noticeable enough to mention. The person making informational posts about the rules / setting / game has maybe not proofread what they've written: I see a lot of sentence fragments throughout these informational threads, which normally wouldn't register for me, except for the fact that since this is an original setting I have to read a
lot of informational threads. The more I read, the more I notice it. The reason I bring it up is not to criticise your writing style, but rather point out that a lot of the target demographic of this forum often uses the way the admin and/or staff write informational threads as a metric of the "level" of roleplaying and writing ability that is required for a forum. While I
personally don't make this judgement myself (my philosophy is very much "if I can understand what you wrote, I don't care how it is written") it is a common consideration as evidenced by the responses to
this looking-for-RPs thread where people often state if they're looking for beginner, intermediate, or advanced writing skills. RP forums with grammatical mistakes in informational content tend to rate lower and often lead to less success.
As far as the plot itself, I think it's OK? I'm not really big on mystical good-and-evil clashes for RP purposes (I prefer my fantasy RPs to be more aligned with Tolkien rather than Supernatural) but the information is solid. It's open-ended enough that if I joined I'd feel empowered to make my own decisions about my character, but not so open-ended that I'm overwhelmed with choice / unable to understand the game and story. I will say that the place where I see a potential hurdle is getting started as a new member; I don't see any area where I can introduce my character(s) to other players and connect with them to set up potential plots. I also don't see an easy-to-access source where I can find any open threads.
Lastly, I would like to give you a round of applause for your different "chapters" mechanic of time progression. That's clever, and I haven't seen it used often since the early 00s. Well done!
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Rating: 7/10
Final Thoughts: Overall, while I likely wouldn't join this site myself, the reason for that is just due to the wrong genre of fantasy for me as opposed to there being any fundamental issues. There are some aesthetic issues that could definitely sorted out, as well as organisational / new member orientation issues, but I think that the core of the forum and story is solid. I'd love to re-rate this if you do decide to change the aesthetics and organisation of the forum, but even if you don't I think there's potential.
Extra Note: The one thing I would raise a flag for — not as part of this rate, but as a fellow RP admin — is "the shonen series problem". If you or anyone reading this aren't familiar, in anime and manga, shonen series (more action oriented with a targeted male demographic, tho of course not exclusive) tend to have a power scaling problem. Hero(es) have to level up their skills and abilities to beat a Big Bad, so the next Big Bad has to be more powerful to present a challenge, which means the Hero(es) level up again, which means the next Big Bad has to be more powerful to present a challenge, which means.......... and then repeat so that by the time you get to the end of the series, the final Big Bad as well as the Hero(es) are so ridiculously strong that they've become completely absurd. I don't think you're there at this time, but with the idea of this being a massive power struggle across multiple species, in different spheres of conflict, and the characters themselves already being some of the most powerful fantasy archetypes in existence, I strongly recommend being cognisant of how you approach power scaling for any globally-impacting conflicts or forum story events.
I hope this helps! Thanks for sticking with it. Please let me know if you have any questions / if I need to elaborate on anything!
