Hello! Sorry for the delay in replying. I started a new job last week and was just a little too busy during the week to provide a review.
Before I start, I want to preface the review with this:
nothing I say is personal. Whatever opinion I provide is purely from an analytical perspective, using my personal experience with forums & my professional experience in this field to provide feedback. The important thing is to take what you like and feel you can use from my comments, and disregard anything you dislike or that doesn't serve your purpose.
OK, with that out of the way, let's get on with the review! Luckily, I'm both a seasoned RP admin and a big Pokémon fan, so this will have a bit more of a holistic approach.
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First Impressions: It's a little plain. The "ORAS" on your banner looks very pixelated and it's a little blurry a first glance especially with the colour choice (which I know is intentional, but just keep this in mind). Beyond that, it's just a bunch of green with skitty icons. I think that the intent of the forum being a
roleplay specifically is lost in this; there isn't really anything that sort of hooks me into the forum, and I am someone who would conceivably be in your target audience being both an RPer and a Pokémon fan who has played ORAS as well as the original RSE countless times. As it currently stands, if I were looking to join a Pokémon RP, I would probably pass over this one as I have other options like
ZapdosZulu and
Shula, which tell me more upfront the purpose of the forum & what I need to know, or would wind up making my own. The visuals of the other two forums are also a lot more dedicated to the pokémon theme and are overall more aesthetically pleasing.
Content: There are
so many boards, and most of them are empty. It doesn't look particularly active, or like you are really motivated to RP. This is further emphasised by me checking your recent threads list. Page 1 displays 30 threads, with the last updates occurring within the last 16 days. Further observation shows
10 ads and
8 forum games on page one. Of the remaining threads,
3 are
in-character posts,
3 are
character profiles, and
6 are
administrative / game info threads.
In other words, in the last 16 days your activity on the forum that guests can see:
- 60% unrelated to anything regarding pokémon at all
- 20% administrative / informational
- 10% character profiles
- 10% actual roleplay
I would recommend condensing boards into similar topics. Do you need to have a completely dedicated board for each city in Hoenn immediately visible? Subboards are infinitely nesting, so you could divide Hoenn into North / South / East / West boards, then subboards for each city in those regions, and then sub-sub boards for landmarks in those cities. Condensing boards will increase perception of activity at a cursory glance, provided that each board has at least ONE thread (which I recommend -- a lot of people are reluctant to be the first person to post in a board).
I would also recommend pulling back your focus from the game corner and being more present in the RP yourself; if the admin doesn't participate in-character enough, neither will players.
Lastly, I recommend some table or something at the top of the forum, before the boards, to let users know what it's about. The forum says ORAS but are we just following the plot of ORAS? Is it just set in ORAS's setting? How does the original RSE fit in? What kind of person can I be? Do I have to be a trainer? Can I be a pokémon? --- Basically, where's all the information I need to know? Yes, there are boards, but remember, it takes 30 seconds on average for someone to decide to stay or to leave so if a user cannot find pertinent information in this time, they won't bother looking for it and they'll go somewhere that does have it easily findable.
Aesthetics: Honestly, it's a bit bland. If skitty and the banner weren't there, I wouldn't know this was a pokémon forum at all, much less a pokémon RP. Also, Skitty is a normal-type pokemon so I'm not super sure about this green theme -- I'd expect either something in grey, or with a more scenic representation an outdoors area that seem like the type of place Skitty (and I presume the 'new post' icon is delcatty) could be found. The banner is, as mentioned, kind of blurry. You may want to reconsider using the red/blue thematic colour on the text, and a higher quality image for a clearer, crisper banner.
It's okay if this isn't fancy, but it should be thematically significant.
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Overall: As a whole, I'm kind of underwhelmed. When there are options like ZapdosZulu or Shula or other non-PB-hosted Pokémon RPs, there's nothing that really pulls me towards to this forum in comparison. It seems inactive, and it kind of seems like there's a bigger emphasis on hanging out generally than there is playing in the universe. Information is not easily accessible at a first glance, and in the absence of any other 'hook' to keep me on the site, I would wind up navigating away.
Score: 4/10 - I think you can do better if you reprioritise the RP into your main focus and work on seeing what other RPs (not just Pokémon ones) are doing to entice new members, and what they're doing to retain them. Better aesthetics would help, as well. Like I said, none of this is personal. Take my suggestions / observations with a grain of salt.
Hope this helps!
