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Is your URL "twitter" or "x" ?

You may be able to, temporarily, work around the embed issue by swapping "x" for "twitter" in the URL, and adjusting your censored words list to do the same. However, be advised that the twitter domain has been officially retired so this work around may not work for long.

If / when "twitter" is no longer feasible, then it will be up to PB to add in embedding for "x" URLs and we will just need to wait to see if they will (feature development is currently suspended, but this is more a maintenance update to retain existing functionality, so there is a non-zero chance they may update).

I have been trying to word this in a way where I don't come across mean, but I'm not entirely sure that I'll be successful. Instead, I will do my best to be honest with you. Please take my opinions with a grain of salt; it's nothing personal, just thoughts I've formed using my experience with forums (specifically RP) and my profession (web & video game development).

So, gently, I don't think this is going to be a successful forum premise. If this is really deeply and truly the kind of forum you want to run, then I absolutely think you should ignore everything I have to say below except for the last two paragraphs.

Ultimately, it looks like you really want to run a mafia game forum, but think that a Pokémon RP will drive players to join, and then get them to participate in the other half of the forum. From experience, a vast majority of RPers will not do this. They join forums to RP with other RPers and build a community of people who share that interest. Setting up an RP forum that's only really 1/2 of a forum's purpose means that there will be a not insignificant portion of players who will never engage with each other. That's not a community, and I don't know a lot of RPers who would stick around in that environment for too long. My advice is to pick a topic that you really want to devote your free time to, and do that topic really well, instead of tacking on unrelated stuff in an effort to get people to sign up.

I've written extensively about my thoughts about RP here whenever people ask, so here's a few things you might want to browse:

• Tips on starting your first RP forum
• Being a mod on an RP forum
• Should site-wide plots be open-ended or staff-defined?
• Running an original, high-fantasy RP
• General forum-running advice

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However, if I'm wrong about my hunch, and this is truly the type of forum you want to run, then a few general tips:

• Colour scheme of the default theme is a very big strain on the eyes. There are a lot of resources about deciding on colour schemes for your website, but my favourite is colormind.io because you can select your colours and see how they look on a sampling of different types of elements, with some granular control over which colours are must-haves in a theme. I also encourage you to run your selection of colours against the WebAIM Contrast Checker for accessibility.
• A description of the forum's goals in a table so guests don't have to click around to find the info they need (and you may want to put up some rules both for social interactions and the RP)
• Organise your forum better to put pertinent info first (rules, etc), followed by the primary focus(es) of the forum (RP and mafia games), followed by off-topic areas.

Best of luck, whatever you decide to do.

Just a small note: per the TOS please disable your ad blocker on PB sites by adding them to your white list.

The most likely explanation is that you ran out of ad free views: ad free works for 50,000 page views (counts for ALL views not just unique ones) or the end of the month UTC time whichever comes first. Since the month hasn't rolled over yet, you prob have exceeded the 50k views.

There is an option for overage additions in the subscription options, but what I would do is check to see (admin > upgrades > adfree) to see if you have run out of available page views first, just to confirm.

You can't change the banner's width like that -- it's just going to drop the quality of your image. Images have a finite size, so while you can make them smaller and not lose any quality, making a small image bigger is going to result in more blurriness / pixellation and lower quality.

The 75% you have your forum's width set to is 75% of the user's browser size; blowing up your image to be that size may not have the best appearance to everyone else. For example, I use an ultra-wide monitor. If my browser is maximum size, that means your forum is approximately 2600px wide, and your banner would then scale up to 2600px wide but with zero update to the quality of the image.

If you want the forum and the banner to always match in width, you need to set the width to a pixel amount (I would recommend 1200px as 1280px to 1366px are the most common screen widths). Alternatively, you need to create a banner with a transparent background, so it doesn't look out of place for not "filling" the banner area.

Chris that's perfect; i'm still developing my concept for my next theme but knowing this is here even if just a starting point puts me at ease haha, tysm!!

What do you mean "screenshotting abilities"? It sounds like you want to update your affiliate image, but that shouldn't involve any screenshots.

Also, you may want to check out the rules about requesting images:
support.proboards.com/page/cdrules#gdr

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!