Re Review of my site (DS Ultimate)
 

Yeah, it's been around 10 months of me reviewing everyone else's site, and I've now changed my forum massively enough to probably warrant a re review. Current changes and additions I'd like rated:

1. The 700 odd smilies
2. The 200 odd avatars
3. The 50 odd moods
4. The new banner
5. The forum structure and forums as a whole
6. The edits to phrasing, FAQs and templates such as removing all ambiguity.
7. The new (non sprite based) images by NintenDan (a forum member)
8. The alternate styles and images by various members
9. The features like arcade, gallery, wiki, etc.
10. General forum activity, management, etc.

Basically, anyone up for reviewing? Just the style and pretty much every single forum I rate everyone else's forums based on I want rated point by point with detail.

Link is http://dsultimate.net/Board/upload

*Hopes for best*

I know, and he also designed some of the mood images for it, which have been added, and some smilies.

--------------- Added [DATE]1218716286[/DATE] at [TIME]1218716286[/TIME] ---------------

Wow, no reviews?

I'm not great with reviews, but I'll say what I can.

In my honest opinion, there are too many smilies. I'm not sure if I know many people that could or would spend the time required to find a smiley they like out of seven hundred of them. I like the wide range of selectable moods, as well as public usergroups.

There's also too many skins in my opinion. There's not much you can do about that now though, as there's at least one member with their own preference for each skin.

The ability for a regular member such as myself to select postbit or postbit legacy as a control panel option is very handy, as there's a large amount of people that prefer each one.

Some of the category icons don't blend with the default skin, which gets pretty close to ruining the whole flow. If you could have NintenDan make more icons rather than using sprites or renders, it would work very well.

+ Postbit/Legacy Selection
+ Many Selectable Moods
+ Many Public Usergroups
- Too Many Skins
- Too Many Smilies
? Some of the phrase rewrites confuse me when comparing to other forums.

That's about all I can come up with for now.

Some seem to, which is ironic considering they're sometimes the users that don't know how to use the post button. And thanks, I like the moods and public usergroups as well.

I know. Many of the styles were only added on user suggestion by using their profile colours. I'd probably want to have less as well.

True.

Anyone have any ideas for one consistent style for the category icons? I know they don't blend, but I'm at a loss in which of three suggested sets to use (NintenDan's Turpinator's or Goomba Smackdown's)

Thanks for your suggestions and advice.

Your not suppose to upload the upload folder , Header Img looks a lot better than last time i seen it , Style is Fun and Fits Great

Too bad your locked in to the DS , Because they will come out with something else , Would be a wise move to move to Nintendo Forum or something like that

It is basically a Nintendo forum in general now, so the name is kinda misleading as this point in time. Heck, even the main site it's based on now has Wii sections and stuff like, the reason mainly for the title is that:

There's still a lot of Super Mario 64 DS Action Replay discussions.
For branding and seeming culture (because there's about ten member projects based on the site and the culture).
SEO.

Bump for more reviews, as I've got a new set of reputation images which look even more like the Legend of Zelda series health bar and magic meter.

Also, should I change any other images? Would editing the online icons, rating stars or the like be a good idea?

And bump for more reviews, since I'm having even more images edited.

Any more reviews? Seems I don't get any reviews from people I don't actually know, and while I thank everyone for their comments and reviews so far, I'd like a few reviews from completely neutral members that aren't members at said forum and don't really know any members at said forum.

There are a lot of styles. I personally like all the choices! :cool:

The first impression I always try to snapshot in my mind then play with the board a bit. The moods project is a nice addition you have going on. :)

The status icons are not consistant. I feel the forums are unorganized at first then as I looked around it was organized. The status icons with real and animation status icons makes the first impression of the board be unorganized. :o

There are a ton of categories which are nice and I do not see any categories being dead. Least they are active. The only boards that jumped out at me where the:

PS3 board status icon makes it look like it does not belong in your forum. Maybe a animated picture or something. It sticks out and detracts the focus of your board. I kept looking at the PS3 board even though it's a DS (Wifi,DS, Nintendo website?). The focus of the board was thrown off after I saw the PS3 icon, sorry. :(

Super Mario Galaxy board didn't make any sense as to why it has its own categorey. I think you wanted to say you want to talk about this game, but under General Discussion didn't make as much sense as having it under a Nintendo categorey. :confused:

"Other Major Series" and "Nintendo DS minor games", could these two board be put together to make "Other DS Games"? But, that won't make sense witht he categorey called "Other DS Games". I am familiar with major and minor releases being code or upgrades as in programming terms. But, most gamers do not understand this lingo either, maybe Popular Series and One-Hit Wonders are more gamerish. I do not want to knock the wording choice, but you get what I mean. It's a bit confusing from a gamer/programmer perspective. :erm:

The last one is the category "Other DS Games". Where is the DS Games categorey? Is it the "Wifi Games" category??? But, I see SSBB in there??? That isn't a DS game. The title of the category is misleading. I am looking around for Wii Games Category, but those are in the "Wifi Games" and in the General Discussion categories??? :confused:

The wiki, Galleries, Arcade are nice features. They are most useful features, but feel a-bit too much when I saw the Glossary. I do not know persoanally if gamers need a Glossary. But, it's a nice idea. :)

I do like the deep blue with the Rainbow Star colors form Mario Kart 64. It's a nice touch! Some popular Nintendo character are nice to see. :cool:

I cannot really comment on the management, but all the user colors threw me off on how important everyone is. I am glad there is a legend to tell me who is important and who is not. But, the colors lead to more questions on who do I contact and are they goingot help me answer any of my qustion when i have them. :o

As an overall results the board looks great. I had to look around quite a bit to come up with those comments. It wasn't easy to mention, but hopefully it helps. I look forward in reviewing your community again in the future. :)

Oh... I just realized that wasn't a PS3 board... ugh! Anyways, now that I look more closely tot he picture, there is an XBOX. Oh, wow! Okay, this is confusing... "Older Consoles and Games" & "Other Consoles and Games". Both titles are misleading. I first thought Older consoles were Atari, Com64, Vision Series, NES, etc. then I read the discription. Not many users read distcriptions. I have found that out with my own boards. The "Older Consoles and Games" should be "Older Nintendo Consoles and Games" then that would help, then reading those paragraphs of explainations. :confused:

Good luck with the community. :cool:

[UPDATE]: I just found the Wii board... :erm: I will keep my first impressions posted, so you can read them. I am a bit confused and lost in your boards. I have seem to have a difficult time trying to navigate though the boards correctly without knowing the focus. I thought your boards were about the Nintendo DS. But, I am confused with web URL and changing fo focus. I feel the boards are not properly categorized. Sorry, maybe I cannot properly review your board. I have to many questions and memory problems with your boards. :(

Thank you, I like the styles as well.

And the moods were created by the members, so you can thank them for that.

I know. I have a category icon designer creating new ones in this style:

http://dsultimate.net/Board/upload/i...urp/MKIcon.png

But he's got a slight mental block at the moment, and the others are placeholders from about 3 different designers who had different styles. I basically had a vote and the new designer won, so they non decent ones will be replaced shortly, or when he gets round to it.

I have archived any inactive ones, that's why none seem inactive.

See the point about the category icons being under redesign, that needs a new image which it doesn't have yet, and is a placeholder. It will be changed, as I understand what the problem is here.

True, I'm considering putting it as a Mario sub category, but it was created because there were a lot of Mario Galaxy discussions in the Mario board and because I was creating a Mario Galaxy section on the main site (dsultimate.net without the actual forum).

True, good point I haven't considered, and I will think about that.

I'll change Other DS games to DS Games, and Wifi returns to Nintendo Wifi Connection which is both for DS and Wii games (as you can see here http://www.nintendowifi.com/global/AboutWiFi_Wii.jsp, Nintendo refers to Wii online as Wifi Connection as well). Hope that helps explain.

Thank you. And yes, I guess I should probably add a page or link saying 'Other Features' or something, because it's not so major. Ignore the All Albums as well, that link somehow got auto added by a modification.

Thank you, or thank NintenDan for that, he designed the banner and button images.

Can you explain a bit more about this? And yes, the usergroups are confusing, but they all have their own ranking systems and various images and what not. On the bright news, I also removed one of these groups recently, the concierge group since it was being abused.

Thanks for your comments, they are just the kind of comments I was after in a review. You've said just what to improve, gave points people haven't gave before and were honest, which is why I am thankful for the comments.

Any suggestions for what to rename the boards to?

Don't worry, it can be kind of confusing, and I'm always keen to cut down on the number of forums (and yet I constantly get boards suggested by members, and you can tell just why I've not been adding them recently from your confusion).

Bump since I've had many of the category icons changed and forums rearranged.

Bump for reviews.

Since I am on my Iphone this is have to be short and simple...sorry, hate typing on this thing.

Ok your important announcements repeat themselves which seems like a waste of space. I like the forum design with the custom characters and the skin is bright and attractive for younger members. You do however seem to have a lot of member groups, a idea would be to add the things like legend of zelda as a rank so for example a member could become "Legend...like zelda" (or something like that) after 100 posts, as a admin of a few forums myself I would limit your members to smaller images and text sizes in their signature, after all, trying to load all those images and text in one huge thread filled with 100 posts can have a big impact on bandwidth. Reduce them to about 150 characters is a good amount

Just my input,

Connor

I know we need to reduce signature size. We've been recently bringing in rules for that, but it's currently mainly on the honour system as far as major limits go (it's generally meant to be less than 5 images per signature according to forum rules).

What do you mean by Important Announcements repeating? That's probably not intentional, and I'll need to fix it.

Thanks for your positive comments on the forum style and custom Nintendo images, that's thanks to the DS Ultimate image designers, who are pretty much volunteers.

Nothing much to add then already said. The double announcements and the biiiiiig signatures need to be fixed, the rest is good IMO.

Any comments on the alternative styles? Preferrably the Evil Dark, Castle Bleck, Halloween, Goomba Smackdown, Dragorium15, Green Legend, Quambo's, Clean Red and Dimension D styles. Yeah, I know there's a lot of styles, and there's also a few parody styles of the current banner:

http://dsultimate.net/Board/upload/i...ESUltimate.png

http://dsultimate.net/Board/upload/i...64Ultimate.png

P.S. If you don't understand the naming, some styles were made by various members, and a few of the styles are based on Super Paper Mario.

Oh, and I've fixed the duplicate notice issue. Just needed to revert the FORUMHOME template.

It looks very cluttered :(