Content and forumhome feedback

[Yorixz]

Since march 2005 I've been running my own website named Otfans, well, it's not totally 'my website', we've got a team of several enthusiasts that help to maintain our site as their hobby.

Description: Otfans is an international community focussed on the opensource MMORPG gameserver named "Otserv", we try to provide support as well as a nice place to share thoughts and improvements.

I would like to request some feedback from the somewhat experienced forum reviewers out here, as the members on my forum couldn't exactly some up with too much of usable criticism.
The main points that I would like to hear some comments on would be:

• The order/availability of forums; right now our forum has at least 40ish subforums (of the main forum, excluding those that are available to users' projects). This causes a lot of posts that don't seem to belong to the forums they're posted in as well as crossposts over multiple categories, I would like to try to reduce this in order to decrease the moderator work on the website.
• The availability of documentation; as I know we're lacking some, the problem is that I'm notsure where to place them in order to make them easy to find.

In case you want to check out some member-only options, you can use the following account on our site:

Username: vBtest
Password: vBtest

Thanks a lot for your time and hopefully I'll be able to improve our forum even further

[Princeton]

it's a good start :up:

• background on logo is too busy
• you have 2 login blocks on portal page
• you are showing 2 Private Messages (information) on portal page
• your column block headers do not look right in smaller resolutions ... even in your "fixed" style (I'm guessing it's because of the "code blocks" in the center column.) A quick fix for this is to modify the $stylevar[codeblockwidth] when displaying the news content.
• get rid of the Affiliate Links marquee ... it's annoying and most people ignore them
• move recent threads to right column / top
• color/icons/buttons/smilies look great!

[Yorixz]

Originally Posted by Princeton

it's a good start :up:

• background on logo is too busy
• you have 2 login blocks on portal page
• you are showing 2 Private Messages (information) on portal page
• your column block headers do not look right in smaller resolutions ... even in your "fixed" style (I'm guessing it's because of the "code blocks" in the center column.) A quick fix for this is to modify the $stylevar[codeblockwidth] when displaying the news content.
• get rid of the Affiliate Links marquee ... it's annoying and most people ignore them
• move recent threads to right column / top
• color/icons/buttons/smilies look great!

Thanks a lot for your reply, I'll try to improve at these points, more critics are welcome in this topic though

[peterska2]

Very nice clean style.

On your forumhome your last post/threads/posts columns are out of alignment from category to category.

On your portal, when you collapse a section, you have no option to expand it again so you get stuck with closed sections and can't open them again.

I'm not a big fan of the login being to the left of the breadcrumbs but I think it does work on your site.

In your navbar, your arrows are stuck to the top of it instead of centered, so I would either center them or remove them altogether.

You postbit is very well organised and using the legacy postbit is perfect for your style.

The only other thing that I can see, is that you are still using the default icons for your subforums. I would replace these with miniture versions of your forum status icons.

[Yorixz]

Originally Posted by peterska2

Very nice clean style.

On your forumhome your last post/threads/posts columns are out of alignment from category to category.

On your portal, when you collapse a section, you have no option to expand it again so you get stuck with closed sections and can't open them again.

I'm not a big fan of the login being to the left of the breadcrumbs but I think it does work on your site.

In your navbar, your arrows are stuck to the top of it instead of centered, so I would either center them or remove them altogether.

You postbit is very well organised and using the legacy postbit is perfect for your style.

The only other thing that I can see, is that you are still using the default icons for your subforums. I would replace these with miniture versions of your forum status icons.

A somewhat late reply - excuse me for that, had a little break.

Thanks a lot for your reply, I'll see what I can change to either correct or change these points, the only problem I've found so far is the expand arrow that is out of the line but I'll start a little mission for it again tomorrow.