Yuuki Yuna Reviews Magic Arts Duel Academy!
Hello! I'm Yuuki Yuna, and as of whenever I start writing this, I decided that if I feel bored because I don't want to A. Play Overwatch B. Play ranked Devpro or C. fuck around in Starbound or some other game like Civ 5, so I'm going to write a review for an academy.
Now, you might be asking, "Who the fuck is this guy to go around criticizing our home?" And that's a valid point, I did just sorta show up out of nowhere and as you are probably seeing, criticizing things. But I also want to bring up another valid point: Academies will die (for those that get revived, the dead stay dead, meaning they will eventually die shortly after their revival), and new ones will always be created. I've experienced tons of academies, I've even run an academy for myself. I know what makes a good one and what makes a bad one. Now, MADA is a special case to me, because most academies that are not DA usually don't survive for 2 years, or even a year. They die off rather quickly. So, I'm moreso going to be asking why that is the case. |
Appearance 7/10 Well, I'm helping ywall out with a new head banner, mostly because I sorta barganed my way to do it, but I wanna clear up a misconception. A lot of people think that you have to have forum graphics. And I disagree, you don't have to. If you chose to, they should be professionally done and good. But if they are poorly done, not only do they increase the site's loading times, but also they make the site look unatractive, thus they may turn away potential users. Also a recomended size is 300x100 max.
As for the forum skin, you can only do so much with forumotion. And it works, though I think the navbar is out of place. It's a fairly decent skin that looks ok. If you really wanted a really cool, awesome skin like something DA has, you have to have the CSS and HTML knowledge to make it yourself, as well as know how to edit templates and know what you are doing. And you need the founder account to edit templates. Also maybe the beginning of every new year, you can chose a new skin or something. Or if you have someone who has the knowledge that I described is needed, have someone work on a new skin. And I know you are going for simple, but you should have something that looks nice and is simple.
As for forum categories, they look fine, though I will say that I think Art, Music, Tv, Manga, and Anime can all just be combined. Same thing with art shops and MADA shops, Art shop topics can just be put under MADA shops. If you are worried about users being confused, just require that shops must be tagged like having the tag [GFX] or [DEK] in them.
Also, I'm starting to think that requiring a forum for a dorm in an academy has no purpose besides aesthetics. People used to think that people would post their dorm room in the dorms and people would comment on it and stuff, but that only happens on DA. Yet again, DA is okay with spam to a degree. Like people shitpost on DA all the time in threads, and dorms is just the main place they do it in. Having the dorms there though do make it a good place to have Homework being placed, so I guess it's conveniant for that.
Also, another thing to note is that having this (https://i.imgur.com/AwLdmeU.png) just sorta look awkwardly placed (not to mention you don't really need to add admins to that since they already have moderation rights over every forum, and they have the pannel). Fixing this is simple, all that is required is to go into the ACP ---> Display ---> Homepage ---> Structure and hierarchy find the option where it says " Display forum moderators" and turn that yes into a no.
Also, if you're seeing this, feel free to use the table coding I am using for this post for any offical post. Like the rules! I can even tell ya how to configure it into the CSS so that when you are using the table code, it's a lot less shorter.
Another thing I want to add is that the affiliates widget looks very cluttered. And I have a code if you are interested that places the affiliates at the bottom of the page. So let me know if you want that.
Also, if you aren't going to update card of the month, don't do card of the month. It makes you look lazy if you just aren't going to update the widget.
Anyhow, if you want feedback on your forum's appearance, just ask for a review on the forumotion support forums, and they will kindly help ya out with that for sure (because I know there are somethings that they cover that I don't cover). But in the end, the forum just looks a bit above average. The Head banner that I made is nice and probably looks a lot better then the current (subjective but ok), the forum's skin is decent, the lack of GFX actually helps the forum, and there really isn't anything that stands out about the forum's appearance.. |
Staff and Usergroups 6/10 Usually this was just how the staff did their job, but I also critqued on the usergroups themselves, so I am going to add to this. Too many usergroups can make it seem like usergroups in general are pointless. And I can really point out 2 that I seem don't really need to be needed: Affiliates and War Commanders.
Starting with affiliates first, newer members (or generally anyone that really isn't an affiliate) won't care. You're just making them special for the sake of making them special. No point really to their purpose besides that.
When it comes to War Commanders, you only have 2 of them. I don't see them that often, but if you're only going to have 2 of them, it could be better to list them in a post saying that these are the guys that are in-charge of the war team (plus, are there any other academies around to war anyways? If they exist, they are probably really small and dieing out soon). I mean you could go have them war devpro teams but good luck with that. I know DA used to have their war team war DNF teams when DN was a thing.
Besides that, we got our standard Professors, Mods, and Admins. And with those 3 alone plus dorms you have the perfect amount of staff groups required, not to mention the perfect number of which you should keep, which is 3 admins, 3 mods, and 3 professors (Not counting Jackachu, in a since, I'm sorta treating it like a hierarchy. People who are mods also have the responsibilities of a professor, and people who are admins also have the responsibilities of mods and professors). However, since MADA is pretty big and active (or gets even bigger), you can definitely increase the number slowly but not durasticly.
However as of recently, when it comes to the professors, I'm not seeing the actual professors post lessons articles or homeworks from the professors themselves. I check the articles forum, and I see Stardog's name everywhere. So yeah, there's that. I also want to add that DA doesn't even do lessons anymore, and I don't see that many articles on DA, they mostly focus on doing tournaments. So if the learning aspect of YGO is going to be one of the main things that attract people to the forum, then you have to stay with it. I'll get into this more later.
When it comes to the moderators, I can write a whole essay on this. Coming from a background where this was all I did, I have so much to say, but I just cannot simply cover it all quickly. So I'm not going to, because I tell things like this all of the time, and they don't get it. And these are the same mistakes I will see at a lot of places. And they exist here (though here, it's not as bad as other places I have seen purely based on the fact that I could probably apply to any place that allows me to apply for admin and/or mod and get the position). Maybe this is an essay I'll write in the future, but for now, I won't give feedback on it. Commenting on things like these also don't attract the best response from people, and I rather not be banned anytime soon.
Also for the admins, or the "big 3" as they are called, they are doing just fine. I don't know what each exact individual admin is doing, but I know that they are creating the content that needs to be created to attempt to keep their members on their forum (Pokemon tournaments, and another yugioh tournament going on on the side). So they understand that which is good. I'd say they're good admins when it comes to knowing what to do, but this is something that an outsider like me can't judge off of 4 days of watching MADA. |
Content 1/10 Let me explain what I mean by content. I am refering to the things that makes the members of the academy want to stay, and/or rather gives them something to do. This could be from duels for currency, tournaments, lessons, to dice games and roleplays (btw, I'm mostly going to refer to Yugioh related content). And I'd say that ywall are lacking in this department. I am only see tournaments, but they're old tournaments, so if someone new wanted to join in on one of them, they couldn't cause they're still in-progress. You should be having weekly tournaments with 8 participants. No more, no less. 4 tournaments a month at max, and 1 event a month at max.
I know that MADA has had an on-going event, but it's not happening anymore. And on-going events help to make sure that your members have something to do. Not to mention even though that I can get currency by dueling, I see no reason to do that. And if say you have your glow and everything you want, there is no reason to keep on trying to get more currency.
And to add to this, you get to chose the dorm you are in. Very creative. In fact I've only seen one small academy try the system out and that died because the admin team was torn to pieces. However, I have one major problems with the system: You aren't doing anything with it. Becuase you aren't doing anything with it, it's sorta just like "You get to chose your dorm? So what?" The testing system had the motivation that if you got a low test score the first time, you could always buy your re-test and try again. The rank up system always had the motivation of just doing dueling things to rank up (or in DA's case, even a ladder). What's the motivation for joining a dorm? If anything, it's only purpose is aesthetics and you could just delete those four usergroups in general.
For roleplays, I recomend not doing them. Want a roleplay? Go to the a roleplay forum. You'll get a lot higher quality roleplaying. I have never seen RPing being good on academies (Satellar DA/AKA is an exception to this, because that community is mostly rpers that are veterans or are above average and are surrownded by veterans).
Dice games are also a fun way to get currency as well and also incourage users to keep on posting. If no one is posting, the forum looks dead. And as for the lessons, I covered this with the professors, if the lessons don't exist, I can't judge. Though I know Jackachu from pervious places, so I can safely say that the lessons are decent. |
Everything Else Appearance, Staff, and Content are sorta the essentials, so now I'm sorta just giving advice to other things that don't really fit with everything else. For example, code. When it comes to cool coding things, this acad has some cool codes. When I found out that ywall had a snake game, I thought "hey, that's actually kinda cool." Not to mention that I contributed profile songs (though last time I checked Stardog's profile, it's a white box. Dude, I WILL help you get the code working, cause I gave you the same strip of code on AKA and it's working fine there) so SPOILER ALERT, that's new. But if you have all that you want while knowing that there is more out there you can have, then that's fine.
Here are some suggestions for decreasing your site's loading times. 1. Disable the chatbox on the main page. You have a pop-up one, so you should be fine. Personally though I prefer the pop-up chatbox on the toolbar, because I find the toolbar to be really useful for watching threads that I care about, but that's just me. 2. Get rid of the glows. They're fun, but they increase the page's loading times. And every second counts. But of course, not everyone want's to sacrafice their fancy name effects for making their site look better + increase the page's loading times.
As much as I love discord, I do not recommend having a 3rd party program to chat. This being you are detracting activity away from the home of the academy, AKA the forum. You want people to be on the forum, so why are you trying to get people to not be on the forum and be on a 3rd party program instead?
Also, if you have a magician themed forum, you should make your dorms match with the theme as well. Right now the dorm names just seem really out of place. Be creative though, you don't have to end with "Dorm" at the end of the usergroup. Take an example out of Harry Potter for instance. They named their dorms right, you can figure out something cool for your dorms as well. |
So why is MADA still alive after 2 years? The answer I have come up with is that MADA has a strong community that is extremely loyal to the forum. The fact that the community is so tight together, that I even end up feeling excluded because of it. In a since, a lot of the members aren't welcoming of the new ones, not because they act hostile towards them but rather I can see newer members having a hard time fitting in and making friends. And a strong community like this will go away, so cherish it while you have it. And while you do that, make sure they stay by giving them things to do. And if this is done and done consistantly, and the staff never get's lazy or gives up, then MADA will last for a long time.
I'll probably still be around, so within a month from now, I'll do another one. If you have any questions or things you want me to address, post down below and I will address it. |
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Yuuki Yuna Reviews MADA
by Yuuki Yuna Tue Sep 06, 2016 7:11 pm
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