First off, let me say that I really like the site and plan to be an active member as long as there are people here who will post back and I will add my knowledge, which I have sufficient of, to any topic that I see that I can help in.
Number 1...
Your banner has a brushed background; I know they are brushes because I have used them in some of my signatures before, with some text with some text effects on it.
I would suggest either holding a small contest or getting someone to make you more of an official banner that would add to the board and community.
The first thing that people look at and judge your website or forum by is the graphics you have on there and how fast your site loads. So it is key to your survival that you please the community and are able to provide new stuff for your community members to be involved in. The more stuff you do to get the community to do, the more likely they are to become active long-term members.
Number 2...
Your graphics section is VERY small when it comes to posts and topics per week. If this trend continues, I would suggest getting rid of this section and replacing it with something that your community would benefit from more; maybe another computer related category or just totally get rid of it till more interest pops up about it. There is nothing worse then a member to see an un-active section where they want to post in and no one will really post back.
So either make some spoof members to get the popularity up or like I said above take it away.
Number 3...
Your automated posting robot, also known as Jim, is a very good and informative part of the forum; but you seem to have missed programming him to do two(2) forums. This is a small and maybe a mistake that you know about, but I would like to see it be corrected so that you can get more content on the site. It should just be basic RSS feeds, but I may be wrong.
Number 4...
I went and read your guidelines and looked over them quickly to make sure that you didn’t make any simple mistakes. While I was reading through it I found only
ONE mistake. I am pretty sure you meant to say ‘break’ instead of ‘brake’.
Number 5...
Currently, from what I can tell, you are using vBulletin v3.5.4 which is
HIGHLY exploitable and can easily be taken over and destroy your hard work within minutes. I am pretty sure the newest version is v3.6.1 but it may have a newer version. I would suggest you to upgrade your boards so that some malicious hacker doesn’t ruin your hard work. Don’t get me wrong; not all, hackers are bad, you have both your ‘white hat’ and ‘black hat’ hackers. There are more ‘white hat’ hackers out there that would exploit your site to help you then there is ‘black hat’ hackers that would do malicious acts against it.
In that post could you please link to somewhere where I can see how to get a V.I.P. account and how others could too.
PS. Thanks for the comments about my post, even the slightest hint was noticed .=)