I was asked by Review Me to give my thoughts on a fairly new site, Qoo Forum, here they are.

I’ve been using internet forums for about 10 years now; I think that they are one of the best ways of finding information, connecting with people, trading services and goods on the internet. They allow heated debate without someone pointing a finger in your face. They also help share knowledge. This could be part of the reason I started my own photography forum back in 2003.

Initial thoughts on Qoo are a bit mixed. I’m not sure what the name means but whatever and the layout is, well it is what it is. The site is very Web 2.0 feeling with plastic icons and buttons everywhere and eye-catching colors, however the skin they chose is way to skinny for today’s internet. Even viewing the site at a screen resolution of 1024×768 it looks too skinny. If I look at the site at my normal resolution of 1280×1024 or on a second widescreen monitor that runs 1680×1050, the forums appear to be only a sliver and go on for miles. Leading me to my next point, there are simply too many categories.

Clearly the intent of this site is to be a one-stop information for all forum, great idea, it’s been done a few times in the past with great success however most fail at it. From my experience of running forums over the last four years, start with a core set of categories and add to them as users demand it. This site has no clear direction and everything gets lost in translation.

There are some cool features to it, such as the ability to add the RSS feed from your own blog to your profile, but that was one of the only nice things I saw. The rest is pretty typical forum stuff.

I did join and make a few posts, the introduction forum is all the way at the bottom, not a great place, move it to the top will ya? The people are overly nice and the typical forum attitudes don’t seem to be there, yet. With little more then 50 registered users and less then 500 total posts, Qoo Forum is still very much an internet baby.

After some pruning and perhaps a few tweaks to the forum skin, this could be a great place. If you are looking for fast replies on specific topics however, this may not be the site for you.

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