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I have overall two main comments to make: Point 1: Your site is currently very oriented towards anime (as if the title didn't make that clear). That's not a ba

I have overall two main comments to make: Point 1: Your site is currently very oriented towards anime (as if the title didn't make that clear). That's not a bad thing, of course, but you are advertising the site as "for geeks", both here and in the logo's tagline. So how about geeks that don't like anime? Or that like it, but don't want to be associated with the word "otaku"? It seems to me you could benefit from a slightly more focused approach - I know more than one geek that could not tell me what "Otome" is, much less "Asian Balljointed Dolls" (which is one of the first things you see). Point 2: I think you might want to simplify your user interface a bit. Check Facebook and Deviantart, for instance: they ask your name, email, sex and birthday, and that's it. LinkedIn asks for even less. In contrast, I count 14 fields + 8 extra for "Otaku Match", all at once. Check what OkCupid does, too. I'm sorry I can't give you any specific link about user interface design, but feel free to PM me if you can't find it yourself and I see what I can find. Finally, small bug report: the "members" page throws an error ("Geocode was not successful for the following reasons: OVER_QUERY_LIMIT") on my computer, and you might want to do something about the "Location: --Not in the United States--" fields, because you have a lot of activity from Non-US members. Displaying the country should be enough.

Xenokitten 12y ago
Hi thanks for checking out the site :) You make a good point about the "not in the US" feature. It was orginally because of the events plugin that I was running required US zipcodes to generate the maps and search results, but I should probably add a field where people can at least add their country or search by country. As the name does suggest, things are geared strongly towards an asian slant on the word geek, however, there's also a lot of non-asian content, such as boardgames, photoshop tutorials and "western" videogames, or books, movies, scifi series, etc. The front page changes a lot since it just pulls in the latest news articles, which just happened to be asian themed (although I do agree that many of the articles on the site are as such since it pulls from rss feeds such as kotaku (who also has otaku in their name :)) and crunchyroll. The term Otaku in Japan has a negative connotation, but most anime fans in the USA have embraced the term and self-identify with it as a positive thing. Much like how being a geek or nerd used to be a negative thing back in the 80s, and was popularized by 90s and millennial culture. I do agree that there are a lot of profile fields. The ones you see in search though are mostly not required. I culled down a lot of the required fields as my current testers provided the same feedback :) Initially ALL of those fields were required because I wanted to differntiate my site from many "dating" sites (or social networks) where users do not post very detailed descriptions. I wanted people to be easily able to search for people based on interests, but if everyone left those interests blank, then no one could search for anyone. But it was deterring people from signing up. And a social network isn't any fun without other members lol. :) I am actually considering adding the buddypress plugin that will allow users to signup/login with their existing social media profiles. Though I do hate the fact that there will be a lot of blank profiles on the site if I do so. I will look into the bug. I have noticed it too but it seems to be a non-breaking bug. It is annoying since it pops up 3 times. I'm only a fledgling developer (which is why I'm using buddypress in the first place :)). I can do css and hack up some stuff in php, but a lot of things are still over my head so I will have to see if I can find a way to prevent the popup. Thanks again for the feedback :)

Xenokitten 12y ago

Hi thanks for checking out the site :) You make a good point about the "not in the US" feature. It was orginally because of the events plugin that I was running required US zipcodes to generate the maps and search results, but I should probably add a field where people can at least add their country or search by country. As the name does suggest, things are geared strongly towards an asian slant on the word geek, however, there's also a lot of non-asian content, such as boardgames, photoshop tutorials and "western" videogames, or books, movies, scifi series, etc. The front page changes a lot since it just pulls in the latest news articles, which just happened to be asian themed (although I do agree that many of the articles on the site are as such since it pulls from rss feeds such as kotaku (who also has otaku in their name :)) and crunchyroll. The term Otaku in Japan has a negative connotation, but most anime fans in the USA have embraced the term and self-identify with it as a positive thing. Much like how being a geek or nerd used to be a negative thing back in the 80s, and was popularized by 90s and millennial culture. I do agree that there are a lot of profile fields. The ones you see in search though are mostly not required. I culled down a lot of the required fields as my current testers provided the same feedback :) Initially ALL of those fields were required because I wanted to differntiate my site from many "dating" sites (or social networks) where users do not post very detailed descriptions. I wanted people to be easily able to search for people based on interests, but if everyone left those interests blank, then no one could search for anyone. But it was deterring people from signing up. And a social network isn't any fun without other members lol. :) I am actually considering adding the buddypress plugin that will allow users to signup/login with their existing social media profiles. Though I do hate the fact that there will be a lot of blank profiles on the site if I do so. I will look into the bug. I have noticed it too but it seems to be a non-breaking bug. It is annoying since it pops up 3 times. I'm only a fledgling developer (which is why I'm using buddypress in the first place :)). I can do css and hack up some stuff in php, but a lot of things are still over my head so I will have to see if I can find a way to prevent the popup. Thanks again for the feedback :)