Advice for Freelancer WF Team | Stop Doing Too Much!

First of all I wanna say my top three sites online are themeforest.net, warriorforum.com and freelancer.com, I absolutely love these sites. So when Freelancer purchased Warrior Forum I was extremely happy and excited about the things Freelancer team can bring to the Warrior Forum.

And then Alaister started a thread last month 'Warrior Forum redesign' I wanted to respond to that but didn't have the time to. Please take this only as feedback of one person, I am no expert, but I do speak a little bit from experience, because I had a site that used to average 800K pageviews per month, after we changed the design on it it dropped to 400K, and we never could figure out why. The following are some problems I see:

- Good job on making it minimalistic, and appropriate darkening and lightning of certain areas.
- I notice a drop in WSO Live Viewing. Before freelancer acquired it was almost always 6K Viewers at any given time, now whenever I visit WF its in the 4K range only on the WSO section.
-STOP THE BANNERS: So the WF team has put banners on the WSO, War Room, and WAMA. Oh and by the way they look ridiculous on mobile.

-WSO - If you don't know they are already filthy popular. WSO is obviously the most popular form of launching IM products, and we all know this, no need to push it or highlight it. That is one section you do not need to worry about, it will keep growing without you even touching it. And by the way WSO banner is the worst out of the 3 banners put out there. Another problem with having a banner is diminishing other sections of that Warrior Special Offers forum such as Classifieds, Warriors For Hire, and Websites for Sale. If you feel like you must do something, simple highlight the entire section with a slight yellow.

-War Room Banner: Pushing this is a great way for Freelancer to support its WF operations because it can provide them with added income source, while also providing the full benefits of this great site to the users. But again WF community already knows this and we do not need it in our face for us to consider it. The previous owner pushed this sitewide with a small lower right banner on every page of the site. You can do this as well, and I am sure that is more effective then a big banner on main page.

- WAMA: Okay so this is the new thing, and I commend Freelancer team for trying to provide more quality information to the forum. But here's the thing, let it build naturally. Since the day Freelancer acquired this site, they have been pushing this, and look at its stats. They are horrible. A single successful WSO is 10x more popular then what WAMA forum has been able to accomplish. Screenshot by Lightshot Here's the thing, let it grow naturally. WF is a smart community, we will come where we find value.

We get it you've got the engineers, the designers, but Warrior Forum is already an established community, learn from it, sustain it, before you start making changes. And please remove the ridiculous banners, they are so 2002.

Oh and thank you for making everything a bit more speedy

Thank you for reading and considering!
-Rizzy