Kaskus.us: The Biggest Indonesian Forum
Part 2 of 2.
This is Huuya.com's review and result of Kaskus.us website, the biggest Indonesian discussion forum website ranked as no 249 Alexa Traffic Rank and no 6 Alexa Country Traffic Rank.
The Kaskus.us website got the honor to be reviewed first by Huuya.com before Huuya.com continues to review and check other Indonesian websites. How did the website perform against the good web standards? Huuya.com gave it a score of 597. Here's why.
The Details
The Webmaster Online Tools
The WebPageTest, part of the AOL Developer Network checked and gave three A's, one C and two F's for the performance of Kaskus.us. We decided to let WebPagetest checked Kaskus.us from its site in Singapore as that is the closest place to Jakarta, Indonesia. It took a while for the WebPageTest to test the Kaskus.us website performance. Like the Yahoo! YSlow, the WebPageTest also takes the CDN as one factor affecting website performance. We converted the three A's, one C and two F's into Huuya.com's conversion score of 60.
The free Search Engine Optimization (SEO) analysis tool: The Reaction Engine checked Kaskus.us website and gave a result summary of Grade B- with Total Errors: 0, Total warnings: 5, and Total Passes: 6. Huuya.com used the keyword "kaskus" for The Reaction Engine to check the website.
Among the five total warnings detected, The Reaction Engine pointed at the big document size and 174 hmtl validation errors (!) Kaskus.us had. By checking the Kaskus.us one more time using Yahoo! YSlow, Huuya.com found out that Kaskus.us had to deliver over 400Kb of data (html, scripts, css, flash, and images) just to show its homepage. We converted the B+ into the score of 85 for Kaskus.us.
The Basic Website Review, a free website code optimization reviewer based in Australia, gave a score of 71 (rounded) after it checked Kaskus.us website.
The Basic Website Review, which has a similar mission as Huuya.com's, gave a warning about Kaskus.us' Header 1 as document title, the size of the html document, and many images Kaskus.us delivered to the end-users. The team of Huuya.com is wondering. Will Kaskus.us perform better the next time Huuya.com checks it using the Basic Website Review? We will see.
The Looks and Ease of Browsing
We let our students browsed around the Kaskus.us in certain forums (some forums had adult and illegal contents) to see what they like about its looks and its ease of use. First thing, as we had expected, our students complained about the advertisements in Kaskus.us homepage. Its color combination of orange, yellow, blue, and purple on top of brown background really don't match.
The Kaskus.us got an annoying sticky login button on the left of the screen to let its users to login using social network accounts. It has so many categories, written in tiny letters, for its users to choose from. Kaskus.us and its users use bad Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian) language, which makes us wonder, why do they have to speak/write like that? As its motto to respect the freedom of speech, anyone can be NOT WELCOMED (!) in its forums if they don't like the ways the existing users do, write and communicate. Hey, I have to respect that, so do my students. It's their domain anyway. but... what a way to make a better global Internet community.
Powered by vBulletin forum CMS, going around Kaskus.us may confuse its first time users, considering the so many categories Kaskus.us provides. Basically, Kaskus can do a lot better in these two criteria, as they have the resources and the people to do that. The score for the looks of Kaskus.us: 60. The score for its ease of browsing around the website: 75.
Note: Kaskus.us facilitates the downloading of illegal softwares to its users, such as PC Games. I don't think that may refer to its "freedom of speech" motto.
The Summary
The Overall Score
Accumulated from all review scores Kaskus.us got: the W3C's XHTML Validator (0 points), the W3C's CSS Validator (80 points), the WAVE Accessibility evaluation tool (0 points), the Google PageSpeed (85 points), the Yahoo! YSlow (81 points), the WebPageTest (60 points), the The Reaction Engine (85 points), the Basic Website Review (71 points), the Website Looks (60 points), and the Website Ease of Browsing (75 points), Kaskus.us got a final score of
597.
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