Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

I've recently been asked by a few people to do a repeat of an old thread detailing how dakka is doing and how other wargaming communities are doing. I agree that it has been quite a while (2.5 years) since that last post and dont mind doing an update.

In short, traffic-wise, dakka has been doing extremely well. Any month that there is a major 40k release we see a boost of about 15% or so across all major metrics, and with the current release schedule GW have taken on, the past year has seen great numbers. Saying that though, our strong community, good infrastructure, good tools and solid moderation has ensured that we have never seen a single month in which traffic has decreased year-on-year, with this past year being close to averaging 20% increases in readers year-on-year.

As before, all opinions that are not about Dakka are my personal conjecture and are to be taken as drunken rambling rather than anything factual. I do have limited (volunteered) access to data from other sites but have no permission to share it so stay quiet on those fronts.

First and foremost is the most significant of the graphs. This graph indicates the total average posts per day over a month for each site listed. I started collecting stats for Dakka when we launched the current version of the forum software to make sure I was not going to screw anything up, and monitored a number of other websites so that I could see the overall traffic trends for wargaming, and to ensure dakka could replicate anything that was especially successful elsewhere. Here is the graph:



Sawtooth patterns down to 0 then up above the average generally indicate the site being unavailable on the day I tested it rather than 0 posts that month. If a site hits 0 then comes back up around the same rate, it means it was down for a good chunk of that month or period or they removed posts from their database in that month, leading to a negative post rate overall for that month. Major events of note include Heresy Online getting hacked around Sep 2012, the general decline of the posting rate on warseer, and the impressive stability of posting rate at wargamer AU despite the GW trade embargo occurring over that period in Australia. As before, you can see the pattern of Tau Online being bought out in early 2010 and dying promptly under the new management, before coming back as second sphere (who use odd statistics so I cant really track much accurately there for the purpose of this graph).

The forum choices are a bit odd in my graphs and I've added a few more each year. The reason for the choices is varied and I'm too lazy to go into it for now, but basically it comes down to sites that were doing something interesting that I wanted to watch or were some of the first results in google for warhammer or 40k forums at the time. Not including other forums (even if they are large) is not a personal thing, just that I am only after a general overview of the community, not every single forum.

The next interesting graph is a computed average showing an average post rate across major forums over the same period: This covers wargaming in general rather than anything specific, and as you can see, the community as a whole is posting less than it was in 2011 (about 70% now from that peak), but still more than 2007. I have no real concerns about the health of the online community, baring in mind that social networks and other sites have matured and taken away a decent chunk of the posting population from most forums over the last few years (reddit, 4chan, facebook, minor twitter, blogs, etc). Our traffic graphs indicate the community continues to grow at a healthy pace and you'll see them later. Here is the average rate on forums:



I've been tracking registrations as well but that is such a loaded figure it counts for almost nothing. Here is the graph for average number of signups per day (with negative numbers zeroed):



You can see in the above that there is all sorts of funny business going on that makes it hard to compare directly. The first heresy online spike was caused by them making registration mandatory to view the forums after reading a few posts. The librarium online spikes are generally the same thing (they also have aggressive search engine optimisation which gives them big boosts until google changes the way it parses websites at which time they plummet down again). The second sphere spike was an anomaly. The recent BoLS spike was caused by downtime on their blog from an accidental takedown by google, forcing people to talk in the forums instead. I think the miniwargaming spike was because of their indigogo campaign but cannot recall the exact timing and am too lazy to look it up right now

To copy/paste the notes on the above from last time as well:
- Spam registrations vary a lot from site to site. Dakka can be as many as 5 per day sometimes! (Note, this is down to 1-2 per day at max now)
- Some sites require registration to be useable (librarium online) which obviously causes a massive increase relative to traffic/other sites.
- Some times will report the user total as registrations, others will only report it as users who verified their email address after registering, giving quite a wide gulf. For every 10 users who sign up with us, 1-2 will not verify their address for whatever reason and therefore are not valid users.

As such, the above graph is not useful for site to site comparisons, but is useful to see site specific trends. Dakka had a big spam problem in mid 2009, and while spam posts were not too bad, we had a lot of problems with spam registrations. As we cut down on it the registration rate dropped but more normal users were signing up so the community was actually growing faster.

Dakka is now the largest wargaming gallery by miles. Coolmini or not has roughly 192,250 images. Dakka has 479964 as of me typing this, and this increases at a rate of roughly 350 per day. Our images take up a crazy 652GB and we store all the thumbnails and tiles pre-generated as well so that bulks up the storage requirements by a quite a bit. Luckily storage is dirt cheap these days. As per last time, the absolute number of images is the only thing we can compare as coolmini and dakka could not be more different. They are a great site with a fantastic gallery and a much focused painting community than our more general community (not to say we dont have some great painters too), but most importantly they are doing their part for the community very well doing things like sponsoring crystal brush and helping lots of small companies succeed with great kickstarters. Our gallery is about getting as many wargaming images as possible so you can see something as a WIP, a completed model, on the tabletop, etc. whereas theirs is just showing the best things people have done so we both fill different niches and are complementary rather than competitive.

Now, with a confidential axis hidden, here is our traffic graph since well before Yak and I took over. This is the real measure of success and as you can see we are doing very well:



You'll note that pattern is quite different from what is reported by alexa, compete, etc. The above is the true pattern of our traffic and shows consistent growth, with last month being our best ever. The numbers are private, but they are big! The graph shows our unique visitor rate.

Some things have changed a lot recently too. As mobile devices have improved, more and more of you are browsing dakka while pooping, and as such we now serve to a mobile device 25.77% of the time. We primarily serve the English speaking world, with German, French and Dutch users being the next largest audience.

We set up a facebook feed here a little while ago and that continues to grow at a good pace and has been quite a decent builder of traffic. Likewise with our twitter feed. Please like/follow us on one or both if you dont already!

Finances continue to balance out expenses, but we make very little profit. This continues to be a hobby for yakface and myself, and as such while we could plaster the site in adverts and rake in a pretty penny, we are quite happy keeping things running as they are. Our DCMs pay for a decent chunk of our expenses, with our limited advertising making up the rest. We have a reasonable war chest in case of anything unplanned happening, but have still never taken a penny out of the site for personal usage to date - everything is there to be reinvested in the wargaming hobby in some form.

As for future plans - we are working on a hell of a lot of stuff at the moment! I'm dabbling with some alternate gallery interfaces and a good player finder and event finder right now, so they will probably be the next major features to see the light of day.

Finally, as always, thanks for enjoying dakka and making the large amount of time that myself, yakface and all the moderators spend on our hobby worthwhile. Without knowing that so many people are enjoying our labours, it would much harder to work through the memory leaks, maintenance and other boring tasks that fill our time!

Its almost scary that you know when Im pooping.

Thanks Lego, just as Interesting as it was last time. Keep up the good work!

Very nice! Thanks for the update.

Sent from my iPhone while pooping.

In my time in Dakka over a year or two now I have notice it growing hugely! i see more users sticking around and really coming into the community. Its nice to see real reports about it as well.

Also - how do you know I am browsing dakkadakka while pooping?

Way to go! Dakka really is bestriding the wargaming world. It looks like Dakka has more posts per month than all the others combined.

It's fairly shocking to see how far warseer have dropped. When I joined dakka, warseer was the biggest on the block by a country mile.

Remember, big brother Yakface watches you while you poop.

Thanks for the information, lego!


I also post when I'm pooping.

I should really get a smart phone or a tablet or something, though!

It's nice to see that the cult is healthy and that fascism is begin to grow. I am also happy that banening people has not had a negative affect on membership totals.

I'm going to poop now.

I specifically went to poop to post this. I shouldn't be proud of this, but I'm drunk too.

Anyway, thanks Lego, Yak, and all the mods for all you guys do for us!

Thanks for the info Lego!

On one hand I'm fairly shocked by these numbers, particularly in regards to Warseer, on the other hand though, I've been feeling it in the gut for a while, Warseer is very slow these days relative to what it used to be and how often I post there now. Warseer was once *the* place for new information about GW stuff, and I think the kicking in of their new policies may explain some of their decline as it seems to coincide when GW started to enact stricter and stricter release guidelines. Dakka seems to be where all the people who organize events and things of that nature post, which is far more relevant following GW's complete withdrawal from that sector now, which also likely explains at least part of Dakka's increased popularity.

Good stuff Lego. Nice to know how Dakka shapes up against other forums.

Our images take up a crazy 652GB

That's heaps. Is there a limit to the amount of pictures Dakka can hold?

I'd be curious to see you add in some Warmachine forums to these comparison graphs.

I love this site. Grats Dakka.

Keep up the good work guys. It's great to see how Dakka has survived and prospered since its beginnings.

Not bad for the cesspool of the wargaming community.

Thanks for your hard work guys!

 pretre wrote:
Very nice! Thanks for the update.

Sent from my iPhone while pooping.

They already knew that....

Good thing about DakkaDakka is that it is not just a "GW" forum but also other stuff!

 Rotgut wrote:
Its almost scary that you know when Im pooping.

Exalted.

So how long with this be a dakka meme?

-typed from my tablet while pooping.

The posts on Dakka are so much poop that I got pink eye

 Jehan-reznor wrote:
Good thing about DakkaDakka is that it is not just a "GW" forum but also other stuff!

Kind of why I'd be curious to see it compared to some other non-GW forums.

Thanks for the info, Lego: exalted! Really interesting to see, glad to see Dakka's still going strong.

- Sent from my poop while android'ing

Snrub wrote:Good stuff Lego. Nice to know how Dakka shapes up against other forums.

Our images take up a crazy 652GB

That's heaps. Is there a limit to the amount of pictures Dakka can hold?

There is no effective limit - when we get to 80% capacity or so, I'll get more HDDs put in, but that is a long way off as we have quite a beefy bit of kit for it. You dont need fast storage for it so you dont need to break the bank as once an image is viewed it is cached for a while and gets served from the cache instead. The offsite backup is the bigger headache due to storage and bandwidth requirements and if the server ever failed, it would likely take about a week to restore from backup due to hard drive and network speed limitations.

AduroT wrote:I'd be curious to see you add in some Warmachine forums to these comparison graphs.

I should really, but it would only track those games in particular and I can already get that data quite accurately from the popularity of our sub forums. I did try to track flames of war for a while but they hid their numbers after a couple of months so I didnt bother. Dakka is a pretty decent barometer of overall wargaming health, but sad to say 40k is still the elephant in the room by quite a large margin.

Also want to say thank you for all the work enabling this meeting place. This site has a vibe of professionalism (as in knowing what you do) and personal dedication alike which makes it outstanding, even compared to other areas than wargaming community.

But I didn't know pooping while posting is mandatory here. Sor-ree!

 legoburner wrote:
I should really, but it would only track those games in particular and I can already get that data quite accurately from the popularity of our sub forums. I did try to track flames of war for a while but they hid their numbers after a couple of months so I didnt bother. Dakka is a pretty decent barometer of overall wargaming health, but sad to say 40k is still the elephant in the room by quite a large margin.

If only I can get such accurate statistics for everything i do on the internet....and to be fair, theres a really good reason why 40k is the elephant wouldn't you say? I love it

Edit: Thanks for the data btw.

If possible, I'd be interested to see the traffic within the Dakka subforums?


What I love about Dakka: from all this information, we focus on Lego's off-hand poop joke.

 Just Dave wrote:
If possible, I'd be interested to see the traffic within the Dakka subforums?


What I love about Dakka: from all this information, we focus on Lego's off-hand poop joke.

I would be interested in seeing this as well actually

And we focus on the poop joke because we're all children at heart, and find poop jokes hilarious

Sub forum traffic won't be shown as it is quite a bit of work to build those numbers and I simply don't have the time in the near future, sorry!