Howdy everyone,

In the next day or two, you'll see a fairly dramatic reorganization of the forums here on Dakka. No, this isn't an early April Fool's Day joke, its actually something we're doing, and I wanted to take a moment to explain why (and how).


WHAT'S THE POINT OF THE REORGANIZATION
The absolute worst thing for a forum-based site, in my opinion, is to have a bunch of forums that only generate a tiny trickle of activity per week (or even month), aka 'dead forums'. Not only can dead forums make a site feel like a bit of a ghost town (even if other forums on the site are red hot), but they also make it harder for users to navigate the site, as they constantly have to scroll past all these forums that really aren't being used.

Unfortunately, when it comes to new forums and activity, they most certainly do not follow the famous Field of Dreams mantra 'if you build it they will come.' We've seen time and time again that simply adding a new forum doesn't instantly spark discussion on that topic. Instead, creating a new forum is only really successful when there is already sufficient discussion happening on a topic and by making a new forum you're giving that existing discussion its own space to thrive.

A few years ago, we reorganized many forums on this site away from a more genre-based direction and instead focused them more on specific game manufacturers that were on the rise at the time. However, taking a close look at the traffic for many of these forums has indicated that in some cases, they simply do not warrant their own distinct forums here on Dakka (or least not having multiple forums for a single game/manufacturer). While some of these games/companies are wildly popular in 'the real world', they simply do not create all that much discussion here on Dakka, for a variety of reasons (usually because the manufacturer themselves hosts their own highly active discussion forums).

Therefore, the goals of our site forum reorganization are:

• To eliminate/consolidate the extraneous forums that do not generate a decent level of traffic, thereby helping to make sure that all remaining forums will feel more vibrant.
• To reduce the overall number of forums we have on the site.
• To make sure we create distinct discussion spaces for the topics that are currently being discussed by our community.


WHAT'S CHANGING EXACTLY
Before I tell you that, I want to say ahead of time that I know a lot of people will not be happy about some of these changes. You may feel that by us reducing or condsolidating forums for a game you happen to love that we are somehow downgrading its status. I want to assure you that this is absolutely not the case.

I want to reiterate again: Just because a game is wildly popular in general, does not necessarily mean it generates a ton of discussion here on Dakka, and the level of discussion a game generates here on Dakka is the only thing that matters towards whether or not a game should have a distinct forum (or even multiple forums) on this site. In all cases, we've done an incredibly detailed analysis of how much traffic each forum does, and we absolutely are not consolidating/eliminating any forum that doesn't warrant it.

And of course, down the road if discussion of a particular game/company picks back up and warrants us to create a new forum for that game/company, we will absolutely do so (as we have always done).

But enough jibber-jabber, here's a list of the major changes we're making:

• Age of Sigmar: Will be reduced down to 3 forums (with the lesser trafficked ones being consolidated together). Legacy WHFB/9th Age discussion will be split off into a new forum (see the next bullet point).

• More GW Games: We are creating a separate section for 'additional' GW games forums (Specialist Games, Hobbit/LotR, & Legacy WHFB/9th Age). For now, we're sticking with only the single specialist games forum, but if GW really does get serious about supporting their specialist range, we'll consider splitting this forum up into multiple forums as needed.

• More SciFi Games: We'll be making a new section specifically for Sci-Fi miniature game forums, that will currently have 3 forums (Infinity, Fantasy Flight's Star Wars games & a general Misc. Sci-Fi game forum). Note that Infinity will be consolidated down to a single forum, and Star Trek Attack Wing will go into the Misc. Sci-Fi game forum.

• Other Miniature Games: The 'Other' miniature games section will now contain: Warmachine & Hordes (consolidated down to a single forum), Kings of War, two separate Historical game forums (one for pre-WWI games and one for WW1+ games) and finally 'Misc. Other Miniature Games', which will be home to Malifaux, Frostgrave, Wild West Exodus, Dystopian Wars, etc. All other Mantic Games besides Kings of War will go to either the 'Misc. Sci-Fi Games' or 'Misc. Other Games' forums. Flames of War/Battlefront will naturally move into the WW1+ Historical forum.


WHAT'S THE GOOD NEWS
It may seem like that's just a big list of things that are going away/being consolidated, however there are a number of nice little benefits to this reorganization that I wanted to point out:

• Right now all the Age of Sigmar, Legacy WHFB/9th Age discussion is overlapping each other in the same forums, and I think that's helping to encourage the people who don't like AoS or legacy WHFB to post in each others' threads (thereby ruining them). With Legacy WHFB/9th Age discussion getting its own forum (and Kings of War getting a forum all to itself), hopefully whatever direction the Fantasy crowd wants to go, we'll have them covered nicely.

• While we are consolidating Battlefront/Flames of War into a forum along with other Historicals, we're also splitting up the HIstoricals into two parts. This will get all the WW2 discussion into one forum (so Bolt Action & Flames of War together), which will hopefully leave space for those who want to discuss ancients, etc.

• While several games are being consolidated back into a 'Misc.' type of forum, the fact that we'll now have a 'Misc. Sci-Fi' and a 'Misc. Other' forum should give plenty of breathing room for threads from each game to have their chance to be seen/read.


IN CONCLUSION
While I know these changes will not make some people happy, I hope you will give them a little time to settle in and maybe they'll start to grow on you.

And of course please know that we'll be keeping an eye on things, as always, and will make changes as necessary.

Thanks everyone! Oh and once the reorganization gets started, it will take the moderators a little bit of time in some cases to get the right threads moved into the right forums, so please be patient for a bit!

Having followed the discussion both in Nuts & Bolts and elsewhere, I'm looking forward to seeing these changes implemented, as they are more or less in line with what a great many wanted.

Yeah, if you have reasons behind these changes, then sure go for it! I'm sure it'll work out fine. I understand what you mean by the traffic to certain forums, so splitting some off should work out great.

Looking forward to it.

I fear change. I am frightened.

Last Chance to Post

Turn on notifications?

I hope there's a really big red button somewhere as I picture Lego thus:

So plausible, so scary.

Oh come on, now you are like GW with Tomb Kings/Bretons

Seriously, a good decision.

 BrookM wrote:

I'm only here to say I find this image to be strangely hypnotic.

I'm really excited for this! Thanks for the thorough explanation, yak

I welcome our new Dakka reorganization.

I'm going to miss the Mantic subforum, especially since 90% of people can't access their official company forum (ongoing unfixable super-cookie redirect issues), and we have quite a nice community going on there which is going to be broken up into "Kings of War", "random threads in Other Misc" and "random threads in Other Sci-fi",the subforum has gradually grown in activity and is a lot friendlier and less argumentative than the N&R threads about the company. It was really starting to pick up steam, and a lot of people playing one of Mantic's games are interested in their other games and play them, so there's a lot of crossover talk.

There's going to be KoW posts, and pretty much nothing about any other game.

I don't see how a single KoW-only forum is going to be better than a "KoW + other mantic stuff" forum. It's still one forum however you look at it, it's just that the latter option makes it easier to find things, and keeps the community there intact.

Most Mantic games discussion already goes to facebook as a result of there being no effective dedicated online forum space to discuss anything that the company does, I can't see this helping to reverse the trend. In fact I can see myself browsing less as a direct result.

If KoW is the only game getting attention in terms of mass post count, why not throw in the other Mantic stuff in with it as well and see how it goes? The current forum community there is working really well, it just needs to be allowed a little breathing space, rather than having everything that isn't strictly KoW forced into misc other.

I like the fluidity of discussion here and the loose categorization here, restricting it to "KoW only" for a forum would mean I can't post Dungeon Saga or other fantasy stuff from Mantic in the KoW forum, they have tons of games and it is great to see it all in one place. It isn't neat or pretty, but it works.

Hope the intentions of separating WFB/AoS are met...

Squig, that is a fair point and one we looked into really thoroughly. Right now, the vast majority of discussion in the Mantic subforum is focused on Kings of War.

Given that, I think you could have the same level of "miscellaneous Mantic games" discussion in one of the two new Misc sections (Sci-Fi and Other) as you do in the Mantic section right now. Some of the more "general" Mantic threads are covered by the News & Rumors topics in this section. This really was a tough call - but if the Mantic forum were left as-is, it would've been just a third "Miscellaneous Games" forum... only Mantic specific.

The hope is that having two Miscellaneous forums will let games like Gates of Antares and Deadzone get a little more limelight - and that the whole section will get more traffic with this reorganization

Whilst I approve of pretty much all of that; would a "Misc: Fantasy" make sense rather than "Misc: Other" which can only really contain fantasy?

Huh. My two major game systems (Infinity and FFG Star Wars) in one section. How... nice? Will Maelstrom's Edge go in the Sci-Fi Miniatures game section? Or continue to be its own loner forum?

 bocatt wrote:
Huh. My two major game systems (Infinity and FFG Star Wars) in one section. How... nice? Will Maelstrom's Edge go in the Sci-Fi Miniatures game section? Or continue to be its own loner forum?

Infinity and FFG Star Wars will have their own separate forums, they'll just be listed under the same section header.

Maelstrom's Edge on the other hand, will be staying put.

Herzlos wrote:
Whilst I approve of pretty much all of that; would a "Misc: Fantasy" make sense rather than "Misc: Other" which can only really contain fantasy?

It basically is fantasy, but also encompasses things like Wild West Exodus, Arena Rex, etc which kind of fall in between categories.

As Ketara said, Infinity and FFG Star Wars are definitely each keeping their own sections!

Herzlos wrote:
Whilst I approve of pretty much all of that; would a "Misc: Fantasy" make sense rather than "Misc: Other" which can only really contain fantasy?

That was debated, however with WHFB legacy/9th Age, Age of Sigmar, Kings of War, Hobbit/LoTR, Warmahordes all having their own forums, there really isn't another Fantasy game out there that generates discussion traffic here on Dakka to warrant a Misc. Fantasy forum on its own.

<delete>

I don't suppose there's a chance that someone will finally do the sane thing and split up the Painting forums by specific periods like Warseer has done, i.e. Imperium, Xenos, Fantasy, Historical.

Makes sense to me.
If a certain section has low traffic make a few merges and changes to boost it.

Dakka is run by a solid team and never seen anything that has caused issues in the past, so don't see it doing so now.

All these changes look great, though I agree with Squig about having all things Mantic in one place.

Often times, for some of the non-40k games, it just felt like once you had subfora for rules, lists, background discussion, etc. you just ended up with having nothing to really put in the general discussion.

This is unconscionable!
I have chained myself to the Infinity Rules Questions forum in protest.
The fact that I had to open a new tab while writing this to check the name of that sub forum in no way undermines its incredible importance.

Will Kingdom Death: Monster discussion still be in Misc. Miniatures, or will it be part of Boardgames?

Any chance of being able to collapse whole sections to a single line using a collapse arrow/icon? I don't read Warhammer Fantasy, Warmachine/Hordes and Infinity so it would be nice to collapse these sections so as to not have to scroll through them to get to Other Games.

Tim

That was a surprisingly quick turn around after getting notification of this. It'll take a little bit of getting used to but I like it.

Sinful Hero wrote:Will Kingdom Death: Monster discussion still be in Misc. Miniatures, or will it be part of Boardgames?

Still misc miniatures as it involves good plastic miniature models.

timd wrote:Any chance of being able to collapse whole sections to a single line using a collapse arrow/icon? I don't read Warhammer Fantasy, Warmachine/Hordes and Infinity so it would be nice to collapse these sections so as to not have to scroll through them to get to Other Games.

Tim

Well 2 of the three of those are no longer an issue!

I'm pretty happy with this, it seems like a good move and the reorganization of WHF/AoS particularly so.

I'm sad to see the Warmachine/Hordes area consolidated, but that probably has more to do with the excellent forum Privateer Press manages then anything else. Also, all the haters of WM/H post over at 4Chan and a few other places. Who knew that some people hated WM/H so much?

Separating WFB and AoS was probably a good thing. Still lots of anger and hate floating out there...

I did notice one weird thing to me: Why does Gangfight Games get its own Forum? Is it due to the traffic for it's one and only game that no one has really heard of (I saw it in 2015 at Templecon I think? And they had like next to nothing to sell, a small demo, and no OP for it?). I haven't seen this game advertised much, though I know one of the guys working on it (and we only discussed it in passing one time...). Anyways, just seemed odd to me.

I really dislike lumping all the other sci-fi games into one forum. Will just make it hard to follow the games I like when it's clustered in with all the rest. No, I really don't have a suggestion to fix that besides making a bunch more sub-forums. All I know is that I'm going to be irked when I'm trying to have a conversation about STAW and random X person is going to post "Is this game still a thing? I thought it died out a long time ago..." or "You should play a better flight path system game- X-Wing!". Having it's own separate forum kept the riffraff out, if you know what I mean. Now, people will feel more inclined to read a thread about a game they may or may not like when it's in the same forum as a game they follow. Could be a good thing, could be a bad thing. /shrug

Glad there are active moderators who monitor the traffic of the site and not afraid to review/reorganize things every once in a while.

I think, on the more cosmopolitan sub fora, perhaps a keen encouragement to adopt a [NAMEOFGAME] preface to thread titles will help people scanning for specific games?

 legoburner wrote:

timd wrote:Any chance of being able to collapse whole sections to a single line using a collapse arrow/icon? I don't read Warhammer Fantasy, Warmachine/Hordes and Infinity so it would be nice to collapse these sections so as to not have to scroll through them to get to Other Games.

Tim

Well 2 of the three of those are no longer an issue!

True, but collapse arrows would still be nice for the big ones: Painting, 40K and AoS.

Tim

@Squig I don't keep up on FB what are the best pages/groups?

Seems like mantic fans on this site(those of us left) are being scattered.

If KOW can do well enough here for its own subforum then maybe give DZI and WP a chance to be released before breaking up the mantic community? As a mantic fan I'd rather mantic games were segmented from other games just in general. The way it stands now mantic games will be using three tags in just sci-fi misc. Seems really messy and short-sighted to me.

Looks good so far, more structured and, in general, it is a nice reaching out to users and their interests.

Would it be possible to add a "Collapse" function to the forums? So that you could "hide" all forums you don't want to see? It would further reinforce the structured look and helps focussing on what you really want to read.

Keep up the good work, Lego! :*

I'm pretty happy with the reorganisation, and I appreciate all the work you guys do.

Dakka is the best moderated and administrated site I have ever been on.

Need to renew the old DCM one of these days.

 Tamwulf wrote:
I did notice one weird thing to me: Why does Gangfight Games get its own Forum? Is it due to the traffic for it's one and only game that no one has really heard of (I saw it in 2015 at Templecon I think? And they had like next to nothing to sell, a small demo, and no OP for it?). I haven't seen this game advertised much, though I know one of the guys working on it (and we only discussed it in passing one time...). Anyways, just seemed odd to me.

Dakka has a deal with Gangfight Games to host their official forums.

Will any of the 40k boards be getting condensed/merged as part of this?

Yay for reorganization!

 yakface wrote:

they most certainly do not follow the famous Field of Dreams mantra 'if you build it they will come.' We've seen time and time again that simply adding a new forum doesn't instantly spark discussion on that topic.

Yes but taking away a forum and shoving it in a random hole is a good way to kill any activity the site may have. Seriously the STAW forum was not hurting anyone. When we were kicked out of the X-wing thread and shoved in mis games we almost lost all of our contributors. Condensing multiple forums for one game into a few is one thing, but eliminating a forum all together is just wrong. Mis games is where games go to die.

 RiTides wrote:
I'm really excited for this! Thanks for the thorough explanation, yak

Tough to be excited when your forum is nuked and sent to a hole never to be seen again.

Das_Ubermike wrote:
I don't suppose there's a chance that someone will finally do the sane thing and split up the Painting forums by specific periods like Warseer has done, i.e. Imperium, Xenos, Fantasy, Historical.

Nope, not happening, at least for now.

It may have worked for Warseer, (I don't know, I stopped visiting over there years ago) but splitting P&M has to be done judiciously as it can very, very easily just fragment everything, leaving less popular genres with little to no attention. Having everything lumped in together increases the chances of casual browsers checking different stuff out, rather than just sticking to their one favourite or comfortable genre.


Having said that, the P&M Blogs section does move very quickly and can be hard to keep up with, so this may be something that we'll want to look into down the track.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Mr. S Baldrick wrote:
Yes but taking away a forum and shoving it in a random hole is a good way to kill any activity the site may have. Seriously the STAW forum was not hurting anyone. When we were kicked out of the X-wing thread and shoved in mis games we almost lost all of our contributors. Condensing multiple forums for one game into a few is one thing, but eliminating a forum all together is just wrong. Mis games is where games go to die. .

Ultimately, having multiple sub-forums sitting in the directory with little to no traffic is not desirable, and it doesn't really encourage newcomers to post... they look at the front page, notice that there's been one post in the last three weeks, and move on.

Consolidating with other games is the next best thing... the alternative is to just nuke it altogether. If a particular game in the Misc section gets enough discussion that it starts to look like it could support its own section again, then that can be revisited... So, ultimately, it's up to you. If you want a game to have its own section, you need to help keep the discussion on that game active.

 insaniak wrote:

Having said that, the P&M Blogs section does move very quickly and can be hard to keep up with, so this may be something that we'll want to look into down the track.

As someone who took an extended break and is just now trying to catch up on all the P&M blogs he subscribed to over the years, as well as find new ones relevant to my games of choice, this would be excellent.

Looking forward to seeing how the current changes pan out.

The Age of Sigmar forum descriptions all still say they include legacy WFB chat btw.

 insaniak wrote:

Ultimately, having multiple sub-forums sitting in the directory with little to no traffic is not desirable, and it doesn't really encourage newcomers to post... they look at the front page, notice that there's been one post in the last three weeks, and move on.

Ah no, everyone posting it the STAW forum these days except for me and Meangreenstompa came after we crawled out of mis. games the last time.

 insaniak wrote:

So, ultimately, it's up to you. If you want a game to have its own section, you need to help keep the discussion on that game active.

That is a cop out, toe the line answer. We did that once already and now you guys are throwing us back into the hole. Mis games is where threads go to die. 5 mins after you post a thread is is shot half way down the page for 20 "hey anyone still play X game" thread.

Sure we didn't have a X-Wing level traffic but we had regular contributors, we kept things peaceful and people knew where to go to find us. What's the point of generating more traffic if you guys will just take away the forum again the next time?

Das_Ubermike wrote:
I don't suppose there's a chance that someone will finally do the sane thing and split up the Painting forums by specific periods like Warseer has done, i.e. Imperium, Xenos, Fantasy, Historical.

I second this.

It's just a big mess ATM and impossible to search for anything. If there at least were tags, it could work to have every kind of painting log mixed together. But there aren't.

 ImAGeek wrote:
The Age of Sigmar forum descriptions all still say they include legacy WFB chat btw.

We are still working on that!

 Mr. S Baldrick wrote:

 insaniak wrote:
So, ultimately, it's up to you. If you want a game to have its own section, you need to help keep the discussion on that game active.

That is a cop out, toe the line answer. We did that once already and now you guys are throwing us back into the hole.

Just going to post the contents of a PM I just wrote to another STAW fan since we're having the discussion ITT:

Manchu wrote:First, I understand your disappointment. Nobody wants to have their favorite section reabsorbed into another board. But separating Attack Wing content into its own forum was an experiment from the beginning, not a promise that Dakka Dakka would always have a separate board for this game. Furthermore, the board was not originally intended to be only about Star trek but also about D&D Attack Wing and Heroclix. No discussion ever developed around those other two games. And discussion of Star Trek Attack Wing has slowed to a tiny trickle over the last year. We counted less than seven active threads per fortnight. The results of the experiment are pretty clear: the separate board did not attract enough new users to significantly boost discussion of any of the WizKids games over time. Therefore, we decided to fold those discussions back into Misc Miniatures.

The corollary is of course that everyone would like to have a separate board for their favorite game, regardless of volume of discussion. Most games don't even get the chance to see if it will work.

Volume of discussion was not our only consideration. Regarding Gangfight Games, for example, Dakka Dakka has been hosting the official Gangfight Games Forum; so this site is the primary one for discussion Gangfight Games. This is obviously not true of, for example, Attack Wing.

 Manchu wrote:

The results of the experiment are pretty clear: the separate board did not attract enough new users to significantly boost discussion of any of the WizKids games over time. Therefore, we decided to fold those discussions back into Misc Miniatures. The corollary is of course that everyone would like to have a separate board for their favorite game, regardless of volume of discussion. Most games don't even get the chance to see if it will work.

Volume of discussion was not our only consideration. Regarding Gangfight Games, for example, Dakka Dakka has been hosting the official Gangfight Games Forum; so this site is the primary one for discussion Gangfight Games. This is obviously not true of, for example, Attack Wing.

So right there you are just saying that because it the amount of traffic bothered you guys, we lose out subforum. It didn't hurt anyone, but will hurt the discussion and annoy the actual users is threads being derailed by non players or lost into oblivion.

You guys have a very arbitrary way of deciding these things. Before you guys said it wasn't about the number of posts or threads but quality, no you guys are on quantity, so which is it. Or does it just boil down to the fact that no MODS of Admins are into STAW so you guys don't care.

In regards to Gangfight, that just shows that if a MOD/Admin has an interest in it, it will get past the arbitrary magic post count to have a subforum.

Mr. S Baldrick, I also was asked about this by another user and wanted to copy my message here:

I was actually the one who compiled the use data of our various subforums, and unfortunately, the STAW forum was simply not active enough to keep, and it has had some time to become established.

It's not just STAW - Infinity got consolidated to a single forum, Warmachine as well, and those are Big games. We have found that more traffic and discussion is great for the health of the forum and of any particular game system, too. Why not just start tagging your threads [STAW] and discuss them in the Misc SciFi forum? We specifically split this forum off so something like STAW could have a home there, rather than having just a single Misc forum.

I know this probably isn't what you wanted to hear... but there really wasn't an argument to be made for keeping STAW based on usage. I think it is awesome that you guys talk about it here, and hope you'll be able to continue in tagged threads in the Misc SciFi forum.

If you want to talk about it further just reply here - although note I'm about to drive to AdeptiCon so might be delayed replying!

I really think you could keep discussion of STAW going - just tag the threads, and you've got the Misc SciFi Forum (which, as noted above, STAW was originally intended to share a forum with a few other games, anyway - they just never materialized!).

I hope you'll stick it out - this certainly wasn't targetted. A number of mods play Warmachine as their main game (myself, malfred, AgeOfEgos, Waaagh_Gonads) but it was never in question that we could consolidate Warmachine down to a single forum. The same goes for Infinity. Both of these games will, hopefully, continue to be discussed thoroughly on Dakka - they just didn't need so many separate forums for that discussion to happen! For STAW, discussion just has to take place in the Misc SciFi Forum.

Other Mod favorites that got consolidated - Malifaux into Misc Other Games, and Battlefront into WW1 - Present Historicals. More folks posting will be better for all these games, it's never good for a game to have an empty / "dead" subforum, even if it's got its name on top of it. Let's give it a chance and see how it goes!

No, the deciding factor for Gangfight was not mod/admin interest but rather the fact that Dakka Dakka hosts the official forum. To my knowledge, WizKids never approached Dakka Dakka to host the official forum for any product line.

As to Attack Wing, it's true (as far as I know) that no mod or admin currently plays it or argued to keep it separate. I don't think there is any proof that the former caused the latter. Even now, the only argument for keeping it separate seems to be because it has been separate in the past, which is necessarily a bad argument considering it was separated out precisely to see whether doing so would help drive discussion ... and it didn't.

Let me give you a counterexample: One of my favorite games is Bolt Action by Warlord Games but as you can see there is no separate forum for it, nor has there every been one. Or from the other direction, there used to be a separate Flames of War forum and one of the site's owners has been pretty big into that game -- and yet that forum has now been folded into another one.

Definitely think these are some changes for the better. Realise it's a hard choice for a lot of it, and the distinctions are not always clear.

Only change I would make is putting Infinity/Star Wars + others section above the GW legacy games. You've got to go with the times and fashions, man!

 Mr. S Baldrick wrote:

 Manchu wrote:

The results of the experiment are pretty clear: the separate board did not attract enough new users to significantly boost discussion of any of the WizKids games over time. Therefore, we decided to fold those discussions back into Misc Miniatures.

The corollary is of course that everyone would like to have a separate board for their favorite game, regardless of volume of discussion. Most games don't even get the chance to see if it will work.

Volume of discussion was not our only consideration. Regarding Gangfight Games, for example, Dakka Dakka has been hosting the official Gangfight Games Forum; so this site is the primary one for discussion Gangfight Games. This is obviously not true of, for example, Attack Wing.

So right there you are just saying that because it the amount of traffic bothered you guys, we lose out subforum. It didn't hurt anyone, but will hurt the discussion and annoy the actual users is threads being derailed by non players or lost into oblivion.

You guys have a very arbitrary way of deciding these things. Before you guys said it wasn't about the number of posts or threads but quality, no you guys are on quantity, so which is it. Or does it just boil down to the fact that no MODS of Admins are into STAW so you guys don't care.

In regards to Gangfight, that just shows that if a MOD/Admin has an interest in it, it will get past the arbitrary magic post count to have a subforum.

 Pacific wrote:
Only change I would make is putting Infinity/Star Wars + others section above the GW legacy games. You've got to go with the times and fashions, man!

Well that would certainly have been my (personal) preference but from a site layout point of view, having the GW ones right after AoS (which is going down to 3 subforums, just in the process of being done!) makes the most sense.

But yeah, I really love talking about non-GW games and I'm hoping this will give those sections of the site a spark! In analyzing forum activity (since someone asked earlier) the 40K sections are simply red-hot. The general sections and painting & modeling are, too! Some of the other game subforums were alright, but many were struggling - and I think part of that was just being split into so many different sections. Warmachine is a great example - PP has their own forum for asking, and getting very fast official answers to, rules questions. So, that wasn't a forum that could sustain any traffic here, and just having the single Warmachine forum will hopefully get even more folks talking about the game on Dakka since discussion won't be so divided up.

 insaniak wrote:

Das_Ubermike wrote:
I don't suppose there's a chance that someone will finally do the sane thing and split up the Painting forums by specific periods like Warseer has done, i.e. Imperium, Xenos, Fantasy, Historical.

Nope, not happening, at least for now.

It may have worked for Warseer, (I don't know, I stopped visiting over there years ago) but splitting P&M has to be done judiciously as it can very, very easily just fragment everything, leaving less popular genres with little to no attention. Having everything lumped in together increases the chances of casual browsers checking different stuff out, rather than just sticking to their one favourite or comfortable genre.

Having said that, the P&M Blogs section does move very quickly and can be hard to keep up with, so this may be something that we'll want to look into down the track.

I would add that there are painters and modellers (including yours truly) who post photos of minis, and projects, from a variety of genres. I'd rather they be able to post all their work in one thread. What may work for Warseer's monoculture may not work here. I know that I will not bother to maintain separate threads for projects of differing genres which I undertake, or for each genre of minis I paint. Perhaps a separate P&M forum-- a 'Safe Spot', if you will-- for those who only want to see things from the H-H-H-Hobby? Or make the rest of us tag our threads with trigger warnings?

P&M blogs do move quickly. (One can drop off the top of the front page is less than 12 hours.) Something like a 'view recent threads' section for it? Also, a way to see how many have subscribed to a given thread would be nice.

Any chance the Off Topic board can be flipped with the Board Games, Roleplaying Games & Card Games on the list of forums?

Currently Off Topic is nestled between Game Design and Board Games, Roleplaying Games & Card Games, but since Off Topic has nothing to do with gaming surely it belongs next to Nuts & Bolts more than Game Design?

In case I am not being clear when I look at the More Dakka section of forums the order is:
Dakka Polls
Dakka Fiction
Forum Games
Video Games
Game Design
Off Topic
Board Games, Roleplaying Games & Card Games
Nuts & Bolts

Yes indeed, good spot!

I notice that "Gangfight Games” is the only topic under the “Official Games Forums” header. Would it make sense to put MEdge there as well?

I’d also like the ability to claps categories if possible, there are a number of sections I don’t visit.

Will there be an echo chamber sub forum?

 RiTides wrote:

 Pacific wrote:
Only change I would make is putting Infinity/Star Wars + others section above the GW legacy games. You've got to go with the times and fashions, man!

Well that would certainly have been my (personal) preference but from a site layout point of view, having the GW ones right after AoS (which is going down to 3 subforums, just in the process of being done!) makes the most sense.

There's no reason for GW to be right at the top. It might boost discussion for other games if the Misc stuff was further up.

 Manchu wrote:
No, the deciding factor for Gangfight was not mod/admin interest but rather the fact that Dakka Dakka hosts the official forum. To my knowledge, WizKids never approached Dakka Dakka to host the official forum for any product line.

Someone must have an interest in it otherwise you guys would throw down the arbitrary gauntlet of “thread activity” on it. Why does it make a difference if the company asks for the forum? Are they paying for the space?

 Manchu wrote:

Let me give you a counterexample: One of my favorite games is Bolt Action by Warlord Games but as you can see there is no separate forum for it, nor has there every been one. Or from the other direction, there used to be a separate Flames of War forum and one of the site's owners has been pretty big into that game -- and yet that forum has now been folded into another one.

That is a terrible counter point. There is no reason to take away any games active subform just because you guys don’t like the level of activity. Yeah sure if something sits for over a year with nothing going on that is one thing, If you guys gave a game a subforum there is no reason to take it away as long as people are being polite an using it.

 RiTides wrote:
It's not just STAW - Infinity got consolidated to a single forum, Warmachine as well, and those are Big games.

STAW is bigger than you think. Still selling in the top 5 above Infinity and AoS

(http://icv2.com/articles/markets/view/33912/top-5-non-collectible-miniature-games-fall-2015)

 RiTides wrote:

I know this probably isn't what you wanted to hear... but there really wasn't an argument to be made for keeping STAW based on usage. I think it is awesome that you guys talk about it here, and hope you'll be able to continue in tagged threads in the Misc SciFi forum.

There is an argument to be made. The separate subforum didn’t hurt anyone, it didn’t bog down the site and there was regular activity. This decision to eliminate useful forums equates to nothing more than moving the furniture around for nothing more than the sake of it.

 RiTides wrote:

I really think you could keep discussion of STAW going - just tag the threads, and you've got the Misc SciFi Forum

It’s going to be rather difficult as threads get lost amongst people drudging up 20 year old games and people that think just because they can sculpt they should make a kickstarter.

 RiTides wrote:

it was never in question that we could consolidate Warmachine down to a single forum.

Consolidate is one thing, but out right elimination is completely different. Did you guys ever consider taking to the users before you come up with these ideas?


What is the point in putting the work into trying to build up a forum just to have it all thrown up in the air when you guys don't like the number of links on the page. We did that once and you guys pull this BS on us. Small games ebb and flow with activity. It’s not like 40K. All I have to say is Mantic and WH 9th fans, watch you backs, you may log in one day and find yourselves shunted down to misc games because the MODS think there are too many links.

As it is the bulk of the STAW treads are in mis games and the most recent are in mis Scifi games. So now we have to check two different subforums. Now we have to try and build it up again amongs all the dakka fodder and "please help my kickstarter" threads. Even if we do get traffic going again, we will be right back here next year when you guys decide that "mis. games and mis Scifi games don't have enough activity... lets consolidate them" .

I've only just realised you meant Star Trek Attack Wing :(

Mr. S Baldrick, regarding the STAW threads being split into both Misc categories, that's just a temporary error from the moving process - if it's not resolved before then, I'll personally be fixing that when back from AdeptiCon.

Thanks for the heads up

 insaniak wrote:

Das_Ubermike wrote:
I don't suppose there's a chance that someone will finally do the sane thing and split up the Painting forums by specific periods like Warseer has done, i.e. Imperium, Xenos, Fantasy, Historical.

Nope, not happening, at least for now.

It may have worked for Warseer, (I don't know, I stopped visiting over there years ago) but splitting P&M has to be done judiciously as it can very, very easily just fragment everything, leaving less popular genres with little to no attention. Having everything lumped in together increases the chances of casual browsers checking different stuff out, rather than just sticking to their one favourite or comfortable genre.

Very true, however...

Having said that, the P&M Blogs section does move very quickly and can be hard to keep up with, so this may be something that we'll want to look into down the track.

This point means that casual browsing is the only kind that really works. You can run through the first couple of pages for stuff that catches your eye, but if you're looking for inspiration for specific games or even, heaven forfend, specific factions from specific games, you better have a good few hours to kill.

You could try maybe setting things up so the link you click on the main page would still be P&M, then once you click-through there would be a small selection of subforums at the top followed by an amalgamated listing of the topics from all those subforums(which would amount to P&M as it is now, for folk who just want to browse the newest topics whatever their subject matter).

The changes already done seem fine, although I take it they're still ongoing. Unless we're expected to believe that 6K+ of the 8K+ threads in the old WHFB forum are about AoS?

 Azreal13 wrote:
I think, on the more cosmopolitan sub fora, perhaps a keen encouragement to adopt a [NAMEOFGAME] preface to thread titles will help people scanning for specific games?

That should really be an inbuilt function, a separate field to write the game name just like there are fields for points etc in the Army List forums.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
P&M could easily please everyone with a tag function combined with a filter.

Progress is good!

How many interweb pixelations does the "Forum Games" section use up?

All of us reading this should try to engage in some sort of tagging for our posts in Misc Games.

I realise that traffic on the historical gaming sub-forum wasn't heavy, and it was a pretty eclectic mix of different games across different eras. But I question the wisdom of combing Bolt Action with FoW. FoW is big enough to deserve it's own sub-forum. By the same token, it tends to swamp any other WW2 game, and some players have a distinct preference for one game over the other. I also don't particularly want any more of PSC's 'infomercials', which are essentially aimed at the 15mm market (I like PSC's models, but the posts are just advertising).

Just my views, and not necessarily supported, but I'm now considerably less interested in posting in the new sub-forum.

 Tailgunner wrote:
I realise that traffic on the historical gaming sub-forum wasn't heavy, and it was a pretty eclectic mix of different games across different eras. But I question the wisdom of combing Bolt Action with FoW. FoW is big enough to deserve it's own sub-forum. By the same token, it tends to swamp any other WW2 game, and some players have a distinct preference for one game over the other. I also don't particularly want any more of PSC's 'infomercials', which are essentially aimed at the 15mm market (I like PSC's models, but the posts are just advertising).

Just my views, and not necessarily supported, but I'm now considerably less interested in posting in the new sub-forum.

Obviously you don't frequent the historical boards then. The Flames of War forum has been pretty dead as of late. I would venture to say that there's been more Bolt Action traffic than Flames of War for some time now.

As for Plastic Soldier Company, they're not exclusively 15mm. They also have 1/72nd (20mm) kits as well as their own 'Battlegroup' game.

with regards to tagging and filtering in P&M, etc. I intend to add tagging to all busy forums with the 'misc' type forums and the P&M forums getting priority. This will work using automated tagging based on keywords in the first post and subject. Tagging your threads with [gamename] in misc will ensure that the filters are visible and active. The P&M area is trickier due to lots of mixed content threads and finding a clean, efficient way to do that automated and programatically is what is causing the major delay on that front, but it can be done and I'm just deciding on the best option as I really want to be able to link to Medge models and blogs from a single remote point

I know my P&M Blog is all over the place. While mostly Ultramarines and Eldar, occasionally other things show up. Often in the same post. I also re-name the first post frequently, not sure how tagging would be affected there.

I know some people maintain multiple blogs, but don’t think I generate enough content for that. It’s all just one cluttered mess of a thread.

And I’m not the worst offender for wandering blogs out there.

 Mr. S Baldrick wrote:


That is a terrible counter point. There is no reason to take away any games active subform just because you guys don’t like the level of activity. Yeah sure if something sits for over a year with nothing going on that is one thing, If you guys gave a game a subforum there is no reason to take it away as long as people are being polite an using it.....

There is an argument to be made. The separate subforum didn’t hurt anyone, it didn’t bog down the site and there was regular activity....

I think you've missed a key point here, that point being that a main point of the reorg was to streamline the site for an enhanced user experience. When a game is generating sufficient discussion and interest levels, it gets more space, when it's not, it gets downsized. Why? Because if interest in one game gets too big, it can drown out all other discussion from games which share with it. It also allows for a 'cleaner' browsing experience for those interested in that specific game.

If it's not big enough though? Then you have a forum sitting there which every single user has to scroll past to get to other ones which interest them. You're adding seconds on to the browsing experience of every single Dakka user who has to go past it to get to something lower down the page. When it's something like 'Infinity:-Rules Queries' where there's been two new threads with a combined five posts per month for the last year, it's clearly not worth it. We have a lot of forums already on here, and the more there are, the more inconvenient browsing Dakka gets.

So, one of the primary motivations behind the reorg was to make a more streamlined, efficient browsing process. More forums have been removed than added. A lot of half dead ones have been consolidated (I'm looking at you, Warmachine and Infinity), the most popular newer games (X-Wing and Kings of War) got their own forums. STAW doesn't generate enough discussion on it's own to warrant a separate forum though, even with one or two other low interest games combined. It hasn't been completely folded back into Misc. Games though, as that's been expanded into two forums (with one focusing on sci-fi).

Saying that, 'It weren't hurting nobody guv!' is actually inaccurate. If we used that reasoning, everyone from Gate of Antares down to Ral Partha would have their own forum, and the frontpage would take five minutes to scroll through. Ultimately, the only way Dakka can prioritise these things is by the level of general interest and activity, and STAW? It doesn't have enough. I know that sucks if you like it, because now your virtual penthouse has more games knocking around in it (making it somewhat more difficult for you to find what you want). But ultimately, it's better to cause a minor inconvenience to the smallest handful of users, than it is to cause an infinitesimal inconvenience to every user. Because using the logic you provide, we'll end up having to make the same exception for so many games (for consistency), that that infinitesimal inconvenience to every user will turn into a minor or a major one.

This is merely one factor that needs to be taken into account. When you include the rest, it quickly becomes apparent that STAW (even combined with one or two other negligible games) doesn't deserve it's own forum, but X-Wing does.

I think I would have also combined sci-fi other games, and "other games" into one catch-all.

Sadly a lot of our industry's best games still only have enough fans at the moment to justify one thread.

 Ketara wrote:

I think you've missed a key point here, that point being that a main point of the reorg was to streamline the site for an enhanced user experience. When a game is generating sufficient discussion and interest levels, it gets more space, when it's not, it gets downsized ...Then you have a forum sitting there which every single user has to scroll past to get to other ones which interest them.

That is the most ridiculous, uneducated, asinine thing I have heard today, and let me tell you I have heard some whoopers today. You have just made the perfect argument for why this reorganization is stupid. If anything you have now made the user experience worse for a whole lot more people. Before the folks could scroll right to the section they want. Now it takes more time to go into these jumble forums sift through crap you have no interest in maybe find one thread you are looking for, scroll threw half a page of Kickstarters that will never take off and you might find another thread. How is that enhancing user experience?

 Ketara wrote:

You're adding seconds on to the browsing experience of every single Dakka user who has to go past it to get to something lower down the page.

That is absolutely not true. STAW and most of the other games that were folded in were way down at the bottom of the page anyway. NOBODY was loosing nano seconds of nerd time scrolling through them. If folks were in that section it is because they were headed that way. The vast majority of users hit the 40K section and stay there. This is an absolute falsehood and if you cling to this form of logic you are delusional. Folding multiple forums together that have nothing to do with each other is not enhancing anyone's browsing experience. If something has been dead for 8 months to a year yeah sure your argument makes sense, but that is not the case for most of the game you are talking about.

Yes separating AoS and WH 9th was obvious to everyone, before you guys put them together, that is a powder keg of emotion there. but the rest of this reorganization is based on nothing more that a small few's personal view on aesthetic not on any basis of fact or science.

@Mr. S Baldrick -

I think your post demonstrates that we have come to the end of any useful exchange. The remainder of this post is therefore for the benefit of other posters following the conversation.

There is simply no compelling argument in favor of maintaining a separate board for Star Trek Attack Wing, a game that a handful of posters infrequently discuss. Furthermore, there is no reason to believe that shifting the discussion to the Misc Sci Fi board will meaningfully affect the volume of discussion about this game; it will doubtless remain extremely limited (otherwise, it would certainly be a candidate to have a separate board again). The case of the former WizKids board clearly demonstrates that creating a separate board does not by itself drive discussion. Reorganizing the forum is not being undertaken for its own sake; the goal is to make the forum more useful to the widest possible audience. Maintaining a separate board for each poster's favorite game is not part of the plan. Star Trek Attack Wing had a chance that the overwhelming majority of other miniatures games do not get - and it did not work out.

First of all, I would advise you to take a short break and calm down a bit. You sound very angry and seem to be extremely emotionally involved into this, making your posts very biased and starting to sound offensive.

Secondly, the reasons for the splt were given. STAW just isn't a popular game - both in regards to the forums and real life. We know that you are a huge fan of it and love it to the death, but its player base simply isn't very high and thus it isn't justified to give it an own section. Yes, people in the forum were nice and helpful, but it's about quantity, not quality.

Thirdly, splitting AoS and 9th isn't a purely emotional reaction. AoS is the official GW system and 9th is the continuation of WHFB...you could argue that it's not necessary as KoW took large parts of the WHFB playership, but on the other hand, it's a ruleset developed by actual competitive players and some parts of the scene use 9th on tournaments. This, however, doesn't affect the STAW decision. STAW is a small system with little impact, thus doesn't deserve an own forum. It's annoying for you and you might even consider it a personal offense, but from a more objective point of view, it was a logical decision.

 Mr. S Baldrick wrote:

 Ketara wrote:

I think you've missed a key point here, that point being that a main point of the reorg was to streamline the site for an enhanced user experience. When a game is generating sufficient discussion and interest levels, it gets more space, when it's not, it gets downsized ...Then you have a forum sitting there which every single user has to scroll past to get to other ones which interest them.

That is the most ridiculous, uneducated, asinine thing I have heard today, and let me tell you I have heard some whoopers today.

Frankly squire, if that's the level of discourse you intend to engage in, I can't say I plan on discussing it any further. We clearly have very different perspectives on a lot of things. I genuinely hope you find the minor forum shift of less earth shattering importance to your enjoyment of your hobby than you anticipate.

Well, I was strongly in favor of the STAW board, I'm of the opinion that once all the games are lumped together, they will be lost and posts will be driven down and off the first page swiftly, you'll end up with many posts and few replies. I wonder if a 'sort' function could be given to the 'amalgamous' forums so that they present just the threads on games you're looking for, perhaps with an option when posting to flag your thread as an Attack Wing one, or whatever? To make the sifting of it easier. *edit* I see that's being done, good show Legoburner.

I appreciate that the management allowed us to have a board for a while, I'm sorry that it did not meet quota to stay afloat.

Ultimately, as I was just explaining on another forum, about my other passion, tropical fish (yes, I am that rock n roll), forums, webpages, facebook groups, they're all small, sovereign private island nations and they are all dictatorships, owned and run either by an individual or small group, they can be malevolent or benevolent or anywhere in between, they can listen to your requests or not, banish you or not, the only choices you have are the ability to climb back in your boat and sail onto another island or establish and island of your own.

For the record, I find the nationstate of Dakkadakka to be governed in a very relaxed manner, that it does take pains to listen to it's inhabitants and tries to make accommodation to reasoned requests. But at the end of the day, if it's administration has come to a conclusion and is moving on it, whether I like it or not is weighed against how much I like the rest of the general atmosphere. I've had brief trips to other islands of a similar nature and found them oppressive, cliquish and badly policed, either in zeal or total lack of it.

So, sad to see STAW go, happy that dakka is in reasonable health, glad the administration were willing to give it a go. Thanks.

Is there a way to easily introduce another screen when selecting forums?

Like another site you can select the painting and modelling subsection and then you are only presented with the forums in that category? So say when you back out of Dakka's Showcase forum you don't have to scroll past all the other forums above it to go into P&M Blogs forum. You would just be presented with the 4 forums of painting and modeling. Am I making sense?

In happier news, MGS - legoburner is on the case as far as tagging/filtering in the Misc sections go.

 Manchu wrote:
In happier news, MGS - legoburner is on the case as far as tagging/filtering in the Misc sections go.

Yes, I just took Samuel L Jackson's meme advice and read the thread the whole way through... I think that will be useful.

I'm happy with the historical reorganization. I never liked that one forum was for 15mm and the other for the rest. The pre and post WW1 was a good choice.

Thanks for laying all that out clearly and explaining the whys to us. I must admit, I was afraid I would see the Lord of the Rings/ Hobbit forum get consolidated but I'm glad it didn't even though I don't post in there very often.

 Strombones wrote:
The pre and post WW1 was a good choice.

That was actually suggested by posters on the N&B board.

 Lord Corellia wrote:
I must admit, I was afraid I would see the Lord of the Rings/ Hobbit forum get consolidated but I'm glad it didn't even though I don't post in there very often.

Unfortunately, it may yet be consolidated into the Specialist Games forum. The reason we have not done it so far is that GW is reorganizing their approach to Specialist Games generally and there seems to be something coming up for LotR/Hobbit along those lines. Adam Troke is supposed to make an announcement at Throne of Skulls this weekend.

Sounds great. Looking forward to the AoS consolidation so I can get my AoS forum fix in one place.

 Manchu wrote:
Unfortunately, it may yet be consolidated into the Specialist Games forum. The reason we have not done it so far is that GW is reorganizing their approach to Specialist Games generally and there seems to be something coming up for LotR/Hobbit along those lines. Adam Troke is supposed to make an announcement at Throne of Skulls this weekend.

Yeah, that's what I'm sort of holding out hope for as well. I heard a while back that they were hiring a bunch of people for a "middle-Earth division" or some such thing. Hopefully they will re-do the entirety of the profiles (or at least review them) and make adjustments based on the lore, but it is GW so who knows?

Troke is the right person to head the project, outside of getting Alessio back into the fold. I'll be keenly watching the coverage to see what the announcement is. If it's nothing big though, then the game is sadly as good as dead.

I hadn't refreshed my cache and have to say this made me chuckle..

 Ketara wrote:

Frankly squire, if that's the level of discourse you intend to engage in, I can't say I plan on discussing it any further. We clearly have very different perspectives on a lot of things. I genuinely hope you find the minor forum shift of less earth shattering importance to your enjoyment of your hobby than you anticipate.

Sir you know nothing about my profession, education, or credentials. Do not dismiss me like some insolent child just because you do not like that I am disagreeing with you. My language has not been uncivil. If you have become offended by the terms I use, I suggest you consult a dictionary.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Manchu wrote:

There is simply no compelling argument in favor of maintaining a separate board for Star Trek Attack Wing, a game that a handful of posters infrequently discuss.

That is an arbitrary decision that you and the others have yet to base in any facts or data other than you personal feelings on site aesthetics.

 Manchu wrote:
otherwise, it would certainly be a candidate to have a separate board again

That is what we did the last time and you guys pulled the rug out from under us, so why would we want to go through that all over again. How is it more productive to keep combining and splitting forums then to just leave things be?

 Sigvatr wrote:
You sound very angry and seem to be extremely emotionally involved into this

I am not an angry person and I am offended by the accusation. However I do not like when arbitrary overlords make decisions and brush people aside when they don't agree with them.

 Sigvatr wrote:

Secondly, the reasons for the splt were given. STAW just isn't a popular game

That is your opinion sir not fact. Money doesn't lie, STAW out sells AoS and Mantic

 Sigvatr wrote:
people in the forum were nice and helpful, but it's about quantity, not quality.

That opinion shifts with sites administration, because before we had a subforum we were told the opposite by several MODs, so where does that leave us?

 legoburner wrote:
with regards to tagging and filtering in P&M, etc. I intend to add tagging to all busy forums with the 'misc' type forums and the P&M forums getting priority. This will work using automated tagging based on keywords in the first post and subject. Tagging your threads with [gamename] in misc will ensure that the filters are visible and active. The P&M area is trickier due to lots of mixed content threads and finding a clean, efficient way to do that automated and programatically is what is causing the major delay on that front, but it can be done and I'm just deciding on the best option as I really want to be able to link to Medge models and blogs from a single remote point

Ah that would be brilliant, and solve many of these issues! Cheers for the heads up

 Mr. S Baldrick wrote:


Sir you know nothing about my profession, education, or credentials. Do not dismiss me like some insolent child just because you do not like that I am disagreeing with you. My language has not been uncivil

uncivil:
ʌnˈsɪv(ə)l,-vɪl/Submit
adjective
discourteous; impolite.

That is the most ridiculous, uneducated, asinine thing I have heard today

Strike one.

. This is an absolute falsehood and if you cling to this form of logic you are delusional.

Strike two.

If you have become offended by the terms I use, I suggest you consult a dictionary.

Strike three.

If you do not understand how your language is discourteous, condescending, and generally impolite, I would suggest for the good of your relations with your fellow man (and forum users), you ask a friend to proofread your posts in the future. The above certainly does not make me (or anyone else who you spoke like that to I should imagine) wish to engage with you on any level. Lord only knows that I have enough troubles and stress in life without taking angry posts on forums about toy soldiers too seriously.

GENERAL IN THREAD REMINDER/WARNING:

RULE #1 is STAY POLITE.

So did the show off your painting threads in the mantic subforum get deleted? I can't seem to find them. What about the Ironwatch Mag thread? Where should they post now? KOW?

What are the rules for tags? Wouldn't it make more sense to have General threads for games rather than a bunch of 'cold' but tagged threads?

If site ease of use, and clarity are the point of this, why not put booth ME and Gangfight under the same header. And considering their both misc games maybe put them somewhere close to those forums. As it stands now you've got ME awkwardly at the top, then gangfight cutting GW games in half.

Seems like both the AOS and 40k sections could use with some trimming too. Couldn't proposed rule and you make the call, be merged and use tags instead? Call it 40k/AOS Rules Discussion.

If you want a cleaner look break the who's online into a sepreate page as it is useful but only in really specific circumstances. It looks really messy otherwise in my opinion.

 Ketara wrote:

If you do not understand how your language is discourteous, condescending, and generally impolite, I would suggest for the good of your relations with your fellow man (and forum users), you ask a friend to proofread your posts in the future. The above certainly does not make me (or anyone else who you spoke like that to I should imagine) wish to engage with you on any level. Lord only knows that I have enough troubles and stress in life without taking angry posts on forums about toy soldiers too seriously.

Sir it is not impolite to disagree, nor is expanded use of the English language. However there is no further point in continuing, the overlords want the issue silenced. I only hope that in the future the administration will be more inclusive and consider all users and not just those of who play the "popular games".

 NobodyXY wrote:
So did the show off your painting threads in the mantic subforum get deleted?

No threads have been deleted. The content was parceled out by subject matter. Threads related to Mantic's sci fi games should be in the Misc Sci Fi board.

 NobodyXY wrote:
gangfight cutting GW games in half

Agreed, this should probably change. Thanks!

@Manchu

The first page is newer stuff, page 2 seems to be all from 2008, I tried searching but I couldn't find it that way. Dunno where else to look, it not hugely important but it was a neat, relaxed thread that alot of people contributed to it that my have not contirbuted without it.

From what you describe, it sounds like the issue is with things still getting moved around. It will be a little while before everything settles down completely.

 NobodyXY wrote:
@Manchu

The first page is newer stuff, page 2 seems to be all from 2008, I tried searching but I couldn't find it that way. Dunno where else to look, it not hugely important but it was a neat, relaxed thread that alot of people contributed to it that my have not contirbuted without it.

is this the mantic painting thread ? (it's one I had on my favorites for some reason I can't remember, but it looks to have recent posts in)

http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/611820.page

 Mr. S Baldrick wrote:
Sir it is not impolite to disagree, ...

It is when you do it impolitely.

I only hope that in the future the administration will be more inclusive and consider all users and not just those of who play the "popular games

They did. All of the forums that were chosen to be removed were the subject of an extended discussion amongst admins and mods over the past month or so. This wasn't a case of yakface and legoburner waking up this morning and saying 'Hey, let's reorganise the forums!' and commencing deleting stuff at random.

We looked at forum traffic, at posting trends within sections, at the number of posters that were active in those sections, and at the current popularity and potential growth or decline of individual games. A lot of effort was put into considering the needs of the site's considerable number of users.

I'm sorry that you're feeling hard done by as a result of the changes. It's certainly discouraging when you put effort into making something grow, and then have it not turn out as you would wish. As Manchu said earlier, ideally, it would be fantastic if all of us could have more space for our favourite games... But decisions have to be made based on what the owners of the site feel is best for the growth of the forum. You're welcome to disagree with those decisions, but please just keep in mind that they weren't made lightly and considerable deliberation went into any and all of the changes made.

 insaniak wrote:

I only hope that in the future the administration will be more inclusive and consider all users and not just those of who play the "popular games

They did. All of the forums that were chosen to be removed were the subject of an extended discussion amongst admins and mods over the past month or so. This wasn't a case of yakface and legoburner waking up this morning and saying 'Hey, let's reorganise the forums!' and commencing deleting stuff at random.

Discussion between a group of admins and mods isn't what I think Baldrick was talking about when he used the term inclusive. I'm pretty sure he meant consider all users, not just mods and admins. Was there any discussions with DCMs at least? Or "regular" users about changes before the announcement?

While we're talking reorg, why is MEdge so far up the page? Going by the traffic criteria it should be placed below 40K. If traffic is the main criteria then at least be consistent with implementation.

That all being said, none of this particularly bothers me. My own frequenting of Dakka has gone down of late, but, to be frank, based on the site's activity, it seems that I am not alone in this.

 theHandofGork wrote:
While we're talking reorg, why is MEdge so far up the page? Going by the traffic criteria it should be placed below 40K. If traffic is the main criteria then at least be consistent with implementation.

You do realize who owns Spiral Arm Studios, the maker of Maelstrom's Edge?

 theHandofGork wrote:
Discussion between a group of admins and mods isn't what I think Baldrick was talking about when he used the term inclusive. I'm pretty sure he meant consider all users, not just mods and admins. Was there any discussions with DCMs at least? Or "regular" users about changes before the announcement?

We have a whole board dedicated to users talking with admins and mods about the site, including about whether to add or remove boards. The decision to split Historicals, for example, was heavily influenced by this thread -- in fact, we even adopted several of the suggestions posted there about how to do it. If you look through the Nuts & Bolts board, you will see many discussions about these topics. Now, if you mean, are we going to hold a vote on how Dakka Dakka should be organized, the answer is no.

 theHandofGork wrote:
While we're talking reorg, why is MEdge so far up the page? Going by the traffic criteria it should be placed below 40K. If traffic is the main criteria then at least be consistent with implementation.

I think you might have to excuse the owners of the site for allowing their own game to take a certain amount of prominence on the forum.

That all being said, none of this particularly bothers me. My own frequenting of Dakka has gone down of late, but, to be frank, based on the site's activity, it seems that I am not alone in this.

Forums in general are in decline, it seems. More people seem to be turning to Facebook groups for their social networking these days.

I suspect a large part of it is also the current trending of boardgames over more traditional wargames. As people turn away from 40K and AoS in favour of all-in-one-box sort of games there is less to actually discuss, so less reason to spend time on forums doing so.

 theHandofGork wrote:


That all being said, none of this particularly bothers me. My own frequenting of Dakka has gone down of late, but, to be frank, based on the site's activity, it seems that I am not alone in this.

As cattymccat already said, it's a general trend. People who primarily use forums often are people who grew up with them, i.e. 25+, and in general, as of Dakka, there's a bunch of people with a high amount of posts but then there's quite a gap and there aren't a lot of new people who steadily get to that level. It's a change in internet culture; instead of sitting down, brewing a tea and having an elaborated talk, people nowadays prefer to stop for a few seconds, ask a question and then move on. Social media, tumblr and, especially, Reddit have taken on the job of what forums used to do. They are faster and cater straight to the YouTube generation that wants to spend as little time as possible on something with the attention span of your average GW rules writer.

I feel old.

Azreal13 wrote:I think, on the more cosmopolitan sub fora, perhaps a keen encouragement to adopt a [NAMEOFGAME] preface to thread titles will help people scanning for specific games?

Makes a lot of sense and will help me find what might interest when browsing the forums.

Das_Ubermike wrote:
I don't suppose there's a chance that someone will finally do the sane thing and split up the Painting forums by specific periods like Warseer has done, i.e. Imperium, Xenos, Fantasy, Historical.

That's a little worrying because glancing at minis from non-GW games can be quite inspiring for colour choices.

Red Harvest wrote:I would add that there are painters and modellers (including yours truly) who post photos of minis, and projects, from a variety of genres. I'd rather they be able to post all their work in one thread. What may work for Warseer's monoculture may not work here. I know that I will not bother to maintain separate threads for projects of differing genres which I undertake, or for each genre of minis I paint.

In full agreement. I do have a separate MEdge painting blog, but it's in the P&M section. That was done due to how new the game was, I may well shove future MEdge stuff into my general hobby blog, so to separate each system could be very tricky.

Red Harvest wrote:P&M blogs do move quickly. (One can drop off the top of the front page is less than 12 hours.) Something like a 'view recent threads' section for it? Also, a way to see how many have subscribed to a given thread would be nice.

I would love to see how many subscribers there are to my threads. If I have no subscribers to a thread, I'd end it myself. If I knew there was 10 or more possibly checking in I would be more inclined to keep it up to date, ramble less and be more focused.

Mymearan wrote:

 Azreal13 wrote:
I think, on the more cosmopolitan sub fora, perhaps a keen encouragement to adopt a [NAMEOFGAME] preface to thread titles will help people scanning for specific games?

That should really be an inbuilt function, a separate field to write the game name just like there are fields for points etc in the Army List forums.

Automatically Appended Next Post:
P&M could easily please everyone with a tag function combined with a filter.

Yep

legoburner wrote:with regards to tagging and filtering in P&M, etc. I intend to add tagging to all busy forums with the 'misc' type forums and the P&M forums getting priority. This will work using automated tagging based on keywords in the first post and subject. Tagging your threads with [gamename] in misc will ensure that the filters are visible and active. The P&M area is trickier due to lots of mixed content threads and finding a clean, efficient way to do that automated and programatically is what is causing the major delay on that front, but it can be done and I'm just deciding on the best option as I really want to be able to link to Medge models and blogs from a single remote point

And as if by magic the team are already on it

Overall supportive of changes, but I mainly post in P&M.

PS Any chance of a Space Hulk forum?
PPS Sorry, bad joke

Never fun to find out that your game is not that popular, or worse, that no one wants to talk about it. At the same time, it's Dakka's website, so they can make the calls on how it's setup and run. They don't 'owe' anyone, or any game, anything. If it's not meeting your needs....

I can only offer a local perspective based on the couple cities near me with shops, but the Flightpath games Wingo of War/Glory, Star Trek, and D&D are all dead, dead, dead and have been closed out and clearanced. Only Star Wars survived between the three stores I visit occasionally, and gets played.

Thank you for the heads up with the changes.

So does Dakka not have the capacity to have a tree structure to the forums?

I thought that would have been preferable to culling forums, just group them as sub-forums. That way they don't clog up the front page nor does it make it hard for people interested in that game to find threads pertaining to it.

I second the request to see how many subscribers you have. My P&M blog has had almost no replies as of late, but if I knew people were checking in id post more.

 Mymearan wrote:
I second the request to see how many subscribers you have. My P&M blog has had almost no replies as of late, but if I knew people were checking in id post more.

Manually subscribing (without posting) is rare enough to make that data fairly pointless. Views is the best way to gauge the interest in your blog. Nowadays, with more people on mobile devices (over 50% of readers), people are much less inclined to comment even if they think something is amazing, but watching the views go up is the purest indicator of people checking it out. Almost nobody on mobile uses the subscribe button due to it being two clicks.

Overall I like the reorganisation of the forums. It'll take awhile to get used to figuring out where bits of Mantic stuff are (I'd have put Mantic Fantasy Games in with KoW), and perhaps have Boardgames next to Misc Miniatures Games since those lines are so blurred these days (Shadows of Brimstone is down in Board, though it's a miniatures boardgame... )

Anyway... this concerns me:

 insaniak wrote:

Das_Ubermike wrote:
I don't suppose there's a chance that someone will finally do the sane thing and split up the Painting forums by specific periods like Warseer has done, i.e. Imperium, Xenos, Fantasy, Historical.

Nope, not happening, at least for now.

It may have worked for Warseer, (I don't know, I stopped visiting over there years ago) but splitting P&M has to be done judiciously as it can very, very easily just fragment everything, leaving less popular genres with little to no attention. Having everything lumped in together increases the chances of casual browsers checking different stuff out, rather than just sticking to their one favourite or comfortable genre.


Having said that, the P&M Blogs section does move very quickly and can be hard to keep up with, so this may be something that we'll want to look into down the track.

I spend most of my posting time here in the P&M Blog section, and my projects of choice change over time - generally I work on multiple projects across 40k, Fantasy and Historicals, and I follow ones across all genres. At the moment I'm coordinating a "Tale of Gamers" challenge that has quite a lot of participants - again across multiple genres. I wouldn't bother maintaining multiple P&M blogs of my own in different sections, nor any kind of "Take of Gamers" type things if the P&M Blogs were split. I'd probably just stop bothering to blog or follow here completely than run try to run community activities and follow across multiple forums for the same content. Quite a lot of the Plogs I follow here also jump between genres and are very much about people sharing their latest models and what's on the boil for their own painting desks. I like being able to follow one thread for (almost) all of the people who I interact with and seeing all of their stuff in one coherent place.

Lego mentioned something about auto-taggers looking through the first post. In my own blog, the first post was about an Ogre Army for KoW (that is still a WIP) in 2013 and since then has had models for LotR, WFB, "Oldhammer", 40k, WW2, Greeks, D&D and a ton more. I'm far from unique there, as well. The Tale of Gamers thread has everything from Medge to 40k to DZC to AoS to D&D to Confrontation to Deep Wars and a ton in between (and regularly links to the various contributors' own Plogs when they have them). I think allowing and even encouraging tags as needed is fine, but some threads are pretty tag-agnostic.

I don't know if it'd make a difference to the showcase forums - they seem to be a different beast. and much more about one-off models than the continuing painting adventures of various individuals.

Yeah, the multiple -subject blog (which I'm also most certainly a participant in) would be a definite impediment to categorising the blog section.

 Mymearan wrote:
I second the request to see how many subscribers you have. My P&M blog has had almost no replies as of late, but if I knew people were checking in id post more.

I check a ton of people's Plogs, but I'm not subscribed to any of them. Never figured out how that works as it seemed clunky when I looked at it, I couldn't find any kind of "how it works" and I didn't have the interest to delve into figuring it out.

 insaniak wrote:
Yeah, the multiple -subject blog (which I'm also most certainly a participant in) would be a definite impediment to categorising the blog section.

I don't really see why.

P&M
>General plogs
>>40K plogs
>>>Imperial plogs
>>>Chaos plogs
>>>Xenos plogs
>>Other Sci-fi plogs
>>>Infinity plogs
>>>Deadzoone plogs
>>>etc
>>Fantasy Plogs
>>>AoS plogs
>>>Legacy WHFB plogs
>>>etc

You click on General plogs, you get all plogs of all kinds like it is now, with an expandable links menu at the top of the page. You click through to 40K and you see a forum with all the 40K plogs and links at the top to the three further subdivisions. You click one of those and you see just that specific forum. Or if you don't want to go to that much effort, just keep a General plogs section at the top and then have sci-fi/fantasy/historicals forums below that for those that are doing a more focused plog, like Ammobunker does. Or go with the autotagging system and give us filtering options at the top of the page.

There's no reason multiple-subject plogs have to be an impediment to making the plog forum vaguely user-friendly for people browsing it - if the mods & admins like the way it is and want to keep it that way, or if you think the time & effort it would take to implement some form of organisation isn't worth it for you, fine, it's your site, but just say so.

 Azazelx wrote:

 Mymearan wrote:
I second the request to see how many subscribers you have. My P&M blog has had almost no replies as of late, but if I knew people were checking in id post more.

I check a ton of people's Plogs, but I'm not subscribed to any of them. Never figured out how that works as it seemed clunky when I looked at it, I couldn't find any kind of "how it works" and I didn't have the interest to delve into figuring it out.

...?

At the bottom of every thread page there is a 'subscribe' link.

Click on it, confirm the selection and you're now 'subscribed' to the thread in question.

Then, hover over 'thread tools' in the menu bar, click on 'My Subscribed Threads' and it will then list...all of the threads you've subscribed to.

I honestly couldn't live without this feature - it makes my Dakka Dakka experience all that much more enjoyable.

This is a big place, and that feature makes it a lot more manageable for me!

Will be there a forum for news and rumors???

 Yodhrin wrote:

 insaniak wrote:
Yeah, the multiple -subject blog (which I'm also most certainly a participant in) would be a definite impediment to categorising the blog section.

I don't really see why.

P&M
>General plogs
>>40K plogs
>>>Imperial plogs
>>>Chaos plogs
>>>Xenos plogs
>>Other Sci-fi plogs
>>>Infinity plogs
>>>Deadzoone plogs
>>>etc
>>Fantasy Plogs
>>>AoS plogs
>>>Legacy WHFB plogs
>>>etc

You click on General plogs, you get all plogs of all kinds like it is now, with an expandable links menu at the top of the page. You click through to 40K and you see a forum with all the 40K plogs and links at the top to the three further subdivisions. You click one of those and you see just that specific forum. Or if you don't want to go to that much effort, just keep a General plogs section at the top and then have sci-fi/fantasy/historicals forums below that for those that are doing a more focused plog, like Ammobunker does. Or go with the autotagging system and give us filtering options at the top of the page.

I don't think the forum software works that way. Otherwise I'm sure we wouldn't have had all that kerfuffle about STAW earlier in the thread. That's also an insanely OTT number of sub-tags you're suggesting.

 Azazelx wrote:

 Yodhrin wrote:

 insaniak wrote:
Yeah, the multiple -subject blog (which I'm also most certainly a participant in) would be a definite impediment to categorising the blog section.

I don't really see why.

P&M
>General plogs
>>40K plogs
>>>Imperial plogs
>>>Chaos plogs
>>>Xenos plogs
>>Other Sci-fi plogs
>>>Infinity plogs
>>>Deadzoone plogs
>>>etc
>>Fantasy Plogs
>>>AoS plogs
>>>Legacy WHFB plogs
>>>etc

You click on General plogs, you get all plogs of all kinds like it is now, with an expandable links menu at the top of the page. You click through to 40K and you see a forum with all the 40K plogs and links at the top to the three further subdivisions. You click one of those and you see just that specific forum. Or if you don't want to go to that much effort, just keep a General plogs section at the top and then have sci-fi/fantasy/historicals forums below that for those that are doing a more focused plog, like Ammobunker does. Or go with the autotagging system and give us filtering options at the top of the page.

I don't think the forum software works that way. Otherwise I'm sure we wouldn't have had all that kerfuffle about STAW earlier in the thread. That's also an insanely OTT number of sub-tags you're suggesting.

I was under the impression Dakka used a modified version of "off the shelf" forum software, almost all of which support those kinds of features or are capable of accepting plugins that do. And I don't see why it's "insane" to want to be able to find specific content that interests the user at any given time; on that above list if you just want to keep wading through all the threads you just never click anything other than "General plogs", and if you do want to refine your browsing experience then the more specific our ability to do that is the better - if they go to the bother of reforming P&M, either with something like those examples or the tagging system mentioned earlier, there's no reason not to have as many tags/subdivisions as possible other than arbitrarily limiting them because the designer wouldn't use them when browsing themselves - the hard work is implementing the system, subsequently adding the necessary tags/subdivisions to let users drill right down to the level of individual armies or broader factions is comparatively trivial.

 insaniak wrote:
Yeah, the multiple -subject blog (which I'm also most certainly a participant in) would be a definite impediment to categorising the blog section.

Yeah, that doesn't really make any sense. How do you deal with blogs that span multiple genres? Simple, you just classify them as General. I also know that you made a comment earlier about narrowing the P&M Blogs would result in less traffic for certain types of games, which may be true. But how much traffic do you lose because no one can find what they're looking for in that mess of a forum? Even if the P&M Blog forum was broken down into General, Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Historical that would be more helpful than the way it is now.

Das_Ubermike wrote:
Yeah, that doesn't really make any sense. How do you deal with blogs that span multiple genres? Simple, you just classify them as General.

At which point they get missed by anyone looking for specific things.

I also know that you made a comment earlier about narrowing the P&M Blogs would result in less traffic for certain types of games, which may be true. But how much traffic do you lose because no one can find what they're looking for in that mess of a forum?

Hard to say without knowing how many people go to the blog section looking for specific things (and subsequently can't find them), and how many are just browsing for cool blogs.


Lego has already said he's working on a tagging system for that section, though, which I believe will help alleviate some of the issues.

 insaniak wrote:

Das_Ubermike wrote:
Yeah, that doesn't really make any sense. How do you deal with blogs that span multiple genres? Simple, you just classify them as General.

At which point they get missed by anyone looking for specific things.

Which remains superior to the current situation whereby even blogs with specific subjects can't be found by people looking for specific subjects, because *everything* is classed as General.

Lego has already said he's working on a tagging system for that section, though, which I believe will help alleviate some of the issues.

Hopefully, yes.

Where is the Poll choice for me to click "DO IT! DO IT NOW!!"

Seriously, good on you to clean this up. You could probably prune things back even further.



Automatically Appended Next Post:

 insaniak wrote:
Yeah, the multiple -subject blog (which I'm also most certainly a participant in) would be a definite impediment to categorising the blog section.

For how little content my plog generates, I am not carving it up into a half-dozen sub-plogs scattered to the winds.

The reorganization makes a lot of sense to me. I especially like the way the historicals boards have been streamlined. It never really made sense to me that FOW was split off from many of the other WWII games. Pre-WWI and WWI-Modern seems a lot more intuitive and hopefully will keep the historicals section reasonably lively.