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Fellow Dakkanauts,

After several-year long break from miniature wargaming, I recently decided to get back into the hobby (specifically 40k). I determined early on that it was important that I become active in an online forum, to both share my experiences & use as an online resource. After a quick search online, it appears that the biggest online forums are Dakkadakka, Warseer & Librarium-Online. I have only used Dakkadakka thus far, leaving me with little or no knowledge of the others.

How do these other forums compare to Dakkadakka?
What are their primary similarities/differences?
Does one forum cover 40k, Fantasy or LOTR particularly well in comparison with the others?

Also, how do other, smaller forums like BolterAndChainsword, 40kOnline & BellOfLostSouls compare?


I'm looking for opinions, so those of you with knowledge on the subject fire away. How do you think they compare?

Warseer is far and away more populated with the highly competitive, tournament going crowd.

Just a note in here, people - we don't allow trash-talking of other forums here on Dakka Dakka. No one has done this yet, but I want to make sure it doesn't happen.

Thank you.

Dakka by far is the biggest of the forums, which have been backed up by the data of daily hits recently posted on this site.

Out of all of the others that you have stated Bolters and ChainSwords is one that I would recommend highly.

They have a good amount of information concerning the hobby.

But to me, B&C treated me well over there and I still visit them from time to time.

Another small site that I would recommend would be Age of Strife, for the same reason of being treated fairly.

Warseer - Most active community IMO. Librarium Online is larger by about 3,000 total members, but it seems that there are less active members. Has some of the best hobby threads I've seen anywhere (painting, sculpting, modeling, etc.), but in general large parts of the community are childish and thin skinned, and the moderators are overbearing megalomaniacal control freaks. Very much more 40k oriented, although fantasy has been gaining more popularity on those boards. Was a member for a long time before migrating to dakka as a result of the general community attitude and disagreeable mods (I was ultimately banned for reasons largely unknown to me, I was never able to get an explanation, and it occurred out of the blue after a week + of inactivity on my part).

Librarium-Online - I haven't been active on this site in years, its where I started, not really much to say about it,its a good community, but IMO its more amateur/beginner oriented, unless things have changed.

DakkaDakka - its not as active as I would like it to be (warseer levels) but its a much more tight-knit community IMO. I recognize way more posters and their general dispositions on these forums than I have on any others. The moderators moderate with a moderate hand, the community in general is not idiotic, and when warseer-esque levels of dumb try to migrate over hear the community seems to band together to shut it down pretty hard with levels of hate and bile I have seen few other places. It seems to me (contrary to Loki's post) that DakkaDakka is where more of the tournament going crowd can be found than Warseer. Indeed, during my time on Warseer (which was several years ago) that was the perception the warseer community had of dakka.

BolterandChainsword - I have never been particularly active on these forums, I think I have like 3 posts, but its a very space marine oriented place (duh). I don't really go there very often, but when I do its to browse space marine minis/conversions and fluff related stuff (there really is no better source for power armor related information) .

40konline - Was a member for a long time here before Warseer and after migrating from Librarium. This site also had an outstanding hobby section(easily rivaled warseer for some of the best hobbywork I've seen) but the rest of the forums never did much for me. The site had some issues with mods as well (which I am told ultimately resulted in the problem mods being removed from the site), indeed I got banhammered faster than I could blink for telling a mod to get bent because he was trash talking me and a bunch of other posters.

BellofLostSouls - no clue, I have a very negative opinion of the blog itself (which is about as lacking in real content as white dwarf), which extends to the forums but actually lacking experience with the forums I'll keep that opinion to myself.

I go to warseer for news and rumors only as they have many trusted sources there. Other than that, Dakka all the way. And for the record usually everything from warseer rumors ends up here eventually.

Thanks for your opinions guys.

@ Adam, AgeOfStrife looks very small, which could be an issue. Did you see this as a problem when you were a member?

@ Chaos, thanks, that was very comprehensive. I'm very surprised to hear that you think that Dakka is more tournament-oriented, from what I've gathered the general perception in Warseer is that they attract more of a tourney crowd. Is this perception wrong?


Also, after some more perusing, it seems to me that Warseer has a lot of seriously good threads and P&M blogs, but most of them are several years old, dating back to 2009, 2008 & further.

Is Warseer past it's heyday?

I read dakka and warseer.


Dakka is better in some ways, and warseer is better in others.

Dakka does have much better painting/modelling guides and Gallery.


Its easy to spend a couple hours just looking through Gallery pics of what people have painted

I like Dakka and Librarium. Librarium has a nice fun community.

Back when I was on warseer and librarium online a lot I noticed that each of those has a much larger population of europeans, which impacts the kind of strategic advice you get. Nothing against them but the tournaments there use very different rules (ETC anyhow) than ours as are the standards of play compared to the USA

Thus I didnt find the tactics sections particularly useful. However if you must pick one over Dakka I would certainly go with Warseer as has been said Librarium is much more casual/beginner oriented. Each of the other 2 forums has a huge amount of restrictions on what can be posted as opposed to Dakka as well. Librarium online especially has a bizarre notion of what copyright actually means (Note - it doesnt mean saying something is weapon skill 4)

I like Dakka and Librarium. Librarium has a nice fun community.

Kirasu wrote:Back when I was on warseer and librarium online a lot I noticed that each of those has a much larger population of europeans, which impacts the kind of strategic advice you get. Nothing against them but the tournaments there use very different rules (ETC anyhow) than ours as are the standards of play compared to the USA

Really? How so?

Kirasu wrote:Thus I didnt find the tactics sections particularly useful. However if you must pick one over Dakka I would certainly go with Warseer as has been said Librarium is much more casual/beginner oriented. Each of the other 2 forums has a huge amount of restrictions on what can be posted as opposed to Dakka as well. Librarium online especially has a bizarre notion of what copyright actually means (Note - it doesnt mean saying something is weapon skill 4)

Is this the whole "an infantry squad costs the same as 3 lascannons & a heavy bolter" thing? Because that's something that I've seen on forums where posting anything (e.g. points costs of units) from the codexes is considered copyright.

TheBlueRedPanda wrote:

Kirasu wrote:Back when I was on warseer and librarium online a lot I noticed that each of those has a much larger population of europeans, which impacts the kind of strategic advice you get. Nothing against them but the tournaments there use very different rules (ETC anyhow) than ours as are the standards of play compared to the USA

Really? How so?

While I can't comment on the EU tourny rules and traditions, there are definitely alot more Europeans on Warseer than Dakka percentage-wise. I don't know if this is an active preference on the part of one or both sides of the pond but its most evident in the trading forum where the easy majority of traders are UK based (where as here they're US mainly.. although a fair number of UK threads get bumped overnight for us). Their rumor subforum used to be *THE* place to go for rumors and was the big draw for me personally but I've found that dakka has taken that crown in the past year or two. Another big change is that their painting/modelling forums are divided up by genre and army whereas dakka just has a big forum for it all in the same place. They both have some very nice examples of painting/modelling are actively used so I guess the preference there depends on how broad your interests are in that field. As for the Librarium, I tend only to accidentally go there from a google link. I'm personally not a fan of sites that are so heavily ad-sensed... an ad at the top and/or bottom of the page? no problem. Ads breaking up threads? no visits from me. I stopped going to the tau forums when they changed over to that style.

Bolter and Chainsword was my first 40k forum. The "Welcome to the Fang brother, have an ale!" roleplaying stuff is a bit too much for me, but the site itself is pretty solid. It has an active community and as long as you want to talk about power armor, it's a very good resource. There's rumor that it's secretly owned by GW, as it has bolter, which is copyrighted by GW, right in the title. GW's shut down other sites named with their copyrighted words before, but that's neither here nor there.

Warseer used to be really good for rumors, but since GW put the stranglehold on rumormongers it's lost some of its value. They've got some very good painting and modeling stuff going on, but the user base is very thin skinned and the moderators are overbearing.

Dakka has a really great gallery system that's easy to use and navigate. I wish other forums had a gallery as robust. The userbase here is pretty solid, but I still see a lot of familiar faces which is nice. Dakka is a little more sardonic than the other two forums, and a little more inclusive. I tend to find better discussions here though, and people are usually okay with criticism. I know on other forums people will accuse you of trolling if you say anything harsher than "good job" on a particularly horrid paintjob.

Through all these places I have found too few people who know how to use the shift key and punctuation. I think B&C is best for that with Warseer being the worst. Bad grammar just bugs the hell out of me so YMMV.

Brother SRM wrote:Through all these places , I have found too few people who know how to use the shift key and punctuation. I think B&C is best for that with Warseer being the worst. Bad grammar just bugs the hell out of me so YMMV.

Fixed that for you.

I can take or leave that comma. It isn't necessary in that sentence, but it's not inappropriate either.

I have accounts on all 3 sites named by the OP.
I cannot stand Warseer, and avoid it entirely.
Librarium is blocked by work and, as such, I don't bother at home, either. When I did visit there, though, I liked the place.
Dakka is my preferred of the 3 listed. The only site I like more than Dakka is ::drum roll:: Bartertown.
Yeah. Who's surprised? LOL

Eric

For a while I was a regular both here and at Librarium Online. On the whole Librarium is a very positive community. The only thing that really irked me at the time was there was a group of people going around calling themselves something like "The fluff masters". Rubbed me very much the wrong way.

But really, the big reason that I am a solid Dakka-ite through and through now has nothing to do with any inherent superiority of the user base (though I think Dakka is a pretty great group), but because in the end Librarium Online's advertisements got to me. I often browse forums logged out, only logging in if I want to post something. On LO, being logged out means you have to see large ads that interrupt using the forum and long, colorful appeals to sign up and join the community. When logged in, I even got messages every once in a while noting that I hadn't posted in a while and asking me to post something. I like that Dakka doesn't interfere with my browsing experience if I'm logged out, and lets me wait until I have something to say before I post.

But I'm picky like that. Those aren't really issues I'd expect to bother others. Feel free to browse both! You can even do it at the same time!

TheBlueRedPanda wrote:

@ Chaos, thanks, that was very comprehensive. I'm very surprised to hear that you think that Dakka is more tournament-oriented, from what I've gathered the general perception in Warseer is that they attract more of a tourney crowd. Is this perception wrong?

I don't know if its wrong, I don't know if its right. When I was a warseer member, (3 or 4 years ago), there was a thread similar to this one, and the general consensus was that the hardcore tournament winner crowd could be found on dakka. Thinking about it, it seems that if you search through some threads relating to 'ard boyz, etc. Dakka has indeed had at least a few winners of said tournament come from its ranks, etc. Also, as stated by another poster, warseer is much more europe oriented vs. the american dakka experience. It really is a very different standard of play and a different meta it seems. From what I understand, army composition scoring is much more prevalent in Europe, whereas its largely fallen by the wayside in the US it seems, as such you tend to see more powerful lists in the US for the most part, but also a lot of internet gimmick lists with cutesy names like leafblower of fatecrusher, etc. that are really powerful on paper, but at the end of the day are overrated spam lists that don't live up to the hype in practice.

Also, after some more perusing, it seems to me that Warseer has a lot of seriously good threads and P&M blogs, but most of them are several years old, dating back to 2009, 2008 & further.

Is Warseer past it's heyday?

There was a thread on dakka about 6 months ago by one of the mods IIRC, that used internet analytics to determine that dakka traffic had surpassed warseer traffic, and indeed had made dakka the most popular forums online. Also, it seems that many other longtime warseers like myself became fed up with the community/mods over there and migrated to other forums around the time I did (or shortly afterwards). It seems that many of the posters responsible for those really good threads are no longer active on that site.

For some time I saw Dakka as more of the "competitive players" forum. I liked and used Warseer but the more I lurked on over to Dakka over the years the more I liked the site. The only other site I can recommend besides Dakka Dakka is Bolter & Chainsword. B&C has an excellent community that is both friendly and informative.

I have used Warseer, Dakka, and LO.
Warseer ~ Not a huge fan. I have nothing against it in anyway, however a while back they seemed to have server problems. Lots of virus warnings a while back, so I stopped using it obviously. I do not know if this has been corrected. I am assuming so as there are plenty of people there. I found the community a little harsh at times. I am thick skinned, but as surprised at the things they let go between posters. Also the site was eventually blocked by work due to obscene content. I never went back.

LO ~ I was a regular user of LO until their server crashed about 4 years ago. That was a time I was getting into WFB. I was writing a lot of the skaven articles at the time. And the WFB forums had quite a nice following. There were a lot of hopeful posters regarding painting, army list building, and and fluff. Their server going down, led me here, as I was in the midst of prepping for a GT.

Dakka ~ I stuck around even after LO got their server's up. I to, dislike the amount of advertisement they do. Still I find the community pretty up beat, I like the Mods are quick to edit posts and trim to stop flame wars. The only thing that really bothers me... the amount of negative GW posts. Don't get me wrong, I agree with lots of it, but I wish it was restricted to a GW rant post or something, because it really gets old.

Bolter / Chain ~ I've looked it over and gotten a lot of good conversions ideas there, never really used it in depth, and only really guest it.

Bell of Lost ~ one of the better sites for previews, rumors, and future planning. Minus that, they have a lot of ad's, again, not a huge fan.

My main forum is Dakka, I also frequent Warseer for the rumours.

Warseer decided to go for quantity over quality, the mods seem to make it a point to ban anyone who gets too prominent in order to sustain this mediocrity. They're really only good for GW rumours and there's an okay PP section. All other companies are crammed into an obscure little ghetto forum.

Dakka doesn't get the scoop on GW stuff as often, but for all other systems it is far, far superior with its general rumour section. The mods, while being a little less consistent with the rules, are far more relaxed here and you don't have to tread on eggs when replying to some moronic post.

My 2 cents:

LibrariumOnline: Too many ads, not really that active of a community

40konline: Imho almost dead, it suffers from a gazillion different boards, isolating activity yadda yadda.

Warseer: The most active board in my perception, probably the biggest community. Due to the big community, by default, there's (by numbers and percents) both more people new to the hobby and plain idiots. The problem with this: Warseer is heavily moderated. I received a ban not for insulting or flaming someone, but for giving a (honest & correct but..) ..really sarcastic answer to someone asking how to use a Landraider Achilles. Heavy moderation is also what killed theor rumours board. Back before 5th I remember snapshots of rules etc etc being posted way ahead of release, artwork etc. Now they ban people for posting artwork (not rules, mind you) ahead of release. It's basically become a "News" source, rather than a rumour source.

Their Hobby segment is massive, though dislocated and seperate subforums are not to my liking.




Last, but in no way least: Dakka. I feel like the mods are closer to the community here, and the rumours as well as news & general boards have one distinct advantage:
They talk about everything.
Where warseer is for massive amoubts of casual and new players in the "Games Workshop" Hobby, Dakka is a place for the consumate Hobbyist: You'll see discussions about anypossible game everywhere, the modelling and painting forums are mixed as well - it's great.

Where separation of every hobby and aspect thereof is the warseer way, at Dakka you have everything.






One more: If you're chill enough, 4chans traditional games board can be like the dark underworld of our hobby...



CoolMiniOrNot is great to frequent (not the boards mind you, the frontoage and shop are where it's at!) to keep up with new releases.







A general recommendation from me:

DAKKA for forums, painting, modelling, all sorts of hobby related news & it's tournament discussion
COOLMINI for ... cool minis and an exhaustive online store,
YTTH for ... Well, Stelek is known among these parts. Easier to digest would be kirbys 3++ is the new pink. Blood of Kittens for the occasional Rumour, but mostly if you want to stay on top of the (american) tournament scene.

Finally, for casual, easy to digest and intelectually unchallenging GWhobby: BOLS and Warseer.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Lord Blackfang:

Younare do rigjt re:Warseer and having to tread on eggshells when responding to moronic posts


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Oi, sorry for spelling up there: My iPhone is sometimes unreliable, and Dakka as a forum doesn't lend itself well to it, so I can't (without considerabke efforts) edit out mistakes.

Apologies.... :(

TheBlueRedPanda,
I note that you do specify 40k. Should you desire to look outside 40k from time to time, I would recomment The Miniatures Page and Lead Adventures.

Both are smaller sites than Dakka, but still worth visiting for non-GW goodness.

Lead Adventure I check periodically just for the great projects and paint jobs that folks put up.

The Miniatures Page is one of my favorites and is probably the top source for releases and news of a non-GW nature. There are some grongonards there to be sure, but I find it to be a very friendly place and a great source for all kinds of gaming stuff I otherwise wouldn't have known about.

archont wrote:



Last, but in no way least: Dakka. I feel like the mods are closer to the community here, and the rumours as well as news & general boards have one distinct advantage:
They talk about everything.

This, haha. The number of times I've seen mods breaking the rules w/ the rest of us is hilarious.

And as another poster said, The Miniatures Page is a great source of info for non-gw gaming... BUT, I prefer to get my news and information from tabletopgamingnews.com Its updated constantly throughout the day and has links and info about pretty much everything.

Yes, TGN is awesome.

chaos0xomega wrote:
From what I understand, army composition scoring is much more prevalent in Europe, whereas its largely fallen by the wayside in the US it seems, as such you tend to see more powerful lists in the US for the most part

Excuse my ignorance, but what is army composition scoring?



Also, after using Warseer for a little bit today, I was wondering does anyone else think that the font/backround colours are slightly annoying to read? I find the off-beige & orange fonts on greyish background of Dakka to be infinitely more readable than the white & azure fonts on black background of Warseer.

TheBlueRedPanda wrote:
Excuse my ignorance, but what is army composition scoring?

You get a penalty to your score if you use cheesy units. That kind of thing. Levels the playing field, or at least that's the idea. In practice, it's more like "Which army does the tournament organizer like best?"

Also, after using Warseer for a little bit today, I was wondering does anyone else think that the font/backround colours are slightly annoying to read? I find the off-beige & orange fonts on greyish background of Dakka to be infinitely more readable than the white & azure fonts on black background of Warseer.

You need to switch the layout to "Portent Forums"

I read warseer most out of the non-dakka forums out there. B&C is the best run in my opinion. Everyone else tends to do some things better, some things worse, but all in all I'm glad there is such a rich ecosystem out there for everyone to enjoy.

Just to clarify some of the above posts though, dakka is the most active community now by quite a margin. Here is the rate of posts per day (not including dakka's gallery comments) for a number of different wargaming sites:

Composition scoring is basically peer review of your army list. Its highly subjective, and often times your opponent sabotages you by scoring you down (unless it uses a rigid format for scoring, but those have their own problems in that they often don't penalize players for spamming the same unit over and over again) unless you're fielding a really weak list. The idea is to prevent things like leafblower, fateweaver, thunderwolf spam, wound allocation game lists, etc. by putting your army list at the mercy of your opponent.

As for the color schemes, I find the warseer black and blue layout to be easier to read, but dakka is much easier on the eyes (i.e. it doesn't hurt/give me a headache).