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We have better functions, larger image sizes, free hosting, no limit to number of pics, bigger avatar pics! We gave =I=munda to the world!! ... yet Warseer modeling blogs totally own us in terms of variety and quality, and to an extent feedback and interaction.

Why?

How do we change that??

I've tried posting only here and using cunning sigs to pull people from there, but only a few posters moved and now I am going back to warseer again, because of the quality and quantity of content.

I want to change that. I hope we change that.

I feel the hosting system within dakka could change all that. But I really dislike the voting system. It's not what people want when they want to share their models as an interactive blog.

It simply comes down to the traffic. Right now we are getting about 60% of the traffic level of warseer, and traditionally dakka has been rules focused rather than painting focused, so the required change in culture is still evolving. By almost any metric dakka is the second most popular wargaming forum on the web, and is the second largest image gallery now as well. We are the only major site to have a consistent (and significant) increase in traffic every month for the past year, and things literally improve every month in terms of technology, users and interaction. Warseer's P&M area is old, stable and a major part of their site. Ours is still young (little over a year old), and relatively speaking is small.

Regardless, I have heard the opposite of what you are talking about as well... I've heard people talk about getting more responses here for projects posted in both places (and on other forums too), more views here and there have certainly been a fair share of amazing projects here too (foda_bett's crazy titans come immediately to mind).

This is NOT TO MOCK what we have here. Just to make that absolutely clear

I don't think it's about traffic. Traffic can also work against you - we have a tight knit community with real quality.

I'd be interested to hear opinions from people who go to both forums and how they see this and wether we have ideas to design the changes that would create more great dakka P&M blogs

traitor scum
dakka has its dry days when it comes to blogs, but most of the time theres some great stuff on here.
dakka is my home

then again, due to my language im sure i would get banned from any other forum.

got an account on warseer, but that was ages ago, i made 1 thread asking for advice and after a week i had nothing, so i left and joined up here

Well, as a relative newcomer to Dakka, here are my thoughts. Bear in mind, this is how I see the situation and I'm not pretending to be an expert on what makes a good site/community tick.

Warseer bills itself as a wargaming site. the fact that the majority of its activity is GW related is neither here nor there. It's theoretically a community for wargamers rather than Warhammer/40K fans. And there are a sizable number of non-GW gamers in residence there - Privateer Press, Flames of War and a good few other non-GW titles have a strong presence there.

Compare that to dakka - on dakkas homepage, the forum link announces itself as being for 40K Forums. Now I dont know if the intention here is to be 40k only or not (I'm inclined to think it probably was in the beginning, with everything else being secondary), but if I was looking for Fantasy stuff, the first thing I'd think on seeing the homepage forum link is that there's nothing here for me and that I'm probably not welcome to start posting pics of my Empire/Warjacks/alternate WWII stuff.

Personally, I've recently started a fantasy p&m blog here, and although its vastly outnumbered by 40k related blogginess, I hope I haven't made a faux pas in doing so. There are certainly a few other fantasy logs dotted about, so I'm inclined to think I'm fairly safe, but if I'm wrong, tell me now and I'll take my blog somewhere its more welcome. To Warseer for example. (To be fair its posted there too, but hopefully you get my point).

Why post here and there? To get the most possible feedback to help me improve my painting and modelling skills.

If you want to rival Warseer, you'd need to either broaden Dakkas perceived scope (separate out the fantasy and sci-fi blogs, make non-GW stuff feel less like an unwanted cousin...) or, ironically, narrow your scope so that Dakka becomes known as a 40k purists site (though you'd possibly lose a few members before you started gaining any).

I'm not an "established" member of the community here in that I haven't built a rep for beautiful painting or converting, or frquent insightful posts or whatever, but I am a member, and I'll continue to post here, because there is still a lot here that I don't see on Warseer. Plus I like the smaller communities - its much easier to feel like part of the group when you aren't competing with thousands of other posters.

Just my tuppence worth. Make of it what you will.

No Faux Pas. I <3 non-40k stuff.

malfred wrote:No Faux Pas. I <3 non-40k stuff.

I second this. I really enjoy seeing non 40k blogs and photos, almost makes me want to dust off my WHFB army.

As for the OP, I can definitely see where Migs is coming from. He consistently puts out amazing project updates (as do a great many Dakka members) and receives 2 or 3 anemic replies like "OMG COOL" or "I like his gun" from people more interested in increasing their post count than actually commenting on the work shown. Seems people aren't inclined to comment on every blog they read. I know I'm not! I tend to avoid "nice work" posts unless it is something really stand out and deserving of praise, or if I can add some kind of constructive c&c. But to put a lot of work into a piece and see 500+ thread views with 2 replies is disheartening at best.

<ramble>
When I decided to get back into the hobby, I forum shopped for a place to post my projects. Having a public blog helps motivate slow folk like myself to work towards a goal, and the input received can often change the direction of a piece for the better. I saw forums where people would post absolute garbage work to be met with "Nice" or "add moar rivets!!!!!" or "looks kewl" and I knew I wanted to avoid that crowd. Here at Dakka I actually found people responding with advice, suggested changes, and constructive criticism. Bingo, I'll post here. Lately though, I see somewhat fewer helpful posts, and a great deal more netspeak, lollerskating AOL chat garbage.
</ramble>

So how do we increase forum quality? I'm referring to members posting, not the nuts and bolts as Lego has been busting his hump for a long time on some great additions and improvements. Is it just that some folk are shy? Scared to offer criticism? I end my updates with a plea for C&C, meaning I want to hear it. I don't take every suggestion given, but input is always appreciated and usually leads to a better final product.

Any ideas?

From a forum marketing perspective there are two ways you can do things to stand out from the crowd and gain new users, as with all marketing these are, go against the grain or go across the grain.

By this I mean either be the exact opposite of the competition (Warseer is large, lots of sub forums but with somewhat "poor" post quality - Dakka could be a small, tight knit community with high post quality), or go at the whole forum thing from another angle.

Things like twitter are changing the way people interact socially on the internet. Integrating this somehow into Dakka to provide additional unique features would make the site unique.

Imagine if a large group of Dakka GD attendee's, for example, tweeted content from seminars or results and images as they happened. It would certainly draw people (like myself) who enjoy the rumour news and images.

The other thing might be to develop tools to make the site more valuable, the B&C marine painter tool for example is widely used and probably attracts a lot of new "faces" to the site.

Just my 2 cents.

Cheers,

Dante

Anodyr wrote:Compare that to dakka - on dakkas homepage, the forum link announces itself as being for 40K Forums....

This is there for two reasons. First off, a huge number of 40k players I spoke to who were not regular visitors to dakka presumed dakka was just an Ork forum from their occasional visit. The text was added to clarify that. The second reason is that it enhances search engine placement for those words, and searches including those 2 words alone make up about 3% of all our traffic as a result. Some reworking is currently underway for the homepage so I'll take your comments into account and will make things a bit clearer in the next iteration.

Teek wrote:Seems people aren't inclined to comment on every blog they read. I know I'm not! I tend to avoid "nice work" posts unless it is something really stand out and deserving of praise, or if I can add some kind of constructive c&c. But to put a lot of work into a piece and see 500+ thread views with 2 replies is disheartening at best.

This is part of Dakka not being focused on modeling for years. The gallery is our answer to that and as we tweak and improve the gallery, hopefully we'll draw in even more experienced painters and modelers who will be happy to share their advice with people. There's no huge shortage of advice overall but there is always room for improvement.

Teek wrote:
Lately though, I see somewhat fewer helpful posts, and a great deal more netspeak, lollerskating AOL chat garbage.

We are expanding at a crazy rate right now, and one consequence of that is that we get a vocal minority of users coming in at once who are not long time lurkers and are not sharp on forum etiquette. We have cut down on a lot of the annoyance with the must-contain-uppercase-letters feature, the no-thread-necromancy feature and coming this weekend is the anti-bump feature. There are some very powerful mod tools in the works that will help us easily crack down on this sort of annoyance as well so I assure you that we will never devolve too far. The problem is, it only takes a few morons to really make the place look bad, so we have to stay on guard and crack down when they appear.

Teek wrote:
So how do we increase forum quality? I'm referring to members posting, not the nuts and bolts as Lego has been busting his hump for a long time on some great additions and improvements. Is it just that some folk are shy? Scared to offer criticism? I end my updates with a plea for C&C, meaning I want to hear it. I don't take every suggestion given, but input is always appreciated and usually leads to a better final product.

With regards to actual overall posts per day, we are by far the second largest forum next to warseer now. As mentioned, we hope to get more people who are interested in painting and modelling in through the features in the gallery, and hopefully we'll come up with some constructive ways to push people to help other users out too, perhaps with some sort of reward system in the modeling forums (there are rough ideas that are still being fleshed out).

CMDante wrote:Things like twitter are changing the way people interact socially on the internet. Integrating this somehow into Dakka to provide additional unique features would make the site unique.

Imagine if a large group of Dakka GD attendee's, for example, tweeted content from seminars or results and images as they happened. It would certainly draw people (like myself) who enjoy the rumour news and images.

The other thing might be to develop tools to make the site more valuable, the B&C marine painter tool for example is widely used and probably attracts a lot of new "faces" to the site.

We are content letting our friends at bell of lost souls handle the rapid news updates, preferring to be more about in depth discussion for now. However, there are a few twitter-like features planned for the future that will make things a lot more interesting and social. A range of tools are currently in the planning phase and will start getting phased in towards the end of the year with luck. The gallery, community management and site optimisation features are all being worked on first though.

I've been too busy working to update mine as much as i'd like- but i do feel it gets abit burried :(
Not sure how to change that

migsula wrote:I've tried posting only here and using cunning sigs to pull people from there, but only a few posters moved

damnit, i knew i felt tricked!

I have just started posting a Necromunda log on Farseer but seeing how Necromunda is farm more populare here I'd be more than happy to start posting it here as well with all of you I would love some more:

"people responding with advice, suggested changes, and constructive criticism." - Teek.

So now you will have yet another long time reader who will finely start posting

Btw migsula your logs are truly inspiring

I really think it's a matter of growing what we've started here this past year. Our community has grown exponentially for how long this section has even been here. Every week it seems that this section is more and more active, drawing more and more interest from all around the web. Hell, I even saw CMDante's Plog get pushed to the second page this past week! ^_-.

I know I really want to see Dakka's P&M Blogs become the premier modeling and painting spot on the web, but it's going to take a while before we get there.

I like the blogs here a heluva lot more. Over there the new posts get spammed 12 pages down in like an hour so you gotta dig to find all the good stuff

Necros wrote:I like the blogs here a heluva lot more.

QFT, i used to be on warseer alot of the time but then you realise how much they have and the amount of good stuff just isnt worth the 4 hours of filtering, thats why im a DCM im happy to donate to dakka so it may one day smash warseer, they have become too big and uncontrolled in a sense, plus they dont have legoburner and Yakeface

Kiddy pool better than Dakka? Nonsense.

I also have posted my WIP on a few other sites and find the responses on Dakka more rewarding so that I linger on here and share my experience with the other members... I then often copy my posts from here and paste them there matter of factly... I find more enjoyment interacting here with the original post.

I also enjoy the Mod structure here... other sites allow excesive language use and obviously team up with their "favorite" posters against others less prominent. I have enjoyed the interaction with various Mods who respond to my WIP thread and may or may not agree with my motives but still support my goals and dreams.

Well done Dakka, you have me on your side, and I will continue to support you for as long as I can.

Mik

Culturally we tend to be a lot more critical.

I find that in most English speaking countries it's easier to say something intelligent that's negative than something positive.

Positive posts tend to boil down to "AWESOME!" while critical posts can go on for paragraphs.

So ANYONE who posts here will feel like they're being critiqued, sometimes unfairly. And this can turn off some people, especially the top-tier painters who don't need to hear from someone with my limited skills going off on them.

Others like to get useful feedback but I think they're out numbered.

So I would say we've got a reputation for being harsh and so some people just won't post their models here.

Hi Migsula,

It's an interesting topic, I tend to post blogs on both forums.

I prefer Dakka's actual format and the options it offers us for example on dakka my Soviet 1:48 blog is only just reached 4 pages on warseer its coming onto 6! Their 4 photos per page rule also annoys me and they limit you to when you can respond, I hate that "please wait 30 seconds" nonsense.

However Warseer is far from perfect and they still have the GW virus. For example General project blogs on Warseer is described as historical and scale modeling and non GW, however the vast majority of blogs there are just "my 40K/WHFB" blog version 2. That really annoys me. I want to be able to use a service for what its advertised for. To see other peoples modeling interests outside of GW.

I find also that the vast majority of posters are wargamers and not modelers. My Dioramas always get the reply "wow cool but... I can't believe your not going to play with it". To me thats not the point.

I think there are some truths to the fact they have more traffic, however in terms of quality i'm not so sure. I have seen some god awful blogs there to be honest also, and its rare to get serious constructive crit or tips or advice. I've had much more modeling focussed responses and discussion here on Dakka. Personally I have always found the quality of modeling blogs on Dakka to be very high although to be fair Warseer has had some gems.

I think though that this is purely down to its age and established base, reputation.

Given time I am sure that usage on Dakka will grow, and with people posting work on both sites and referencing the other in them (for example I often talk about feedback or discussion I get on Dakka in my warseer blog) I'm sure cross usage and traffic will increase.

This is a great discussion guys - and as you should know, I'm a real dakkafanboy - I just felt there needs to be slight provocation "owns us completely" to get the discussion going

A lot of valuable opinions here and I remain excited to see the culture evolve and am committed to do my part of hopefully making dakka P&M blogs the place to visit.

We want nothing Warseer has. Nothing.

Except Brimstone. He's cool. He can stay.

H.B.M.C. wrote:We want nothing Warseer has. Nothing.

Except Brimstone. He's cool. He can stay.

+1

dakkadakka is dakkadakka lets keep it like that

migsula wrote:We have better functions, larger image sizes, free hosting, no limit to number of pics, bigger avatar pics! We gave =I=munda to the world!! ... yet Warseer modeling blogs totally own us in terms of variety and quality, and to an extent feedback and interaction.

Why?

How do we change that??

I've tried posting only here and using cunning sigs to pull people from there, but only a few posters moved and now I am going back to warseer again, because of the quality and quantity of content.

I want to change that. I hope we change that.

I feel the hosting system within dakka could change all that. But I really dislike the voting system. It's not what people want when they want to share their models as an interactive blog.

Migs,

First, let me say that I subscribe to every P&M thread you post. Secondly, I'm not at a place where I could even reasonably critique what you do. Perhaps that's part of the problem. People like to look, but they're not at or near the same level as you in terms of skill, and so are not commenting.

One simple and easy step everyone could take is a tit-for-tat approach to posting. If someone posts to your blog, go post something on theirs!

If you're lucky enough to have 500 replies every time you put up an update of your work, then just try to hit the threads of a few of your fans/critics. Try to post something constructive, and before you know it the response quality will improve with the added bonus of some of those chaps that don't see much interest in their work getting a bit of advice and a morale boost from seeing their own thread on the front page. Obviously if your respondee doesnt have an active blog, you'll just have to pick someone else...

In fact, I'm going to make that my aim and see if it helps. Time to hunt down some blogs.

Of all the 40k forum sites I look over, I prefer DD the most for many reasons. The people, the DD culture/attitude, the logs, the rumor discussions, the way the forum software is set up (having first and last post previews is very handy), and we have the best Smileys!

Anodyr wrote:One simple and easy step everyone could take is a tit-for-tat approach to posting. If someone posts to your blog, go post something on theirs!

If you're lucky enough to have 500 replies every time you put up an update of your work, then just try to hit the threads of a few of your fans/critics. Try to post something constructive, and before you know it the response quality will improve with the added bonus of some of those chaps that don't see much interest in their work getting a bit of advice and a morale boost from seeing their own thread on the front page. Obviously if your respondee doesnt have an active blog, you'll just have to pick someone else...

In fact, I'm going to make that my aim and see if it helps. Time to hunt down some blogs.

I totally agree and I try to post on other peoples blogs as much as I can.

Dakka and Warseer are both communities, and showing a community spirit like this is very important I think. It's important not to be all take take take, and give nothing back.

temprus wrote: and we have the best Smileys!

QFT

The thing I really like about Dakka is the fact that the people are nicer here than they are on Warseer. I have gone to Warseer before and been met with derision and mean comments when asking about a list or for an opinion on a mini or tactic. I don't care for that at all. I can't think of a time here that I was every really put down or insulted.

Hmm, I can understand there is some sort of rivalry between the two since they are both big communities. I, however, don't have a problem with either one of them. I'm cool with both and like to hope between them and hopefully even like to see them influence each other. Meaning that people from Warseer come over here and people from here go over there. Or perhaps even collaborations between our forums (how crazy is that!)

We don't need to be influenced by them. Ever been in an army list or tactics discussion with people who just want to talk about theme, fluff and happy fairy rainbow feelings? It's infuriating to try and talk to people about a list when you get yelled at for taking effective choices, and spend more time talking about paint schemes than army list construction.

That site is useless for anything except rumours, and even then we have Taco Bell to sort through the gak for us and get the real info out of there.