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During my short stay here at dakka, I have discovered that some forums are extremely overcrowded. For example, in the 40k army list forum, once you post a list, its gone the next day. In the fantasy forum for army lists, it's not as bad, however posts still move down the list quite quickly.

The main problem this presents is that if a post goes unnoticed for a day or two, there is a high likelihood that no one will respond; it's far down the first page or even on the second. Because of this, I am proposing a simple solution.

In extremely crowded forums, why not add sub-forums to relieve congestion? For example, in the army lists forums, why not add a sub-forum for each army, instead of having all the lists jammed together in one?

In my opinion, this would benefit the forum as a whole in two ways. Number one, army list posters would have far more time on the front page, therefore receiving more advice. Second, it would just help make the forums more organised.

Another place I think this could be utilised would be in general forums, such as dakka swap shop. Why not separate the Fantasy,40k, and other wargames posts?

I'm sure there are drawbacks to this idea, however I don't really see any. What do you guys think?

No more sub-forums. Dakka has the balance pretty right.

I agree that most of it is very well balanced, but maybe just in a couple forums with large amounts of posts. Take the 40k army list forum: It gets upwards of 50 posts a day. I just think if it was seperated a bit it would help.

That's because posters can just regurgitate a list and expect people to reply with reams of paragraphs on what to do, how to run it.

Honestly though, I do know what you mean. It's especially difficult for more obscure lists/builds. I can't think of an elegent solution though.

Well what if the original forum page remained the same, however when you clicked on a crowded forum, you would be taken to a page with a list of sub forums within that specific forum. (In the list builders, one per army type) This wouldn't stop the excessive list making, but by spreading them out it would mask the problem a bit.

Part of the reason that I don't think this is likely going to be implemented is that Dakka really doesn't have any true sub-forums at all. We have forums that are broken up into categories, but no actual sub-forums at all.

There is only really one page where all the forums are listed, and adding around 20 additional forums to that page for 40K and WFB alone is not really something that makes sense.

I guess it might be a little excessive, however dakkadakka is constantly growing, so I think it might be something they could consider in the future.

I don't know how hard it would be to implement. Dakka is pretty much coded from scratch as far as I know, so it could just be a huge headache for lego.

It probably doesn't help that I think that the list sections are some of the least helpful areas of Dakka, and I usually see all the suggestions coming down to "take this copy paste netlist".

Dakka is my favorite forum, but for me personally I go to the more specialized forums for my lists (Bolter & Chainsword for SM as an example). We do cover a very large variety of games here, and while GW is a big part of it I think we are getting better and better at not being a GW centric forum.

One of the issues with splitting army lists that way is how it divides attention. Look at the lesser used factions such as SoB. All the traffic would go to the marine boards which will still likely remain congested at the cost of isolating the lesser used factions which would become even less likely to get a response.

When I want to look at army lists, all I do is scroll down through the top three pages, until something catches my attention, and even when I'm looking for DE or tau lists those of other armies often catch my attention. It works quite well, and I've had army lists down to page three only for someone to notice it and bring it back to the top. Sure, it creates a bit of a gamble over whether anyone will see it, but I think sub-forums would actually stop people from looking at the lists as much, and those people that only pick the top few army lists are the people less likely to read them thoroughly anyway.

It is something that we always consider and it definitely never hurts to put your voice forward that you feel a particular forum is 'too busy', but honestly we'll always tend to err on the side of too few forums than too many.

When you have too many forums it essentially fragments the eyes reading any given forum and while that can make it easier to find a specific topic, in general that will make everything feel a lot less active as people DO tend to head into one forum with the thought of looking at one type of thing and then get side-tracked into reading and commenting on something else entirely different.

The more you split topics up into different forums, the less of this you get which does tend to quickly reduce the people willing to ever go into a forum that they don't imagine they'd be interested in.


The problem with the 40K army list forum (if there is one) isn't that it is too busy...as somebody mentioned, you can always simply jump a few pages back or do a search if you're looking for a specific topic. The real issue is that far more people are interested in POSTING their army list and hoping for feedback than they are willing to GIVE feedback on other peoples' list themselves.

And on top of that, way, way too many people simply post their army list and then ask for general feedback...essentially requiring others to do all the guesswork of trying to figure out what they're trying to accomplish with their army list instead of asking specific and targeted questions that people will easily be able to identify and respond to.

So splitting up the forum into say different army list forums for every single faction would not help the problem at all. Yes, topics wouldn't drop off the front page quite as quickly in each forum, but people still wouldn't necessarily post responses simply because there are generally more topics being created than people giving feedback.

Id agree with Yak on the issue with the army list forum, being more that people just posts lists but few provide feedback, an additional point would be that most feedback fits more into cookie cutter type lists. Someone posts fluffy theme'd idea X and is told it will never work so build cheese army y instead