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The problem I notice with Find a Game is that many threads are lost at the bottom. There are a lot of tournament and game threads that are well appointed by many British gamers, and that is fine, but the issue I have is that postings for the US get squeezed out, especially by users that are looking for a game in their region, but have failed to notice that there are threads and answers a few lines down, or even on the second page, and clutter things up looking for a game when there is probably a good answer in a recent thread.

So would it be possible to break things up regionally? Say a UK section, a US section (by states or groups of states), south america, European nations, Asia, japan, australia, etc.

Thank you for your consideration.

Or, you could just use the search bar!

Search doesn't always return the data that you want. This give you quick service at a glance.

I think it would be better and would keep all those similar questions in one area. . FREX: Look at how many people are looking for a game in Ohio (USA) a new post from that area comes up every three days or so. Many of the questions could be easily resolved if all the posts from Ohio (or anywhere else) were in one place. Same for New York, or Scotland, or Argentina.

The problem with the sub-forums idea is having people actually post in the right place. People can't handle YMDC questions in YMDC, do you think they would correctly use location based Find a Game?

We are aware of this issue.

We will not be making sub-forums for different locations but at some point (in the distant future) we will likely have some form of integrated map-based solution that ties together our Store Finder with a player-finder of some sort.

But for the time being, just use the search function. I know it certainly isn't perfect, but if you do the advanced search (from the 'search' link under the 'forum tools' at the top of the page it gives you options of how to refine your search a bit.

Thought process goes something like this:

Hmmm, I'm new in the area, I'd like to find a game. Let me see what I can find on Dakka. Oh my what is this, listings for all sorts of places all jumbled up - no seeming organization. Well I'll post anyway and see if I get any bites.

A week later the user checks the site and his post is now on page 4, having had no impact, whereas if there were a sub-se tion for his area it would have more likely been noticed instead of buried.

Other sites do this well, but yours has more traffic. It could possibly help everyone out if you would reconsider your stand on the matter.

As an example Bolter and Chainsword has a sub forum set up for various regions, it has been helpful in the past, but it has a far more limited user base than Dakka. In light of that I could see Dakka as being an even greater hub of the gaming community with only a minimum of effort put forth.

I am sure this would make your site even more streamlined and useful to the community. Please reconsider your stand on this and weigh the benefits a bit more.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 pretre wrote:
The problem with the sub-forums idea is having people actually post in the right place. People can't handle YMDC questions in YMDC, do you think they would correctly use location based Find a Game?

That's because they don't understand the difference between 'discussion' and 'rules discussion', but I'm sure that they know their geographical location.

Hang on i have to interject here. When ever i go into find a Game nearly all the threads are for the USA.

At the moment 23 out of 48 threads are for the US.
13 are for the UK.
3 for Canada.
1 for China
1 For Italy
There are 3 Tourny threads
and the rest are impossible to tell location by the tread titles.


Also given that the Find a Game board is one of the slower moving boards if you pop in 1 a week you can be sure you won't miss anything.

That being said though maybe for the sake of clarification it might be easier to implement a system kind of like the swapshop where you put your country in brackets. So you could have, as an example

[Aus] Looking for 40k games in Melbourne.
or
[USA] Looking for Infinity/40k games in Fort "such n' such", Texas.

That way you can just skim the left hand hand side of the page till you see a relevent country tag.

The mods spend way too much time having to get people to follow the swap shop rules as it is.