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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.