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I'm sure a few of you remember around 7 years ago when Dakka was still a store in the hands of Russ.

In those glorious days I was just starting my Warhammer 40,000 career and I came across this forum through pictures of all the cool tables and mega games Russ had. I joined this forum and started posting immediately looking for tactics, advice, and tips for furthering my gaming habit. I was rewarded in spades with this and general craziness of the Dakka of old.
I remember thinking how cool it would be to drive up from Texas and come see some of the Dakka crew and play in their cool games. The mega games, tournaments, and mini-games were just too cool.
I always thought “Man, if I get a gaming store I hope its as cool as that.”

But it was never to happen, by the time I graduated high school and got a job the store had closed up. So what am I to do I wonder? After High school I started a job in a local hobby store and after a while began running the gaming area. I tried bringing some of that awesome feel I got from seeing Dakka of old on my computer by running mega games, tournaments, and leagues, but something was missing… the mini-games.

About a year or so ago Russ was nice enough to use the wayback machine and post his Dreadnought Combat Arena rules to new Dakka, but the internet gods are fickle and the rules were lost.

Luckily I managed to save the rules to my hard drive and I’ve uploaded them as a dakka article.
http://www.dakkadakka.com/wiki/en/Dreadnought_Arena_Combat

Let the nostalgia commence.

Thanks Russ, for creating the forum that changed the way people look at GW hobbies and provided a highschool kid a place to post away.

I've been lurking on these forums for many years, and I have to second that Russ is the man and his dedication to the hobby has definately changed the way the many people view GW games.

I probably would have totally forgotten about GW entirely if it weren't for this website with its countless articles, mega battle pictures, and just the great conversations that go on in the forums.

I too am dissapointed that I never have and now never will be able to play at the once great store.

So... ummm... I was here WAY back in the day, back in '00 when we were graced with the guidance of Russ, Phanobi, and Task. I was on a sabbatical for several years so I missed some things. DakkaDakka, the store, no longer exists? What is the story with this website of the same name, then? Is Russ still around?

Confused.


Ghidorah

Ghidorah= Old School.

Russ still 'Moderating'.

PS-those Dread combat rules are great fun@!!!!

The store closed several years ago, in part due to Russ and the other owners all needing to put more time and focus into their families. It was sold first to Juan Rios, who due to some of his own personal issues was only able to keep it for less than a year, then to Brad Geoffroy (who still posts on here as Manfred von Drakken) who ran it for a while under the name Battlefield: Manchester. Despite some heroic efforts, Brad was also only able to keep it going for a short period before it finally closed. That was maybe 2004?

Russ also gradually had less time and energy to spare for the website, and last year sold it to Jon “Yakface” Regul, who, in collaboration with Legoburner, has been busily revamping the site and making it even more amazing than it previously was. Russ still pops in now and again and still has moderator rights. He’s more recently started a cool podcast project with Craig Gallant and Raef Granger, two other old Dakka Dakka gaming club/league veterans. Craig actually founded the original club that eventually became the basis for the store, and personally built several of the most amazing tables at the store, including the volcanic island one, the Mordheim city table, and the specialized Warmaster and Inquisitor tables. Check out the D6 Generation Podcast- there’s a sticky thread at the top of the Dakka Discussions forum.

Some of the moderators have been here since the early days, though I’m just about the only old-store local left on the crew; I played in Dreadnought Arena Combat, WH Jousting, and one of those Mega-Battles back in the day. Grey Death used to live in NH and play at the store too.

Mannahnin wrote:Craig actually founded the original club that eventually became the basis for the store, and personally built several of the most amazing tables at the store, including the volcanic island one, the Mordheim city table, and the specialized Warmaster and Inquisitor tables.

Not to mention some pretty frickin' amazing armies, too!

Appropriately enough today is in fact the 1 year anniversary of yakface and I taking the reins of Dakka. I was going to make a new post for this but here seems as appropriate as anywhere, and I just wanted to say that it has been a privilege to be able to be at the helm combining my two main hobbies (wargaming and programming) so thanks to everyone for enjoying dakka enough to keep me motivated to make improvements

Considering yakface and I have never actually met, it is quite amazing that two random people from across the world can collaborate with such success. We are almost polar opposites in terms of interests and personalities but that is what gives us strength and direction as we help cover what each other might not have noticed so many thanks to yakface for doing everything that I dont! Many thanks to the entire mod and article mod team too - between them and yakface, they do all the hard work dealing with people which leaves me free to work on the code and backend.

Since we took over dakka, traffic has practically tripled, and every other metric you might possibly measure the site against has increased considerably too (new users per day, posts per day, google rank, number of articles, and so on). Moving dakka to the new server and software late last year was a lot of work but has meant that there has been about 15 minutes of unplanned downtime in the entire year to date (and that was a temporary config error when I was load testing the server - oops!). In total there has been less than 2 and a half hours of planned downtime over the entire year from upgrading the site, and with last week's server upgrade we intend to keep it that way.

In the last year we launched the current forum, ported over the old forum posts without incidence, launched the articles system / wiki, switched to a dedicated server and built a hefty offsite infrastructure around it for stats/monitoring/backup, and there have been about 600 bug fixes and tweaks too. I already have a full schedule of works of equal complexity for this coming year but they are all secret save for the gallery which I assure you will be fantastic and is being developed completely from scratch (hence why it is taking so long).

So in short, everything is awesome, Dakka is more popular now than any time in it's long history, there are loads and loads of very cool things still to come (the planned features list I have is 6 pages long at the moment), and keep enjoying yourself and coming back! Thanks everybody and here's to another 9 years (that is when yakface and I will forget to renew the domain name and we'll lose the site to some spammers ).

Well said sir. It has indeed been a pleasure.


As for confused people like Ghidorah, and I still have to get up the 'history of dakka' article so everyone can start filling in their own personal memories to it.

I'll have to write a note on my hand to help me remember.


Edit: P.S. Foda, I cleaned up the formatting on your article a bit to make it easier to read.

Cool stuff, guys! At times, Dakka has been my only link to the hobby, so thanks for that! It's been fun seeing the site progress, and I'm looking forward to seeing the further improvements in the future.