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I have the 40k tactics forum bookmarked and drop in on occasion to several of the threads. Today, however, it is missing (for me) from the list of 40k threads and my bookmark (https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/forums/show/18.page) says I don't have permission to access it.
Is there some server work going on? Have I been shadow-banned?

Looks like there's server work going on - I don't see it in the list of boards right now, and I also note that Tournament Discussions has been merged with something else.

Hi, nobody has been shadow banned! There's been a reshuffle of some of the sub-forums and the 40k tactics have been folded into the 40k general discussion forums.

Why did you do that? How will anyone ever find a Tactics thread mixed in with all the General 40K discussions?

40K has a lot of sub forums by necessity, but the Tactics forum hasn't really seen any significant amount of discussion for the past several editions of the game. The current edition in particular seems to have really killed off interest in discussing tactics.

If people want to talk tactics, they still can. But there's just not enough of that discussion happening to warrant a separate section.

 alextroy wrote:
Why did you do that? How will anyone ever find a Tactics thread mixed in with all the General 40K discussions?

Possibly the easiest way would be for people to have [Tactics] at the beginning of their thread title. Much like how swapshop has or that people are doing in the Old World/Fantasy sub.

 insaniak wrote:
40K has a lot of sub forums by necessity, but the Tactics forum hasn't really seen any significant amount of discussion for the past several editions of the game. The current edition in particular seems to have really killed off interest in discussing tactics.

If people want to talk tactics, they still can. But there's just not enough of that discussion happening to warrant a separate section.

You say that as if a sub forum on a larger forum takes some kind of effort to maintain. This merger just makes it even harder for anybody to discuss tactics while also clogging up General Dicussion for no good reason except possibly to make the forum appearmore active.

 insaniak wrote:
40K has a lot of sub forums by necessity, but the Tactics forum hasn't really seen any significant amount of discussion for the past several editions of the game. The current edition in particular seems to have really killed off interest in discussing tactics.

The issue is that all of the factions have their own tactics thread. And migrating all of them into to the general thread has made it very cluttered.

Even if they're not being updated as often as they were in other, better editions of the game, I think it was useful that they had their own space.

The faction specific tacticas should be stickies.

Then everyone would have to scroll down a third of the page to see anything else. I wouldn't mind making a sticky with a link to all of the faction tactics threads but nobody reads stickies...

 Kanluwen wrote:
The faction specific tacticas should be stickies.

That's a lot of stickies. The Imperium alone would be 11 sticked threads, then Chaos is like a half dozen, then you get the Xenos. There's a reason it had and still should have an entire sub forum.

 ingtaer wrote:
Then everyone would have to scroll down a third of the page to see anything else. I wouldn't mind making a sticky with a link to all of the faction tactics threads but nobody reads stickies...

What if we instead stickied them in a different area of the 40k board?

We could call it '40k Tactics' or something like that.

Stickies very bad idea. 26 sticky would be "excessive"

If Tactics can't exist on its own, why not roll it into Army Lists which are at least related?

 Canadian 5th wrote:
You say that as if a sub forum on a larger forum takes some kind of effort to maintain. This merger just makes it even harder for anybody to discuss tactics while also clogging up General Dicussion for no good reason except possibly to make the forum appearmore active.

Tactics was rolled into General Discussion because it's not getting any traffic. That's not likely to 'clog up' General Discussion for precisely that reason.

A section that gets no traffic obviously doesn't take effort to maintain, because there's nothing happening in there. But that also makes it just wasted space on the front page that people have to scroll past to get to actual content. So we periodically look at which sections that no longer get traffic, and prune or reorganise them. In this case, that meant removing 40K tactics, reducing the number of subsections for AoS, rolling Tournament Discussion into local gaming, and a few other tweaks.

We understand that's disappointing for those users who are specifically interested in discussions related specifically to the sections that have been removed, but these sorts of tweaks are an important part of keeping the forum active. Dead sections discourage posting overall.

 insaniak wrote:

 Canadian 5th wrote:
You say that as if a sub forum on a larger forum takes some kind of effort to maintain. This merger just makes it even harder for anybody to discuss tactics while also clogging up General Dicussion for no good reason except possibly to make the forum appearmore active.

Dead sections discourage posting overall.

I could buy that if other barriers to posting were bring addressed but the site being awful on mobile doesn't look like it's ever going to be fixed. If the mods, administration, and owner want traffic what's needed is new forum software, search optimization so new people can find the forum, and a presence on Reddit, FB and Discord so people have other ways to funnel back to the forum. Shuffling deck chairs will only make current posters leave while not solving the issues killing the site in the first place.

While I'm not as up in arms as others I'm really surprised to see tactics go while army lists survives. One has/ had several threads with 30+ pages (most notably the ork one) while the other looks pretty dead with loads of lists that rarely get more than 3 replies.
If anything I'd have thrown the army lists forum into the tactics forum.

I’ll echo the general “I liked the Tactics subforum” sentiment.
But it’s not a huge deal either way.

The tactics sub forum seems like a more natural pairing with army lists than general discussion imo.
I think the units you'd be selecting would have symbiotic relation to the tactics you would use with them.

There was like dozen or so thread within day when i checked when change was. How many active threads tactics section needed to have to be considered getting trafic?

This seems like a bad change to me. I'm not sure I buy the thinking that a single sub forum with low traffic has any major effect on the rest of the board. I'm also not sure I agree it wasn't getting much traffic compared to other parts of the site. Activity has definitely been down in 10th edition, but it was still fairly active, certainly more so than other sub forums.

I could see merging army lists and tactics as they are at least related. I think just pruning stuff because it doesn't meet some threshold for traffic is short-sighted as sometimes having a distinct section for certain types of content is useful in itself.

 ingtaer wrote:
Then everyone would have to scroll down a third of the page to see anything else. I wouldn't mind making a sticky with a link to all of the faction tactics threads but nobody reads stickies...

As opposed to having to read every single random "I have a genius thought!" tactic thread that's going to get rolled in there instead?

It's weird to me that the Tactics subforum got rolled into General Discussion rather than Army Lists. It's even weirder that YMDC was kept on as its own thing rather than rolled into Tournament Discussions.

And even weirder is that Infinity kept its own forum, instead of being rolled into SciFi, when that subforum's basically been dead for a good chunk of time. There's ONE active thread this year. About dice.

There is no 40k tournament discussions forum Kan.
Not sure why Yakface decided to keep the separate companies sub forums but its his call to make.

I know there's not a 40k Tournament Discussions Board.

There is, however, a Tournaments and Local Gaming board.

Announcements for local tournaments/stores/clubs and requests for local games. Also for general discussions about running wargaming tournaments.

I'd say that last bit fits for YMDC.

Which is for every single wargame and card game so why would 40k rules questions get folded into it? That makes no sense whatsoever.

 ingtaer wrote:
Which is for every single wargame and card game so why would 40k rules questions get folded into it? That makes no sense whatsoever.

It makes as much sense as keeping 40k YMDC as "40k YMDC". No other game system has a YMDC subforum right now. Why didn't that get genericized instead of mashing "Local Gaming" with "Tournaments"?

Not trying to pick a fight or anything. I'm just genuinely confused by these changes. I get that you didn't make them and your opinions as to what should/shouldn't be where is likely to differ to mine.

Personal Feelings:
I personally felt like 40k General was too crowded to begin with, this is likely going to make finding anything relevant or interesting just more frustrating. I felt the same way about the Tactics section, with swathes of it being YMDC Incognito.

I think it is reasonable that 40k tactics gets merged with 40k army lists instead of 40k general discussion.

I don't think 40k YMDC should be moved into tournaments and local for a couple of reasons:
1) YMDC is relevant to all players (with the caveat many players are much more comfortable reaching an agreable interpretation that may not be RAW), not just tournaments or specific locales. It wouldn't be intuitive that it would be general rules queries over queries specifically related to tournaments.
2) 40k has a YMDC section because 40k is notorious for poorly-written rules and the size of the 40k ruleset means odd interactions occur at a high frequency. It is also the largest wargame. All of these factors generate much larger numbers of rules queries than other games.

Looking at the first five pages in the 40K Army List forum, there's only four threads with more than ten replies (and a fair many that have no replies at all). IMHO that doesn't sound like it's getting much traffic either.

 Kanluwen wrote:
I know there's not a 40k Tournament Discussions Board.

There is, however, a Tournaments and Local Gaming board.

Announcements for local tournaments/stores/clubs and requests for local games. Also for general discussions about running wargaming tournaments.

I'd say that last bit fits for YMDC.

YMDC is a section for asking rules questions about playing the game. The tournament section was a place to share and talk about tournaments for any game, or to talk about how to run them. The vast majority of posts in there were the former. Rules questions for specific games systems would in no way fit in there.


So far as merging Tactics and Army Lists goes, while they are possibly a superficially better fit, giving how little life the Army Lists section has these days it would likely only be a temporary fix. Army Lists stayed for now because it's a very specific thing and may potentially pick up a little once more factions have codexes for the current edition, but given current trends I would expect that it will eventually wind up also rolled into 40K general.

It's worth keeping in mind that 40K is the only games system that currently warrants so many sub-sections splitting off different types of discussion, and it only does that because of the volume of discussion dedicated to it. When that discussion isn't happening, there is simply no good reason to have those separate sections. All it does is splinter what discussion is happening into separate silos, and discourages discussion in the quieter areas because potential posters can see that there is no discussion happening there.

If we combine sections and find later on that certain topics are crowding out other discussion, then that change can always be reversed or altered. But for the moment, this was the change that made the most sense.

I am confuse over judging the worth of a subforum based on replies rather than views.
If someone nails the reasoning with their response does it need replies?
A bit like that stunned silence you get if you nail a point IRL.