7/31/2007 - As the clock strikes 9pm I am lucky enough to be the highest bidder of the Ebay auction for my favorite website: Dakkadakka.com. What an amazing feeling to own something you like so much!

I want to thank everyone who gave me well wishes during the auction and I especially want to thank those who pledged to contribute to Dakka should I win. I will certainly let you all know when everything is in place for you to make those contributions.

I also want to give a big thanks to Russ Wakelin. Despite only ever meeting him once at the Adepticon 2007 and sadly never having gotten the chance to visit the actual Dakka store he has still managed to postiviely affect my life by creating a website that would ultimately give thousands of miniature gamers worldwide a place to fritter their time at work away. It is only because of his incredible dedication and hard work over the years that I even have the chance to run such a great site.

Although I keep using the term "I", I'm going to start using "we". I may have put up the money for the site, but it is only through a team effort that Dakka will become something greater. A longtime lurker on the site, legoburner is going to be providing all the technical know-how for site maintenance and improvement. While I may take all the credit, he'll be doing all the really hard work and for that I want to acknowledge his incredibly valuable future contributions right now up front.

So what's next, you ask? First, I'm going to be paying Russ via good old snail mail, so Mr. Paypal doesn't get a chunk of the money Russ so rightly deserves. That means I won't actually have access to the site for a few days until Russ gets my check.

Once that happens, sadly you're not going to be seeing any major changes for a bit. We will eventually be moving to new forum software, but its going to take some time to get all the basics implemented in the new forum and the old content migrated. As I have more information on this change-over, I will certainly let you all know.

But what exactly are we going to do with Dakka, many people have already asked me. The answer is nothing and everything. There will be no sudden increase in advertising, Dakka won't become a pay site or a Hello Kitty fansite. Dakka will firmly remain a forum dedicated to the hobby of miniature gaming. More than ever we are going to focus on three major things: Celebrating the hobbyists who make the miniature gaming community what it is, the ease of which this community is able to share with each other and the rich history of DakkaDakka. 

I'm not going to announce all of our plans months before you'll see some of these things implemented, but I can give you a few exciting tidbits:

• We will be returning to a classic Dakka look (Grey background with gold text).
• We will be moving to more stable forum software and server host.
• We will be allowing all members to upload photos and files to Dakka.
• We will be implementing features that highlight quality content and quality posters. This will make it exceedingly easy for anyone visiting Dakka to find that content or poster, no matter how long ago the content was originally created.
• We will have an article system that is unique from any other gaming site and will change the way forum articles are created and maintained. 

So hang onto your hats ladies and gentlemen, because the Dakka plane is about to take off and while I can't say exactly where its going to land I guarantee you're going to enjoy the destination.

Here's to another fantastic ten years of Dakka!

---Jon "yakface" Regul

re-posted from a reply made by LEGOBURNER later in this thread:

Hi All, as Yakface mentioned, I am the guy who will be taking over the backend systems and technical side of things. We dont want to give away all of our plans just yet, but I can share a few more things with you and answer technical queries.

The new forum software is currently being developed. We are starting with an existing UBB style forum, but are adding a lot more functionality to get it closer to vbulletin (the one warseer uses) levels. This is being done (as opposed to just buying vbb) to give us much more flexibility for the later releases which will let us integrate other non-forum things with the forum and login system. If everything goes to plan and testing does not throw up too many bugs we will hopefully be switching over in October. There are currently 3-4 major site releases in the pipeline after that at the moment.

To answer Necros' query, yes - I am writing a utility program to copy over the old forum content into the new forum so all the existing content should be copied in to place when we flick the switch. There may be minor issues such as the differing authentication schemes possibly requiring you to reset your password to be able to log in the first time, but after that things should be very very stable.

We will be getting a dedicated dual core server with hundreds of GB of space and TBs of bandwidth per month so there will be loads of spare capacity for us to have full freedom in developing the site further. A comprehensive backup plan will be in place so that even if a meteor strikes the server we will be able to get back up and running very very quickly. There are some very cool things in the pipeline that will make dakka even more awesome but we will keep them to ourselves for now . We are into this for the hobby and fun of it, not the profit, so you will see no additional adverts either.

That's the plan.

I think Jon only buys things are have long lasting instrinic value and aren't broken! I was thinking that if every one who actively plays GW games got together with $100 each, I bet we could do a hostile takeover :-)

HAIL!

HAIL!

HAIL!

HAIL!

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