What is happening
On 21 September 2026 the BHVR Dead by Daylight community team posted a sticky announcement on the official forums at forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight. The post, signed by the community team and pinned to the top of every subforum, confirmed that the long-running Vanilla Forums-hosted community space will shut down at the end of October 2026, just shy of the game's 10th anniversary. BHVR framed the move as a consolidation, not a retreat: the team will shift its community effort to three properties the studio already operates, the official Discord server, the Steam Discussions tab inside the DBD store page, and the r/DeadbyDaylight subreddit, rather than continue paying to maintain a separate long-form forum layer.
The wording in the announcement was deliberately neutral. It thanked the forum community for years of contributions, recognised that the forums have hosted "incredible moments of creativity, debate, theorycrafting, and shared enthusiasm for our game," and laid out a transition window of roughly five weeks between announcement and closure. The post did not address archival, deletion, or any kind of read-only preservation of historical threads, and the absence of that language is the reason this post exists.
Behaviour Interactive is the same studio that launched Dead by Daylight in June 2016. The forums have run continuously under the Vanilla Forums platform under the bhvr.com domain since the open beta of that year, surviving four chapters a year of content, two Resident Evil crossovers, a Silent Hill chapter, a steady drip of licensed killers from Halloween and Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the introduction of 2v8 mode in 2024, and the DBD 10th anniversary event in mid-2026. The forum platform is being retired, but the wider community is not. BHVR will still have presence on Discord, Steam, and Reddit. What disappears is the long-form, threaded, searchable, server-archived discussion layer that the forums provided. That distinction matters more than the announcement lets on.
A short note on the BHVR quote that the community has been passing around. The line, "Discord, in particular, will become more and more central to our community work in the months ahead," is verbatim from the original announcement post. It is the closest thing to a thesis statement that the community team has put on record about the future direction of DBD community spaces, and it tells players who used the forums as their primary hub that they should plan on Discord being the new front door. The line does not say Discord will replace the forums. It says Discord will become central. That is a softer commitment than a replacement, and it leaves a lot of room for the team to keep using Discord as a chat layer while letting long-form content slide to Reddit and Steam Discussions by default. For forum users who care about searchable, persistent discussion, that is the part to worry about.
When exactly, and the timeline
The headline closure date is the end of October 2026. BHVR has not published a specific day, only "the end of October." Based on how the team has handled similar transitions on other Behaviour properties and on how the Vanilla Forums platform is structured for scheduled retirement, the most likely target window is October 30 to October 31, 2026, with the actual kill switch hitting sometime in the late European evening on a weekday. As of the date this post is being written, 27 September 2026, there are roughly 30 days remaining between publication and the end of October, give or take. Players who want to use the forums as a working research tool in the meantime still have the full month of October to grab what they need.
Here is the operational timeline as we understand it.
September 21, 2026. The closure announcement is posted on the official forums by the BHVR community team and pinned across all subforums. Reaction threads start almost immediately, including the JP-language isolation thread referenced later in this post and the "One Last Time" farewell thread that surfaced within 24 hours.
Late September through October 2026. BHVR will email registered forum users with a Discord invite link and instructions for claiming the new forum-member role. The email goes to whatever address the user registered with on the forums. If you have not logged into the forums in years and you no longer have access to that email, you will not receive the invite link and you will need to join Discord manually to find the role channel.
End of October 2026. The forums at forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight go offline. The Vanilla Forums platform that hosts them is being retired across BHVR's portfolio, not just for DBD, so this is a platform-wide shutdown with DBD being the largest affected community. After this date the URL stops resolving and historical thread URLs return 404 or a generic Vanilla Forums retirement page, depending on how BHVR configures the redirect.
Coming weeks. A dedicated long-form or threaded Discord channel goes live for forum migration. The exact name and structure are not yet public, but the community team has committed to a forum-veteran style space that supports more structured posts than the existing Discord channels, which are mostly real-time chat.
There is one subtle detail worth flagging. The forum-member role is a Discord role, not a forum feature. It is being set up on the official DBD Discord server as a recognisable badge that grants access to a forum-veteran channel. That channel is the closest thing BHVR is building to a forum replacement, but it is still Discord underneath, which means it is still ephemeral by default, still not indexed by Google, and still subject to Discord's content moderation and retention policies rather than the Vanilla Forums terms you agreed to when you first registered.
Countdown view. If you are reading this on the day it is published, you have 4 to 5 weeks to do whatever archival work you want to do on the forums. If you wait until the last week of October, the Vanilla Forums platform may already be in a read-only or partially degraded state, and any third-party crawler you use may struggle to keep up with whatever redirect or removal pattern BHVR sets up.
The deletion-not-archive bombshell
The single most important follow-up to the announcement did not come from BHVR. It came from the community.
Within days of the closure announcement, a long-time forum member with the handle GentlemanFridge started a thread titled "Will the forums be archived or deleted?" on the official forums. The thread ID is 472654, and the URL is forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/472654/will-the-forums-be-archived-or-deleted. The question was direct: once the forums close, will BHVR keep a read-only copy of the threads somewhere, the way Blizzard kept a public archive of the old Battle.net Diablo II forums after the platform migration, or will the content disappear?
GentlemanFridge reached out directly to the BHVR community manager, who goes by "Mandy" on Discord and on the forums, and asked for an on-the-record answer. Mandy replied via DM, and the answer, paraphrased and confirmed by GentlemanFridge in the thread and in follow-up posts, was that the forums will be deleted, not archived. The Vanilla Forums platform is being retired across BHVR's portfolio and the hosting tier is not being kept alive in a read-only state. Once the URL goes dark, the threads go with it.
For a 10-year-old game forum, that is a meaningful loss. Even allowing for the fact that a lot of DBD forum content over the years has been noise, the long tail of the forums includes real community work. There are multi-page patch theorycrafting threads from the Pig rework in 2023, the Nurse rework in 2024, the Spirit balance pass, the Blight adjustments, the Sadako tuning pass, and the Vecna tuning that landed earlier in 2026. There are dedicated lore threads for killers like Sadako, the Demogorgon, the Xenomorph, Pyramid Head, Albert Wesker, Dracula, and the original cast of survivors, written by community members with more patience for canon than the studio has ever officially committed to. There are community-run event retrospectives for the annual Halloween and Christmas events, the anniversary events, the 2v8 launch event, and the Birthday Bash events from 2018 through 2025. There are fan-fic threads, build-of-the-week threads, killer strategy guides, survivor route write-ups, console-versus-PC discussion, region-specific event threads, and the kind of low-volume, off-topic chat that does not happen on Reddit because Reddit punishes it.
For comparison, when Blizzard retired the legacy Diablo II forums in 2021, the studio kept a public read-only archive of the historical threads. When BioWare migrated the old SWTOR forums to a new platform, the threads came with the community. When ArenaNet retired the Guild Wars 1 forums in 2023, the threads went read-only for a year before being archived offline. The pattern in the games industry, when a publisher closes a community forum, is to either archive read-only, mirror to the Wayback Machine with the studio's cooperation, or migrate the content to a new platform. Deletion without a read-only mirror is rare, and in recent memory no major gaming publisher has done exactly what BHVR is doing here.
That is not a value judgment on BHVR's community team. It is a platform reality. Vanilla Forums charges per hosted community, and the DBD forums are BHVR's largest community on the platform but not their only one. Retiring the platform for the whole portfolio is cheaper than keeping a read-only mirror just for DBD. The cost of that decision is borne entirely by the forum community, in lost searchability and lost history.
There is one practical upside worth noting. Forum users who want a personal copy of their own posts and threads can still scrape them in October. The Vanilla Forums platform supports per-user post exports, and a number of community members have already shared the export procedure in the migration thread. Anything you do not save yourself by the end of October is gone.
The Discord migration plan
The biggest piece of BHVR's plan is Discord. The community team is treating the official DBD Discord server as the new front door, and the announcement post says so directly. "Discord, in particular, will become more and more central to our community work in the months ahead."
There are three concrete changes coming to the Discord server.
First, the forum-member role. BHVR will email registered forum users an invite link to the official Discord. The invite is tied to a unique URL, so the user can claim a forum-member role on their Discord account. The role functions as a recognisable badge and, in practice, gates access to a forum-veteran channel that the regular Discord audience does not see. There is no public price tag on the role, it is free, but it does require the user to have an active email on the forums and to follow the invite link before the role-assignment window closes. BHVR has not said how long the invite window stays open. If the same email-based model is used as previous Discord role migrations, the window is likely 30 to 60 days from announcement, which puts the deadline somewhere in late November 2026, comfortably after the forum closure.
Second, a new dedicated long-form or threaded channel. The current DBD Discord is mostly chat. Channels are real-time, messages scroll past, and there is no first-class post-reply threading outside of forum threads in Discord's Threads feature. The community team is committing to a space that supports more structured discussion, closer to the forum feel, with named threads that survive in the channel. Discord does support persistent forum-style threads inside a server, and that is the feature being deployed here. The exact name has not been published at the time of writing. The community team has been calling it internally a long-form or threaded channel. For forum users used to subforum-style categories, this is the closest functional equivalent.
Third, the community team itself is moving to Discord. The announcement says "the community team will primarily focus our efforts on Discord, Steam Discussions, and the Reddit subreddit going forward." That is a staffing statement. The people who used to read and respond on the forums are now going to be on Discord. They will run AMAs, host patch-preview conversations, post dev-stream teasers, and run community-spotlight events on Discord. If you want to be on the inside track for BHVR-led community engagement, Discord is where it will happen.
The practical reality is that Discord is great for chat and terrible for searchable long-form. Two specific failure modes are worth flagging.
Searchability. Discord's search is server-scoped. You can search messages in a server you are a member of, but the search results do not surface in Google. A forum thread on "best Spirit counterplay" that has been ranking on the first page of Google for the last five years will, in the Discord form, become a Discord post in a channel that almost no one outside the Discord server can find. If you have a blog post, a guide site, or a YouTube video that used to cite a forum URL, those citations will 404.
Retention. Discord retains messages indefinitely for active servers, but a forum-style channel only retains its content if the server stays active. If the server ever gets re-platformed, if the community team's Discord permissions change, or if Discord changes its retention defaults, content that lived for years in a forum thread can vanish with no warning. Forums on the Vanilla Forums platform had a clearer archival story because the platform was an independent database. Discord is a chat product that happens to support forum threads as a feature, and the data model underneath is different.
For forum users who want to keep contributing to long-form DBD discussion, the move to Discord will feel familiar but not identical. The new long-form channel will help. It will not fully replace what forums offered, and it will not be SEO-visible to the wider DBD community.
Steam Discussions and Reddit
The other two destinations are Steam Discussions and Reddit.
Steam Discussions is the forum-style tab inside the DBD store page on Steam. It is tied to Steam accounts, so anyone who owns DBD on Steam can post without registering a separate account. The friction is lower for Steam players, which is a meaningful slice of the PC base. The Discussion tab supports multiple subforum-like sections, including General Discussion, Bug Reports, and Guides, and the threads are threaded, persistent, and tied to your Steam identity. For a Steam player who only ever used the official forums to ask a quick build question or to read a patch thread, Steam Discussions will work in a pinch.
The problem with Steam Discussions is that it does not rank in Google search. Steam aggressively no-indexes the Discussions tab on its store pages, which means anything posted there is invisible to the wider search-driven DBD audience. A thread on the official forums titled "Best Agitation build for the Trapper" would, in theory, show up if someone searched for that exact phrase. The same content on Steam Discussions will not. For discovery, Steam Discussions is a dead end. For internal Steam-user chat, it is fine.
The third destination is the r/DeadbyDaylight subreddit. Reddit is the largest English-language DBD community on the open web, with a subscriber count that sits comfortably above the 600,000 mark. The subreddit runs hot, has active moderation, multiple daily threads for build help, patch discussion, meme content, and lore, and is the de facto English-language DBD town square already. For most English-speaking forum users, the subreddit will absorb most of the migration.
Reddit's format is different from a forum, and the difference matters for power users. Reddit threads are flatter. The top-level post and its comments live in a single linear tree. There are no nested subforum categories, no per-category moderation, and no persistent thread index inside a category the way forums have. The subreddit handles this with a heavy use of post flairs (Build, Discussion, Bug, Question, Humor, Video, LFG) and daily megathreads for patch discussion. The result is a high-volume, high-noise feed that is well-moderated but not as navigable as a forum subforum list.
Both options also share the same weakness Discord has. Neither is a perfect replacement for the kind of long-form, persistent, threaded discussion that the forums hosted. Steam Discussions is locked to Steam accounts and invisible to Google. Reddit is open and Google-indexed but more ephemeral by design. Discord is searchable inside the server and nowhere else. None of the three offers the same URL-per-thread, thread-per-category, decade-deep SEO visibility that the forums did.
The Japanese-language isolation problem
The English-language reactions to the closure have been largely structural. Where will build discussion live? Where will bug reports go? What about the long-form archive? The Japanese-language reaction, captured in forum thread 472610, has been much more pointed, and the reason is that for Japanese-speaking players, the migration is not a lateral move to a similar platform. It is a downgrade.
The Japanese-language thread on the forums (ID 472610) flagged the problem within hours of the closure announcement. The complaint, paraphrased and translated from the original post, is direct. "Unfortunately, the official Discord server has no plans to support Japanese at this time." That single line is doing a lot of work. The official DBD Discord does not run a Japanese-language channel, does not have Japanese-language moderators as a baseline, and does not support JP-language bots or commands. A JP-speaking user who joins the Discord today sees an English-first server with limited French and Spanish channels and no JP at all. The community team has not announced any JP-channel plans as part of the forum migration.
Reddit does not have a Japanese-language Dead by Daylight subreddit. There is r/DeadbyDaylight, which is the official English-language sub, and there is no r/DeadbyDaylightJP or equivalent. The Japanese-speaking DBD community on Reddit clusters into a few cross-language threads inside the English sub or into completely separate Discord servers that the community runs itself. Neither option is something BHVR is migrating users to.
Steam Discussions does support Japanese. Steam is region-agnostic for the Discussions tab, and Japanese-speaking players can post and read in Japanese on the DBD store page. The catch is that Steam Discussions is Steam-only, which excludes PS5, Xbox Series, Switch, Epic Games Store, and Windows players. A Japanese-speaking console player has no Steam Discussions equivalent and no JP Discord to migrate to.
That is the JP-language isolation problem in a nutshell. The forums were the only platform that the JP community had that worked for all platforms and supported JP-language discussion natively. The replacement trio does not. Steam supports JP but locks out console players. Discord and Reddit do not have a JP-language home for DBD.
This matters for more than language. The forums hosted years of JP-language community lore, fan-fic, JP-only community event retrospectives, JP-language patch summaries written by community translators, and JP-specific tier-list discussions. Most of that content was never translated to English. It is JP-only. With the forums being deleted and not archived, that JP-language community history goes with them, and the JP community has no equivalent destination to rebuild it on.
There is no clean fix here. The best case is that BHVR stands up a JP-language channel on the official Discord as part of the forum-member role rollout, that the community team recruits JP-speaking moderators, and that the JP community treats the new long-form channel as a starting point. None of that is announced yet. The realistic case is that the JP-language DBD community fragments further into smaller Discord servers, Twitter spaces, and JP-language community wikis, and that a decade of forum content quietly disappears.
Community reaction: the farewell thread and isolation complaints
The forum community has had a week to react to the announcement. The reaction is a mix of gratitude, frustration, resignation, and the kind of dark humour that long-tenured gaming communities fall back on when something they care about ends.
The most-quoted thread of the week is the "One Last Time: Who Are Ya Favs?" thread, a goodbye post that surfaced within 24 hours of the announcement. The format is simple: a single opening post asking forum members to share their favourite DBD memory, favourite chapter, favourite perk, favourite killer, or favourite survivor, and a long comment chain of replies. The tone is warm but visibly sad. One commenter wrote, "our patch of fog disperses next month," a play on the DBD endgame that landed as a quietly perfect send-off. Another commenter wrote, "Pulsar would have loved to have a word about this," referencing a long-time former community manager who left BHVR years ago and who used to be the public face of the forums. The Pulsar comment captures the feeling that the forums were always a specific person's project, that Pulsar's fingerprints were on the culture, and that without that stewardship the move to Discord feels less like evolution and more like abandonment.
A separate thread on console-player isolation has had a similar number of replies. Console players, especially PS5 and Switch players, feel the migration hardest because Discord is not on their console, because Steam Discussions is invisible to them, and because the subreddit, while accessible, skews heavily toward PC content. One commenter wrote, "I newly joined here, don't have a Discord account nor use Reddit. Eh ok it's already hard for console players." That comment, which has been upvoted heavily, is the single best summary of the situation for non-PC forum users. The forums were the one platform that worked the same way on every system. The replacements do not.
Another thread on the Discord server quality has been equally candid. The opening post asks, in a rhetorical way, "Have you guys even seen the Discord? For the most part they talk nonsense on there." The implication is that the existing Discord, before the new forum-migration channel is added, is mostly off-topic chat, memes, and moderation complaints. The criticism is not that the Discord is bad, it is that the Discord is not the forums, and that the community team is conflating "Discord is where the chat already is" with "Discord is where long-form discussion should live." That conflation is the heart of the disagreement.
There are also the practical complaints. Several forum users have flagged that the email-based forum-member role is going to be useless for anyone who registered their forum account with an old email and no longer has access to that inbox. BHVR has not published a recovery process. For users in that situation, the role will not be claimable. Other users have flagged that the invite link is going to be single-use and that sharing it will be against the Discord server rules, so even if you want to give the role to a friend who used to use the forums but never got the email, you cannot transfer it.
The overall mood is farewell rather than revolt. There are no organised petitions or boycott threads. The community is treating the closure as a done deal and is mostly focused on two questions: what to save before October 31, and what the new long-form Discord channel will actually look like in practice. Both questions are answered elsewhere in this post.
Where to get DBD help now
This is the section that ties the news back to the rest of dbdperkcombos.com. The forums closing is a story about community, but the practical impact for most players is functional: where do I find help now? Below is the migration guide by use case.
For build help and perk loadouts. The single best place is the perk database at /perks, which lists every perk in the game with its current effect, its synergy notes, and links to character pages and combo guides that use it. For full four-perk builds, the combo guides at /combos are the right place. They cover survivor and killer builds by playstyle, by patch, and by character. The two resources combined cover most of what the forums used to host in the build-of-the-week threads.
For specific character strategy. The character pages at /characters list every playable character in DBD, with their full kit, their recommended perks, their counterplay notes, and their best builds. For specific matchup guides, the how-to-beat series at /blog/how-to-beat-the-spirit-2026, /blog/how-to-beat-the-nurse-2026, /blog/how-to-beat-the-blight-2026, /blog/how-to-beat-wesker-2026, and /blog/how-to-beat-dracula-2026 covers the killer side. The killer tier list at /blog/best-killer-tier-list-patch-10 and the survivor perk tier list at /blog/best-survivor-perks-tier-list-patch-10 cover the meta. The 2v8-specific build articles at /blog/dbd-2v8-final-week-builds-sept-2026 and /blog/dbd-2v8-returns-august-2026 cover the limited-time mode.
For patch news and meta changes. The blog at /blog is updated within 24 to 48 hours of every PTB drop and every live patch. For cross-referenced coverage and a more visual hub, the community-maintained timesaver.gg DBD hub covers perk changes, killer balance, and event timing. For official statements, the Dead by Daylight Twitter / X account and the official Discord patch-notes channel are the primary sources. The forums used to host the official patch discussion, but the community team has said patch previews and Q and A will move to Discord going forward.
For bug reports. The official BHVR support portal at zendesk.behaviour.com is the right destination for any bug that you want a support response on. The in-game support menu, accessed via the options screen, also routes bug reports through the same Zendesk pipeline. The forums used to host a long-running "Bug Reports" subforum, but that will be offline at the end of October. The Steam Discussions bug-reports section is a half-decent substitute for Steam players, but it is not connected to the BHVR support pipeline. If you want your bug report to land in front of a BHVR support engineer, use Zendesk.
For lore and fan discussion. This is the section where the forum migration hurts the most. The forums hosted years of fan-fic, killer-lore deep-dives, chapter-relationship speculation, and cross-franchise theorycrafting. None of the three replacement platforms is a great home for that. Discord will support it in the new long-form channel, but Discord is not searchable on Google and the audience is gated by server membership. Reddit's r/DeadbyDaylight will support lore threads but the format is flatter and the threads get buried. Steam Discussions is invisible. The DBD wiki on fandom and the smaller community wikis cover canon facts but not community-speculation theory. If you want a permanent home for DBD lore discussion, this site is one of the few long-form destinations left.
For perk details. Below are five concrete examples of perk pages on dbdperkcombos.com that cover perks the forums used to discuss constantly. Each one has a current-effect breakdown, the post-10.2.0 changes, and links to the related builds and characters.
- Agitation is the killer carry perk. It used to have its own 30-page forum thread.
- Dead Hard is the survivor exhaustion perk that gets reworked every patch.
- Decisive Strike is the anti-tunnel perk and a perennial forum debate topic.
- Blood Warden is the endgame hex that has its own combo guide.
- Hex: Ruin is the gen-control hex with the longest forum history of any perk in the game.
Other high-traffic perks that previously had dedicated forum threads include Pop Goes the Weasel, Barbecue and Chilli, Corrupt Intervention, Eruption, Call of Brine, Scourge Hook: Pain Resonance, Oppression, Forced Penance, Dead Man's Switch, Discordance, Gearhead, Tinkerer, Spirit Fury, Enduring, Bamboozle, Monitor and Abuse, Thanatophobia, Play With Your Food, Superior Anatomy, Dissolution, Fearmonger, Coup de Grace, and Lethal Pursuer. All of those pages live at dbdperkcombos.com/perks/
For survivor perks specifically, Borrowed Time, Unbreakable, Adrenaline, Kindred, Iron Will, Self-Care, Sprint Burst, Lithe, Balanced Landing, No Mither, Head On, Diversion, Quick and Quiet, Smash Hit, Dance With Me, Windows of Opportunity, Urban Evasion, Fixated, Bond, Empathy, Calm Spirit, Empathic Connection, For the People, We'll Make It, Ace in the Hole, Appraisal, Botany Knowledge, Streetwise, Better Than New, Autodidact, Pharmacy, Plunderer's Instinct, Detective's Hunch, Buckle Up, Object of Obsession, Soul Guard, Up the Ante, Left Behind, Sole Survivor, Prove Thyself, Leader, Red Herring, Stake Out, Vigil, Deception, Power Struggle, Flip-Flop, Tenacity, Second Wind, Desperate Measures, Built to Last, Deliverance, Inner Strength, Reassurance, Flashbang, Blast Mine, Aftercare, We're Gonna Live Forever, Hysteria, Boon: Circle of Healing, Boon: Shadow Step, Boon: Exponential, Boon: Dark Theory, and Boon: Illumination all have dedicated pages on this site. If a perk exists in DBD, we have a page for it.
The point of the list is not to be exhaustive. The point is that dbdperkcombos.com is built to be the long-form, searchable, indexed home for DBD perk, character, and build information that the forums used to host. The migration away from the forums does not have to mean a migration away from long-form. It can mean a migration toward a different long-form.
What to save before October 31
If there are forum threads you have used over the years, treat October as your last chance to save them. The Vanilla Forums platform does support per-user post exports, and the Wayback Machine is still crawling the forums. Below is a practical checklist for forum users who want to keep something before the platform retires.
Step one: identify the threads that matter to you. Open your browser history, your bookmarks, your Discord DMs with forum users, your old forum subscriptions, and your saved posts. Make a list. The most common categories are build theorycrafting threads (especially for killers like The Spirit, Pyramid Head, Dracula, and Albert Wesker, and for survivor builds on the post-10.2.0 meta), lore threads for killers like Sadako Yamamura, The Demogorgon, and Freddy Krueger, and event retrospectives from the anniversary events.
Step two: use the Wayback Machine. The Internet Archive's Save Page Now tool at web.archive.org accepts a URL and snapshots it. Save the canonical thread URL, not just a search-results page, because the canonical URL will 404 after the forum closes. You can bulk-submit URLs by pasting them into the Save Page Now box one at a time, or by using the Internet Archive's browser extension if you have a long list. The Wayback Machine crawls the forums continuously, but the most recent snapshot may not be the one you want. Check the snapshot date and re-save if necessary.
Step three: export your own posts. The Vanilla Forums user profile page has an export option that returns a JSON or HTML file of every post you have made on the platform. The option is buried in profile settings. If you have made thousands of posts over a decade, the export can take a few minutes to generate. Do this before the last week of October to avoid any platform-side degradation.
Step four: save the JP-language content you care about. Because there is no JP-language home for the migration, JP-language threads are the most at risk of being lost with no replacement. If you have referenced JP-language lore or community history in your own posts, save both your own post and the original JP thread. The Wayback Machine is the only reliable tool here.
Step five: download any attached images. Vanilla Forums attachments are stored on the platform and will be deleted with the rest of the content. If you have ever uploaded a screenshot, a meme, a build diagram, a perk-tier-list image, or a custom chapter concept, the original file is at risk. Right-click and save anything you want to keep.
Step six: tell the people you used to talk to. If you have forum-only friendships, reach out by other means before October 31. Add them on Discord, on the subreddit, on Twitter, on whatever platform they still use. The forum user list will not migrate to Discord, and the email-based role claim is one-shot. People who lose touch on the forums will lose touch entirely unless someone reaches out first.
Specific threads worth saving. The patch theorycrafting threads from the 10.2.0 PTB and the 10.2.0 live patch (searchable by title, but the URLs are scattered). The Sadako tuning thread from 2024. The Xenomorph launch megathread from 2023. The Dracula tuning thread from earlier in 2026. The Blight addon rework thread from 2024. The Spirit addons thread from 2023. The console-versus-PC discussion thread that has been running for years. The community translation threads for JP, KR, and CN languages. The custom chapter concept threads from the off-topic subforum. The community-run Anniversary event retrospective thread from the 2026 anniversary. The "patch notes explained" threads from every major patch since 2020.
If you save nothing else, save the Goodbye thread. It is the closest thing to a record of what the forum community was, and it will be a useful historical document in five years when someone asks "what happened to the old forums?"
FAQ
When exactly do the forums close? BHVR has only said "the end of October 2026." Based on the Vanilla Forums platform retirement schedule and the way BHVR has handled similar platform migrations on other Behaviour properties, the most likely target is October 30 or 31, 2026. The exact hour is not public.
Will they be archived? No. A DMed confirmation from community manager Mandy, surfaced by forum user GentlemanFridge, confirms that the forums will be deleted when the platform retires. There will be no public read-only mirror. Players who want to save historical threads need to use the Wayback Machine's Save Page Now tool and to export their own posts via the Vanilla Forums profile settings.
Where do I report a bug now? The official BHVR support portal at zendesk.behaviour.com is the primary destination for bug reports that need a support response. The in-game support menu routes through the same pipeline. The Steam Discussions bug-reports section is an alternative for Steam players, but it is not connected to the BHVR support system. The forums' bug-reports subforum will be offline at the end of October.
Are forum users getting a Discord role? Yes. BHVR will email registered forum users a Discord invite link tied to a unique URL. Following the link claims a forum-member role on the official DBD Discord, which grants access to a forum-veteran channel and a recognisable badge. The invite window is likely 30 to 60 days from the announcement on 21 September 2026. If you no longer have access to the email you registered with, you cannot claim the role.
Can I still post on forums in October? Yes. The forums are fully functional through October. You can post, reply, edit, upload attachments, and use every feature the platform offers until the end-of-October closure date. There is no public read-only mode in October, although it is possible BHVR may flip the platform to read-only in the final week to manage the kill switch. Plan accordingly.
Will there be a long-form channel on Discord? Yes. BHVR has committed to a new dedicated long-form or threaded channel on the official Discord. The exact name and structure have not been published, but it will support more structured posts than the existing Discord channels and will be gated by the forum-member role.
What about Japanese players? The official Discord does not currently support Japanese, and BHVR has not announced a JP channel as part of the forum migration. Reddit does not have a JP-language DBD sub. Steam Discussions supports JP but only on Steam. The JP-language community has no equivalent destination to migrate to. This is the most damaging gap in the closure plan.
What if I never used the forums, does this affect me? Yes, indirectly. The forum URLs that rank in Google search for DBD queries will start 404-ing at the end of October. Old blog posts, YouTube descriptions, and wiki citations that referenced forum URLs will become dead links. Search results that used to point to forum threads will start pointing to Reddit or to community wikis or, in some cases, to nothing. The migration away from the forums affects anyone who used the forums as a citation source, even if they were not an active forum member.
Where do I find DBD perk info now? The perk database at /perks covers every perk currently in the game, with current effects, post-patch notes, and links to related builds and characters. For full builds, the /combos section covers survivor and killer loadouts. For specific characters, /characters is the index. For patch coverage, /blog is updated within 24 to 48 hours of every PTB and live patch.
Closing verdict
The closure of the BHVR Dead by Daylight forums is, on its face, a platform retirement. Vanilla Forums is being phased out across Behaviour Interactive's portfolio, the DBD community is being migrated to the platforms BHVR already operates, and the studio is consolidating its community team onto Discord, Steam, and Reddit. As a logistics story, it is straightforward. As a community story, it is heavier.
The forums were the only platform in the DBD ecosystem that supported long-form, threaded, persistent, indexed, multilingual discussion for every platform the game ships on. Discord is great for chat and is being upgraded with a new long-form channel, but it is not Google-indexed, and the data model is chat-first. Reddit is indexed and high-volume, but it is flatter and noisier than a forum. Steam Discussions is Steam-only and invisible to Google. None of the three is a one-for-one replacement. Combined, they cover most of what the forums did, but the seams show.
The deletion-not-archive decision is the one BHVR will have to live with. Ten years of community history, including the JP-language content that has no other home, is going to disappear at the end of October. The community team has been candid about the platform reality, and the deletion is a cost decision rather than a hostile one, but the cost is real and it is borne by the forum users.
For players who relied on forum threads for build theorycrafting, bug discussion, and lore, this is the cue to bookmark the long-form alternatives. The perk database at /perks, the combo guides at /combos, the character pages at /characters, and the blog at /blog are all indexed, dated, and updated every patch. They are built to be the long-form home for DBD information. The forums closing is a loss. It does not have to be a loss of long-form discussion itself. That can live somewhere else.
The DBD community has lost a primary long-form hub. It has not lost the long-form habit. Treat this as a cue to migrate.