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Further Explanation on the Switch from Community to Feed
Communications volunteers have read your responses to our decision and wanted to make an additional post addressing your feedback. We want to state at the outset though that this will not be changing the decision that has been made, but hope it will show how much we value your feedback and have put thought into this decision.
Focus on Percentages
There were a number of references to the percentage of respondents but fewer about the total number of 55. Our reason for opening a feedback period was to find out how many people were paying attention to the news coming through and were sufficiently interested in the community to respond.
Some have suggested that other methods such as a poll should have been used. Aside from the delays and difficulties that would pose (since this account is not a paid one), a poll would more easily be skewed by people encouraged to participate who did not have strong feelings about using a community versus an automated service. On a platform such as Dreamwidth where commenting is a norm rather than an exception, we did not feel that asking for people to tell us how often they read this account was an unusual thing to request of readers.
And our results showed that there were fewer people motivated to respond than we expected. We are sure that there are some occasional-to-regular readers of news on this account who, for various reasons, did not respond. While we value your readership immensely, we felt that our limited resources could better serve you elsewhere and that automated delivery of news would allow you to still engage with OTW News in a very similar format.
Active vs Passive Posting
Another issue raised was that if active posting here was a central issue for Communications then alternative methods could be used such as IFTTT. Comms has used it in the past for different purposes but have found the service reliability is mixed. We have also tried to use other services with little success. We do not send full posts through to our accounts because unfortunately, many sites have different format restrictions and there is no easy one-size-fits-all posting method.
In response to the discussion about Dreamwidth's 2 week feed retention period and comment deletions, we looked at metrics from previous posts and found that we only averaged about one comment a month. If readers would like to share comments with us, we encourage commenting on the OTW website instead, where we can aggregate feedback across platforms.
Feed Content and Commenting
Some statements were made that the feed does not contain all news the OTW puts out. This is true and it is equally true of news posted at this account. If you want the complete record of OTW news, traditionally posted here, you'll want to subscribe to the otw_rss_feed and, if you want AO3 News as well the the AO3 News blog feed is also available on Dreamwidth.
In other words, were this account to continue on as it always has, you would not be getting any different news than via the feed above.
We would also like to emphasize that we value your comments and have done our best to respond to many of the concerns raised in our June 17 post. If you have lingering doubts about feed functionality or have not seen a response to issues raised in the comments, please refer to that post; we might have already addressed it.
Universal Opinion
While most people commenting have indeed preferred to keep things at this account as they have always been, we found that some people were in fact willing to use a feed account or subscribe to a newsletter once we develop that service.
Additionally, some who expressed misgivings about feed function might not be accustomed to their functions via Dreamwidth. We recommend fans subscribe to the following feed to get some familiarity with feed functionality. The subscription and reading process works just the same as your subscription here.
otw_rss_feed
We realize that change can be difficult and that new options are not always ideal, but want to re-emphasize that we value your feedback and unfortunately have to make difficult decisions to manage our limited resources as non-profit volunteers. We hope this post helps make the transition from community to feed posts more understandable, if not easy, and that we can retain your support as the OTW continues to attempt to serve you in the best ways we know how.
Focus on Percentages
There were a number of references to the percentage of respondents but fewer about the total number of 55. Our reason for opening a feedback period was to find out how many people were paying attention to the news coming through and were sufficiently interested in the community to respond.
Some have suggested that other methods such as a poll should have been used. Aside from the delays and difficulties that would pose (since this account is not a paid one), a poll would more easily be skewed by people encouraged to participate who did not have strong feelings about using a community versus an automated service. On a platform such as Dreamwidth where commenting is a norm rather than an exception, we did not feel that asking for people to tell us how often they read this account was an unusual thing to request of readers.
And our results showed that there were fewer people motivated to respond than we expected. We are sure that there are some occasional-to-regular readers of news on this account who, for various reasons, did not respond. While we value your readership immensely, we felt that our limited resources could better serve you elsewhere and that automated delivery of news would allow you to still engage with OTW News in a very similar format.
Active vs Passive Posting
Another issue raised was that if active posting here was a central issue for Communications then alternative methods could be used such as IFTTT. Comms has used it in the past for different purposes but have found the service reliability is mixed. We have also tried to use other services with little success. We do not send full posts through to our accounts because unfortunately, many sites have different format restrictions and there is no easy one-size-fits-all posting method.
In response to the discussion about Dreamwidth's 2 week feed retention period and comment deletions, we looked at metrics from previous posts and found that we only averaged about one comment a month. If readers would like to share comments with us, we encourage commenting on the OTW website instead, where we can aggregate feedback across platforms.
Feed Content and Commenting
Some statements were made that the feed does not contain all news the OTW puts out. This is true and it is equally true of news posted at this account. If you want the complete record of OTW news, traditionally posted here, you'll want to subscribe to the otw_rss_feed and, if you want AO3 News as well the the AO3 News blog feed is also available on Dreamwidth.
In other words, were this account to continue on as it always has, you would not be getting any different news than via the feed above.
We would also like to emphasize that we value your comments and have done our best to respond to many of the concerns raised in our June 17 post. If you have lingering doubts about feed functionality or have not seen a response to issues raised in the comments, please refer to that post; we might have already addressed it.
Universal Opinion
While most people commenting have indeed preferred to keep things at this account as they have always been, we found that some people were in fact willing to use a feed account or subscribe to a newsletter once we develop that service.
Additionally, some who expressed misgivings about feed function might not be accustomed to their functions via Dreamwidth. We recommend fans subscribe to the following feed to get some familiarity with feed functionality. The subscription and reading process works just the same as your subscription here.
otw_rss_feed
We realize that change can be difficult and that new options are not always ideal, but want to re-emphasize that we value your feedback and unfortunately have to make difficult decisions to manage our limited resources as non-profit volunteers. We hope this post helps make the transition from community to feed posts more understandable, if not easy, and that we can retain your support as the OTW continues to attempt to serve you in the best ways we know how.