OTW News Reader Comment Period

[otw_staff]

The OTW Communications Committee periodically reviews its news distribution process to best balance volunteer workload and the maximum reach possible for readership. This review has shown that for some years now there has been little to no engagement here on Dreamwidth.

However readers on Dreamwidth are capable of utilizing RSS feed accounts. On Dreamwidth, OTW news can be found via the otw_rss_feed and there is a separate account for the AO3 News blog.

The Communications Committee is proposing to stop manually adding blurbs and links to this account, and instead redirecting readers to subscribe to the feeds. This account will not be deleted, so its archive will remain open. It simply will not be updated.

Today begins a 2 week feedback period from readers regarding this change, letting us know how many people are still reading, and what reasons those readers might have as to why the feeds would not serve the same function.

If you do comment, please let us know how long you have been reading this account and how often you click through to the website to read the full news posts. On June 24, we will post again with a decision.

Thank you for your interest in OTW news!

Comments

[melannen]

I read OTW news pretty much exclusively here! If I feel the need to comment I will click over to the OTW site to comment, since that is where the majority of discussion is, but I greatly prefer reading through this account. I would not mind if comments here were redirected to the OTW site, though, if that reduced volunteer needs.

The RSS account would be an OK replacement, but I'd like to make sure that an OTW volunteer would be tasked to maintain it - DW RSS feeds frequently go silent due to minor changes on the originating end, so it would be very easy for DW feed to just disappear without notice if it wasn't being regularly checked up on. Also, would it be possible to tune the RSS feed so that it didn't require a clickthrough? As far as I know it's possible to set whether the feed will show the whole or partial posts, or even have several with different amounts - at least it used to. For-profit/ad-supported blogs require the clickthrough versions for obvious reasons so they've become more popular but I don't see why the OTW one could not offer RSS in full as at least an option?

(It should also be possible to use some kind of automation to crosspost to this DW account automatically without it being an RSS feed; I know it's been done in the past. That would have the benefit of preserving an archive and being far more user-friendly, as well as being a backup if the site blog is having problems.)

And finally I'd like to echo the requests above that if you are moving toward promoting RSS, to make RSS feeds of other important OTW updates more accessible.

[jjhunter]

Seconding all of this! My DW reading page is my main news aggregator; I really appreciate having OTW news available here.

[melannen]

Also, I don't know if it would make a significant difference to volunteer time, but DW is not a heavily graphics-based service, and I don't know that reposting large graphics on every post is any significant benefit when it comes to a DW news feed. You could leave off the graphics and let the post titles stand on their own and I don't think any of your DW readership would mind. (OK, sharing the headers for the archives Open Doors imports are pretty good! The same clip-art megaphone taking up 2/3 of my screen on every post, not so much.)

[alyndra]

If I remember right from the very tiny amount of messing around with an RSS feed I did once, setting a feed to post the whole thing without a clickthrough makes it show up without a cut on the reading page, which gets annoying fast if the posts have any significant length to them. If I’m wrong and there’s a way to use a cut, that would be worth doing—but I suspect what I’m really saying is that posts here are valuable and the RSS feed would be an imperfect substitute.

[melannen]

I don't think you can use a DW-style cut without doing a DW-post - we have our own unique cut syntax - but some people are ok with long uncut posts (as long as the formatting is OK) and it should at least be possible to choose how much is shown before it cuts off (Default ones only show only about as much as a twitter post, which is often not even as much as you'd put in front of a cut.)