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

[thistleingrey]

OTW RSS has been very unreliable. Originally it was Drupal's fault--I was once a volunteer with shared responsibility for such things, long years ago--but Drupal itself isn't so fragile anymore (ETA and I see that the site currently uses WP). +1 to melannen's suggestion above that if RSS is centered upon, a volunteer be tasked with keeping an eye on it.

That said, I've been reading this manual news account since it was begun (though I can write RSS XML from scratch) because Dreamwidth itself is pretty reliable. As a place to keep a record of posts, it doesn't hide things capriciously via algorithm. If y'all quit mirroring content here manually as a result of limited staff resources, I'll just stop reading OTW news. Thanks for the effort thus far, regardless.