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Entry tags:
Comment Period Update
Hello OTW News readers!
As we mentioned in the post here of June 10, the OTW Communications Committee has been reviewing its current news distribution sites to determine how best to allocate volunteer resources and how to reach the maximum number of fans interested in knowing more about our organization and projects.
We have compiled the responses we received and want to continue the comment period ending June 24 before any decision is made. There were a number of concerns raised which might or might not have appealing solutions, and there were also some misunderstandings we'd like to clear up.
Why is engagement important?
The short answer is that it's not. We don't expect anyone reading to feel the need to comment, and as some people have pointed out, they prefer to do so at the OTW website instead once they've read the entire post.
Anyone using Dreamwidth is aware that it is unusual among online platforms used by fans, as it's a long-form blogging site as much as a social media site, and posting to it is different, particularly when it comes to images. What is particularly important from an organizational point of view, is that there are no metrics here to help us find out if our subscribers are still reading our account or even using Dreamwidth at all. Any site that has been around for some time is filled with dead accounts. And unlike other platforms, where people can signal their presence by liking or reblogging, if people don't comment here, they're invisible.
This does not mean that we feel people must engage with this account. Like many communities on Dreamwidth, activity here is not easy to cultivate. This account did for most of 2015 have its own moderator attempting to do so. Although the account has largely gone without a moderator since 2009, there has intermittently been someone monitoring the account for spam and responding to the occasional question. But if people simply want to see what news is coming out, we're fine with that!
Issues with an RSS feed on Dreamwidth
Feeds break.
This is undoubtedly true, as there was previously an RSS feed here which stopped working some time ago, possibly when our website migrated to a new host. It may also be the case that it would take some time for a support ticket to be addressed, creating a lengthy gap for readers.
However, it is not necessarily the case that a feed is bound to stop working. For example, the feed to the AO3 news blog has apparently been functioning since it was created in December 2010.
We should point out that until this month the OTW has never started a feed here. Any feeds connected to us here were started unofficially and we do not know which other ones there may be or how to find them.
We agree that should news here go feed-only, then we'd need to periodically check that it was still active. But we would also rely on readers here to contact us if news stopped. It is rare that we go a week without sending out a post, and there are at minimum 4 sent out each month.
The feed is incomplete
This is true, and while the OTW could fix one aspect of this, the other is on Dreamwidth's end. Feed posts here are set to disappear after two weeks. Some readers are concerned this means they have no access to older posts.
Possible Solutions: RSS feed posts only disappear here. The posts are still available in full at the OTW website. We also have a Pinboard account that tracks all OTW related news posts, not just what gets posted on the OTW website. The Pinboard link could be pinned here along with links to the RSS feed accounts so that anyone wanting to scroll through posts new or old could.
The current OTW News feed is truncated. To some people this is an advantage (less to scroll past) and to others a disadvantage (need to click through to the website for the whole post) while some people prefer the way the RSS feed eliminates the post banners.
Possible Solutions: We could change the feed settings on our end to have whole posts come through as they do on the AO3 feed. Whether more people want this or don't isn't so clear, so we'd want to get more feedback on that.
A feed can create duplicates
This has sometimes been known to happen with feeds and it's possible it might happen with the OTW feeds, which would be annoying. However the majority of feeds on Dreamwidth do not, even over long periods of time (and on some occasions when it happens, it's because the feed has been reset).
Dreamwidth is a preferred location for news
As our news posts can get hidden on other sites due to fiddling with algorithms or display order, we can understand why Dreamwidth is a better choice for many people in terms of being sure our posts will come up in one's reading list, (and do so in the order in which they were posted).
Given that subscribing (and unsubscribing) to a feed on Dreamwidth is done exactly the same way as subscribing to a community or personal account, switching to a feed shouldn't create any change. But we can understand why subscribing elsewhere is not an appealing alternative.
Notifications of Board Meetings
As many people noted, in recent years Board meetings have been announced only via Twitter (or occasionally in the Newsletter, depending on the timing of its release and the Board meeting). This is partly because most of our news readers utilize Twitter and partly because it has been a quicker and simpler process to post a tweet and then to auto-schedule follow up reminders.
However, Communications could make posts to the OTW News blog with board meeting announcements and anyplace receiving that news feed would also receive these notices. It would be less certain that we could quickly notify users of a cancellation or last minute schedule change, but as long as people wouldn't mind showing up to the Discord channel only to see a reschedule notification, this should work better than the current Twitter-only practice.
OTW News vs AO3 News
To clear up confusion about what has historically been posted at this account, we need to point out that AO3 News has never been posted here. (No doubt this was why someone started the AO3 News feed.) There is, occasionally, news about new policies or other activity from AO3 committees that ends up here, but that is because announcements are cross-posted to OTW News by request of those committees. And some OTW News posts are also cross posted to AO3 News, resulting in duplicates for anyone following both.
However news about the latest updates, fixes that have been made, new features, etc. has always been posted only at AO3's news blog. AO3 has social media outlets of its own, but these have not usually carried all of that news.
For anyone here who wants to follow AO3 News, we recommend you subscribe to the feed linked above.
Are proposed changes here connected to other issues?
Yes. About a month ago Communications had a change in its Chairs and will also be recruiting soon (see our post next Wednesday!) We are currently very understaffed and are looking at how many people will be needed to fill our current roles and whether, in fact, all roles are needed.
This review connects to how many posting outlets we have, as well as our need to train people to send out posts manually to all these locations. (There are currently only 2 people in the committee who can do so).
Our commenting process began with LiveJournal back on May 27th and would have begun on Dreamwidth at the same time, but we were unable to get a feed running here on Dreamwidth until last week. The LiveJournal account is now inactive as we received no response to our call for comments there.
Other alternatives
There was a suggestion about a future OTW Mastodon account, which is something we'll be taking into consideration. But given people's responses, the real concern is not how to get OTW News but how to get it here on Dreamwidth.
However there is another possibility which might be appealing to anyone wanting direct notification of news, and that is a newsletter being sent directly to your email. In the OTW's early days it owned a Yahoo Groups account, and until the site itself went away we still had subscribers to it because it was the only way to get news sent to people individually (a request we still see from time to time). This is another form of news distribution we are considering, and if we do pursue it, this is likely to happen within the next year.
Should that be of interest, please do leave a comment about it.
What's next?
As we stated up top, we'd like to continue hearing from readers now that we've provided more information in response to your comments. After June 24 we'll discuss how we'll proceed, which might involve turning this account inactive, or continuing to post here manually for at least the next year, or should another alternative be put in place in the near future, doing another comment period to see how many people might be served by that option.
Thank you for your responses, and we hope to hear from you again.
As we mentioned in the post here of June 10, the OTW Communications Committee has been reviewing its current news distribution sites to determine how best to allocate volunteer resources and how to reach the maximum number of fans interested in knowing more about our organization and projects.
We have compiled the responses we received and want to continue the comment period ending June 24 before any decision is made. There were a number of concerns raised which might or might not have appealing solutions, and there were also some misunderstandings we'd like to clear up.
Why is engagement important?
The short answer is that it's not. We don't expect anyone reading to feel the need to comment, and as some people have pointed out, they prefer to do so at the OTW website instead once they've read the entire post.
Anyone using Dreamwidth is aware that it is unusual among online platforms used by fans, as it's a long-form blogging site as much as a social media site, and posting to it is different, particularly when it comes to images. What is particularly important from an organizational point of view, is that there are no metrics here to help us find out if our subscribers are still reading our account or even using Dreamwidth at all. Any site that has been around for some time is filled with dead accounts. And unlike other platforms, where people can signal their presence by liking or reblogging, if people don't comment here, they're invisible.
This does not mean that we feel people must engage with this account. Like many communities on Dreamwidth, activity here is not easy to cultivate. This account did for most of 2015 have its own moderator attempting to do so. Although the account has largely gone without a moderator since 2009, there has intermittently been someone monitoring the account for spam and responding to the occasional question. But if people simply want to see what news is coming out, we're fine with that!
Issues with an RSS feed on Dreamwidth
Feeds break.
This is undoubtedly true, as there was previously an RSS feed here which stopped working some time ago, possibly when our website migrated to a new host. It may also be the case that it would take some time for a support ticket to be addressed, creating a lengthy gap for readers.
However, it is not necessarily the case that a feed is bound to stop working. For example, the feed to the AO3 news blog has apparently been functioning since it was created in December 2010.
We should point out that until this month the OTW has never started a feed here. Any feeds connected to us here were started unofficially and we do not know which other ones there may be or how to find them.
We agree that should news here go feed-only, then we'd need to periodically check that it was still active. But we would also rely on readers here to contact us if news stopped. It is rare that we go a week without sending out a post, and there are at minimum 4 sent out each month.
The feed is incomplete
This is true, and while the OTW could fix one aspect of this, the other is on Dreamwidth's end. Feed posts here are set to disappear after two weeks. Some readers are concerned this means they have no access to older posts.
Possible Solutions: RSS feed posts only disappear here. The posts are still available in full at the OTW website. We also have a Pinboard account that tracks all OTW related news posts, not just what gets posted on the OTW website. The Pinboard link could be pinned here along with links to the RSS feed accounts so that anyone wanting to scroll through posts new or old could.
The current OTW News feed is truncated. To some people this is an advantage (less to scroll past) and to others a disadvantage (need to click through to the website for the whole post) while some people prefer the way the RSS feed eliminates the post banners.
Possible Solutions: We could change the feed settings on our end to have whole posts come through as they do on the AO3 feed. Whether more people want this or don't isn't so clear, so we'd want to get more feedback on that.
A feed can create duplicates
This has sometimes been known to happen with feeds and it's possible it might happen with the OTW feeds, which would be annoying. However the majority of feeds on Dreamwidth do not, even over long periods of time (and on some occasions when it happens, it's because the feed has been reset).
Dreamwidth is a preferred location for news
As our news posts can get hidden on other sites due to fiddling with algorithms or display order, we can understand why Dreamwidth is a better choice for many people in terms of being sure our posts will come up in one's reading list, (and do so in the order in which they were posted).
Given that subscribing (and unsubscribing) to a feed on Dreamwidth is done exactly the same way as subscribing to a community or personal account, switching to a feed shouldn't create any change. But we can understand why subscribing elsewhere is not an appealing alternative.
Notifications of Board Meetings
As many people noted, in recent years Board meetings have been announced only via Twitter (or occasionally in the Newsletter, depending on the timing of its release and the Board meeting). This is partly because most of our news readers utilize Twitter and partly because it has been a quicker and simpler process to post a tweet and then to auto-schedule follow up reminders.
However, Communications could make posts to the OTW News blog with board meeting announcements and anyplace receiving that news feed would also receive these notices. It would be less certain that we could quickly notify users of a cancellation or last minute schedule change, but as long as people wouldn't mind showing up to the Discord channel only to see a reschedule notification, this should work better than the current Twitter-only practice.
OTW News vs AO3 News
To clear up confusion about what has historically been posted at this account, we need to point out that AO3 News has never been posted here. (No doubt this was why someone started the AO3 News feed.) There is, occasionally, news about new policies or other activity from AO3 committees that ends up here, but that is because announcements are cross-posted to OTW News by request of those committees. And some OTW News posts are also cross posted to AO3 News, resulting in duplicates for anyone following both.
However news about the latest updates, fixes that have been made, new features, etc. has always been posted only at AO3's news blog. AO3 has social media outlets of its own, but these have not usually carried all of that news.
For anyone here who wants to follow AO3 News, we recommend you subscribe to the feed linked above.
Are proposed changes here connected to other issues?
Yes. About a month ago Communications had a change in its Chairs and will also be recruiting soon (see our post next Wednesday!) We are currently very understaffed and are looking at how many people will be needed to fill our current roles and whether, in fact, all roles are needed.
This review connects to how many posting outlets we have, as well as our need to train people to send out posts manually to all these locations. (There are currently only 2 people in the committee who can do so).
Our commenting process began with LiveJournal back on May 27th and would have begun on Dreamwidth at the same time, but we were unable to get a feed running here on Dreamwidth until last week. The LiveJournal account is now inactive as we received no response to our call for comments there.
Other alternatives
There was a suggestion about a future OTW Mastodon account, which is something we'll be taking into consideration. But given people's responses, the real concern is not how to get OTW News but how to get it here on Dreamwidth.
However there is another possibility which might be appealing to anyone wanting direct notification of news, and that is a newsletter being sent directly to your email. In the OTW's early days it owned a Yahoo Groups account, and until the site itself went away we still had subscribers to it because it was the only way to get news sent to people individually (a request we still see from time to time). This is another form of news distribution we are considering, and if we do pursue it, this is likely to happen within the next year.
Should that be of interest, please do leave a comment about it.
What's next?
As we stated up top, we'd like to continue hearing from readers now that we've provided more information in response to your comments. After June 24 we'll discuss how we'll proceed, which might involve turning this account inactive, or continuing to post here manually for at least the next year, or should another alternative be put in place in the near future, doing another comment period to see how many people might be served by that option.
Thank you for your responses, and we hope to hear from you again.
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I continue to value receiving updates here on DW; I would also be interested in signing up for an email newsletter if one was made available.
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Pinboard is not necessarily where I'd currently put any eggs.
Sending good wishes to the current (and few) relevant staff.
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I would still prefer to get the updates here, as it fits with my reading patterns and is convenient for me. A newsletter would work less well for me, but would be better than remembering to check twitter when I don't have an account there.
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I would be interested in an ability to have an emailed newsletter as an alternative.
(Agreed that the issue for me is not "well, where else will I access the info?" Because I know that I likely just won't, unless the timing syncs up for a tumblr post to cross my dash. Not out of lack of interest, but I'm not going to set up on a different site to do it.)
My experience with RSS feeds hasn't been great, but maybe I've just had the poor luck of almost exclusively attempting to subscribe to ones that do break, and maybe that's less common than I believed. I'd at least try subscribing to the RSS feed here, but it doesn't seem like it quite replicates what I get from the posts here.
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I can only speak for myself but I think this is quite an acceptable compromise.
While Dreamwidth doesn’t have scheduled posts, it’s possible to post via email, so an email could be scheduled as well (not sure how manageable that is).
I wasn’t aware of the pinboard, so that’s very good to know. (But yes, agree with previous commenter.)
I would absolutely be interested in an email newsletter.
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In case there's something helpful in there, I described before how I manage scheduled posts for a comm, using the email posting options.
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I would subscribe to an email newsletter as well as follow the Dreamwidth comm and/or feed :) It's a great idea.
I know some people use the polling function to serve as a "Like" or "I read this" equivalent from other social platforms, in case the sort of engagement you're hoping to measure on post is "is anyone reading this?" rather than comments. (I'll mention
(Note: polls a paid account function, hopefully within reasonable budget for the org (~$35/year) and/or I'm sure there would be people willing to gift some extra Dreamwidth points if that can help keep the
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Additionally, knowing all the things that are going on at the OTW right now, and the role good communications plays in it, I appreciate the clarity and accessibility of this post.
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(Anonymous) 2023-06-19 06:29 pm (UTC)(link)no subject
OTW news posts
Having the meetings announced here would be great, too, since I don't check Twitter anymore since Musk broke it (I had ZERO notifications between September and May, despite people replying/reposting, etc.). It just isn't reliable anymore. (Plus, you know, I don't want to support the right-wing dumpster fire aspect of the platform.)
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I would prefer to read these updates here on DW. A newsletter is an all right option as well, but would be my second choice.
I would also be very much in favour of you posting the notifications about board meetings here! I think it would be very reasonable for readers not to expect last minute news or updates about the meeting on this same channel, as you suggest.
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An email newsletter would also be a great option.
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(Anonymous) 2023-06-20 07:40 pm (UTC)(link)In your review of current news distribution sites, are there others that have been flagged for potentially being dropped in the same way as DW? I notice this post doesn't respond to those of us who raised concerns about the timing of this potential change. I'm concerned that all the other outlets linked to at https://www.transformativeworks.org/where-find-us/ are for-profit websites (with the exception of Critical Commons, which you don't use for news communication). Given that the OTW makes a big deal of owning its own servers for hosting fanmade content, I'm surprised that you're happy to trust these third-party sites with the distribution of your news, and particularly that you use Twitter exclusively in some cases, given its current volatility and ethically questionable status. (And as others have raised, the difficulty of access for those without accounts is a concern.)
An entirely unrelated point: I think it's worth pointing out that purpose-built RSS feed readers are often more reliable for fetching feeds than Dreamwidth is. The RSS issues raised relate more to DW than to the OTW RSS feed.
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Good to know about the RSS information, thanks!
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Whatever happens with![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
otw_news, I am strongly in favor of having Board meetings announced on the OTW News blog.
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OTW News Reader Comment Period
is not an 'eye-catching' headline that would make people reading the post realize that the text beneath the giant banner (that took up more space than the text) was something important to read. so, were you trying to hide it on purpose and not get response to justify the decision?