Comment Period Closure and Results

[otw_staff]

Hello OTW News readers!

As we mentioned in our post on June 10, the OTW Communications Committee has been reviewing usage of this community and getting responses from subscribers about potentially following OTW News via a feed account instead.

We have now compiled the responses we received to both the original message and the follow-up message, and we have decided to turn this account inactive and to direct users to follow the feed accounts instead.

Several factors went into this decision.

Amount of Response

Although there was a quick response to our initial post, and some additional comments to our follow-up, overall only 55 people replied to one or both posts out of 1206 subscribers. (An additional 16 accounts have added the community since then, but these users were either not following OTW News before, or were doing so elsewhere.)

Although it wasn't expected that the majority of people would respond, this amounts to less than 5% of subscribers.

Availability of Current Options

OTW news can still be found here on Dreamwidth via the otw_rss_feed and there is a separate account for the AO3 News blog for anyone who wants to subscribe to both. Dreamwidth makes it just as easy to subscribe to a feed as to a community.

Our second post discussed the pluses and minuses of the feed display (and reliability) versus manual posting. Although we asked for people's interest in seeing a change to the feed display (which had been remarked upon by a few people commenting on the first post), none of the respondents to our second post mentioned a preference. Due to the lack of response, we'll let the feed remain as it is for now from our end.

Given that we will be relying on the feed to offer people news, we will be monitoring it regularly to ensure that posts continue to arrive here.

Availability of Future Options

We mentioned in the second post that we are considering an email newsletter which would send our news posts directly to people's inboxes. One of the reasons we'd like to do so is that this is considered both more convenient and reliable to many people than the way they are getting the news now.

What's more, such subscriptions would allow us to reach fans who normally use locations we have never posted to and at which an automated feed can't be set up. There are obviously many places fans use online and it would not only be impossible for us to post to all of them, but their varied formats might also be a poor fit for our news posts.

The newsletter option would also simplify things for fans whose fandoms are changing online locations. With a newsletter, fans would keep getting delivery regardless of where they were active.

Although the Communications Committee is currently occupied with recruitment and training, we expect to address this option in coming months and will be evaluating providers. Should anyone have experience with or a preference for newsletter services, we will be glad to hear your recommendations. Just comment on this post!

Notifications of Board Meetings

As mentioned in our follow-up post, there was almost as much concern with notification of OTW Board meetings as there was regarding methods to get news here. In response to that concern, we will be making posts to the OTW News blog with Board meeting announcements, which will then get delivered here via the feed.

Some readers took note that this new practice began last week.

Reader Preferences

Although there was a strong preference for receiving news here at Dreamwidth as opposed to other sites, and understandable concerns (which we addressed) about the reliability of feeds, various commenters expressed a willingness to use the feed account. There were also various comments to our second post that a newsletter option would be desirable.

What Happens Next?

If you have not already done so, click on this link for the otw_rss_feed (and, if you want AO3 News as well, the AO3 News blog) and click on the Subscribe link. You will begin receiving the news post links in your reading list as each one goes out.

In order to allow time for people to switch over without losing news, we will continue posting here for the next few weeks. Then, this community's profile page will be changed and a pinned post will be made which will offer directions to any visitors on how to keep viewing news, see all past news, and how to contact us.

Comments

[scintilla10]

Add me to the list of people very disappointed by a disingenuous "consultation" period in which there was apparently no real intention in engaging or consulting an existing community of fans on DW. This is not helping to build or maintain trust in the OTW.

[vae]

I'm very disappointed to see this - I've been mostly offline for a few weeks due to health issues so returning to see that you requested feedback, got feedback that was pretty much unanimous, then ignored that feedback because it wasn't enough without ever telling DW users that we had to reach a certain % of subscribers commenting for our feedback to be considered valid is absolutely infuriating.

Please reconsider - as mentioned, the feeds do not contain all posts and this community has been a straightforward way to keep up with OTW updates.

[operasteers]

as many of the others have stated in the replies, this is a rather disappointing decision especially when your own posts stated that engagement through here on comments wasn't important

i understand the reasons given to an extent, but nonetheless it's rather disheartening and feels almost backhanded to say that there wasn't enough engagement when that wasn’t what the initial posts called for, and it feels as if the concerns and conversations that the community on here brought up are being dismissed with a hand-wave solution as opposed to actually being addressed.

and, like others have stated, if i had known that engagement through comment numbers, as opposed to the content of the comments, was what was wanted, i would have responded, even with a simple "i'm here" in the prior posts. i had thought it to be redundant in stating my concerns when others had already put them so eloquently, but if statistics is what was desired then i wish that would have been stated explicitly from the beginning

[dhampyresa]

I missed the post asking for feedback, but I would also have preferred to keep this comm.

Dreamwidth has an API for posting entries. I would be happy to work on coding something based on it to lessen volunteer load, if possible.

[settiai]

If you expected people to comment in order to determine whether or not a specific level of engagement was hit, you should have said so because a lot of us don't comment if other people have already said everything that needs to be said. If you were going to shut down this community no matter what, you shouldn't have bothered pretending that the decision hadn't already been made.

Either way, it's becoming very clear that the OTW has no interest in actually listening to people at this point, which is extremely disappointing.

[darkrose]

This is a shortsighted decision that really looks like retaliation against DW. It's unfortunate that OTW chose to double down rather than listen to community feedback.

[makamu]

I am commenting here to agree with everything that has been said. I work in communications in my day job, so I know that it can be a strain, but this whole thing has been very badly run.

I've also recently become a member because I want to maintain and make the archive better, but this undercurrent of suspicion regarding your users miscommunications like these - a consultation and a poll are not the same, kicking off the public portion of the process when one of the owners has just voiced public and trenchant critiques of the org the OTW then more or less dismissed as irrelevant - do not look good.

[kunenk]

I don't think this is a good decision. I want to have faith that the OTW can serve us well, but decisions against the desires of the community hurt that.

…incidentally, which theme are you using? The tags overlap with the permalink/reply/comment links on desktop, which… does not look great.

[chestnut_pod]

I have been pretty offline for two reasons over the last month or two: for one, personal reasons requiring my attention, and for two, unexpectedly playing host to a big discussion on a post I am certain the AO3 is aware of, where lots of people complained about how OTW never listens to them!

I missed the initial comment post, or else I would have commented there to say that DW comms are an important part of many people's OTW news access, and I support this comm remaining. It makes it feel more like a community than a feed. I agree with other commenters as well, when they say that a 5% response rate is pretty dang good, and that there are other options, such as using a mass-poster, to reduce workload, if workload is a problem.