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

[kore]

overall only 55 people replied to one or both posts out of 1206 subscribers

Maybe if we had hit that magic 5% number? I don't know. It sounds like they wanted a response from everybody, which is pretty unlikely since a lot of people said they didn't know they were supposed to comment on this comm, but OTW seems to be pulling away from DW anyway.

[muccamukk]

I'd rather Comms hadn't asked if they were just going to do this anyway. What a rug pull.

[kore]

Yeah, exactly. Why ask for feedback if they didn't care and were going to close the comm anyway, apparently? And why emphasize in the first post that engagement wasn't the reason for the comment period, when this makes it clear it absolutely was? (And with RSS feeds, when the entries disappear after what is it, two weeks? the comments on those posts do, too.)

[mistressofmuses]

Right? I think the "no, we didn't expect engagement on the posts here" thing, only to follow up with "...but not enough people engaged here" is frustrating. I know that these recent posts WERE asking for comments on whether the DW posts were worthwhile, so it's different than the "regular" updates, but even so. The responses they did get were pretty universally in support of continuing on, so it feels like there was no point in even asking if it wasn't going to matter.

[satsuma]

I'm not sure they realize that 5% engagement is an astronomically high amount, especially for an account as old as theirs. It's such a frustrating, arbitrary, benchmark :/

[muccamukk]

My personal journal has somewhere in the range of 500 subscribers, and was established a month after the OTW one, and hearing from about 25 of them on the regular seems pretty normal to me.

[satsuma]

For comparison, this post which was posted to the official OTW news twitter around the same date as the initial call for comments has 145 likes out of 23.9K followers. The ratio is even worse when you count views/likes instead of followers liked. And it is (possibly unsurprisingly given the topic was a heavily discussed one) actually an unusually high amount of engagement for that account eg. this post from June 5th only has 9 likes. So yes, looking at their other accounts it does actually seem like a remarkably large amount of engagement to me?