Original Post: Ember, May 20, 2017
Hello everyone! Thank you so much for filling out the survey, it would be difficult to overstate how valuable the surveys are for helping me understand how to improve members’ experiences of the site. If you haven’t filled it out yet, don’t worry, it’ll continue to check it over the next few weeks. As well, the “contact us” box on The Help Page is always open for anonymous messages, but be warned that it can take a few hours for the message to end up in my inbox.
Based on the responses I’ve gotten so far I’ve planned a bunch of small changes that will go into effect over the next few days. I’m going to change the welcome message I use for members to highlight the importance of reading the rules and to explain where they can find the guides and other helpful resources. As well, I’m going to keep a closer eye on the ceremonies and reach out to leaders as soon as the ceremonies are late. I’m already working on a guide on how each clan uses herbs and other medicine cat techniques differently based on their philosophy and resources. If you have any ideas for the guide, I’d love to hear them. Finally, I plan on adding border threads to the forums when I reorganize them to include EarthClan as one unit.
There were also a few suggestions for features that the website already has: we have an event around Halloween each year where members are allowed to play StarClan and Dark Forest cats, a frequently asked questions page can be found under the guides section of The Help Page (though ideas for new questions are always great!), and a list of all mentor-apprentice pairs can be found at the bottom of The Clans Page.
The biggest criticism of the site from this survey- as in past surveys- is the plot planning system and personally I couldn’t agree more with everyone’s complaints. However, while there’s some consensus that it’s a flawed system, there weren’t any concrete suggestions for how to solve the Plot Planning Page’s faults. While having more members post consistently would (at least in my opinion) help, I’m at my wit’s end for how to encourage more members to post. As well, I know that my opinion and the moderators’ opinions carry more weight in the plot planning page than they should, but I don’t know how to correct that beyond reminding people that unless we’re raising concerns about whether a plot breaks the rules, we should carry the weight of an ordinary member. So, please, if you have any ideas for how to improve that system, don’t hesitate to speak up.
Unfortunately, there were also a handful of suggestions that I’m unable to fix. I’m in contact with our website host about the array of technical issues they’ve accumulated (such as the glitchy side bar and the “Recent Activity” section getting stuck on 1 second ago) and I’ll pass information on to you guys as soon as I get it, but so far their engineers seem stumped. As far as notifications go, I can’t control which notifications members get. If you want to change your personal notifications, go to your page>edit profile>notification preferences.
I also received some suggestions that I won’t go ahead with, but would like to acknowledge. I don’t want to bring back restrictive rules regarding how members can name their characters and restricting the roleplay to prevent members from focusing on romance side-plots or quickly going through characters. While I do think that the clans’ history and the cats’ close interactions with two-legs would reasonably change what exactly the naming rules are (I discussed this in more depth in Monthly Meow LVII), my biggest reservation here is that I think it’s more important to allow members to be true to their characters and the stories they want to tell than to rigidly adhere to the canon Warrior Cats Universe rules with something as insignificant as naming. As for romance plots go, for as much as I beg and plead that members keep an eye toward the site-wide plot, I don’t think it’s fair to force them to roleplay certain storylines when what they want to roleplay isn’t directly interfering with a plot the rest of the website has agreed to. If you don’t like to roleplay romance plots -or anything else- you don’t have to join the people who do. As for members who quickly go through characters, I ask that you consider whether you intend to keep a character long-term before posting them to help me stay on top of updates, but don’t feel comfortable making a restrictive guideline on how many characters members can make in a certain timeline. I understand that members mostly make characters with the best of intentions and managing their characters should be left in their hands.
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