Earlier this month, I published a survey aimed at understanding how members are finding the website, why they chose to join, why they chose to stay, and what areas need the most improvement in terms of recruiting long-term members. The survey was closed August 12th and since then, I have reviewed the results and shared those that indicated that they were comfortable with the moderators seeing their responses with the moderators. Thank you so much to everyone who responded, these surveys are so helpful in setting priorities and gathering ideas on how to improve the roleplay.
The results were largely positive, with most respondents saying that the reason they joined and stayed were the same things that Warrior Cats of the Forest prides itself on- a friendly community, organized pages, a long history both in- and out-of-character, and exciting and plot-filled forums- and all members who responded to the survey rated their overall experience as a new member highly.
However, there’s still plenty of room for improvement. A few areas that frequently came up as negative are a sense that the Discord server distracts from the roleplay itself, that the community is so tight-knit that it’s difficult to find footing in, unpleasant experiences with other members that feel unresolved, a sense of feeling out of touch with the roleplay, and a lack of engagement in plot planning.
From these responses, the moderators and I have a number of rule changes, new features, and changed procedures that we’d like to try out.
The first category of changes regards the Discord server. To prevent spamming, the “@everyone” tag has been limited to only moderators and the site owner; if you would like to make an “@everyone” announcement, contact me or a moderator and we can do it for you. As well, the bot channel has been deleted and all intrusive bots removed. If you’d like to continue with the Pokemon game or the music bot, you can join a bot server such as this one. The advertisement channel will remain, as Warrior Cats of the Forest uses the guest advertisement boxes of other roleplays and it’s bad form to not have a channel for other guest advertisements in turn. If you don’t want to see advertisements, you can mute this channel by right-clicking the channel name and selecting “Mute #advertisements.”
The biggest change that was proposed in the survey was an alteration to how plot planning is handled. Since the implementation of plot planning blog entries and later forum threads, we’ve struggled with member participation in large part because members, particularly new members, find them intimidating and hard to enter. With the change to Wix, the formality of the plot planning pages remained, while member participation has been further dampened by a wave of new members and a lack of visibility for the official plot planning threads.
To fix these problems, an official Plot Planning Channel will be added to the Discord Server where members can discuss the plot in a less formal setting. When an idea has been settled on or the discussion ends in a divide, the participating members can write a summary of the discussion and post it to the Plot Planning Thread, where people can keep track of the ideas that are floating around. From that thread and the channel, I will continue to update the Planned Events Section of the History Page. The Short Term Planning Channel will remain in place and serve its original purpose, that is, setting up scenes and roleplay partners.
While this may be less organized than our current system and there are certainly some kinks we’re going to have to work out before it starts running smoothly, we hope that it’ll greatly improve member participation in plot planning and as a result, get more members invested in and participating in the overall plot.
There are also a few long-term changes that we’ve started working toward. The first is adding to the current moderator team, which I hope to accomplish in a month or two when the current wave of new members has settled in. If you have your eye on a moderator spot, the best way to increase your chances of being selected are to stay active, participate in plot planning and comment on blog entries, welcome in new members, to volunteer for tasks like writing a Monthly Meow, and -most of all- helping other members and alerting me to any rule infractions. As well, over the next few weeks the rules regarding high ranking character activity will be enforced more strictly and positions will be opened up to active members. If you’d like a deputy or leader, please see the How Leaders and Deputies are Chosen Guide. Finally, I am working on a new system for cleaning the Members Page and Discord Server so that only active members are shown. To help me in this endeavor, please make sure that your server nickname includes your WCF username and if you see a member on the site who hasn’t joined the Discord, politely remind them to join.
A few changes were proposed or are in the works that I’d like to hear your opinions on before we proceed. The first of these is a tutorial video explaining how to join the roleplay, giving a brief tour of the website and an overview of the clans and website history. This video will be between five and ten minutes in length. While I’m happy to write the script and edit the video, I have a lingering childhood speech impediment and would prefer if someone else did the voice over. If you’re interested, get in touch and I’ll let you know if we decide to go ahead with the idea. This project will be a lot of work, however, so I’d like to hear more of your opinions on whether or not you think new members would find the video helpful. So, what do you think?
As well, an idea for an oldie-newbie mentorship system was floated earlier this summer with River’s New Member Experience Survey and a bunch of members showed interest in the idea then, but it never got off the ground. I’d like to try an official test group for the system and if that shows promise, we can extend the program to include more members. If you’ve been active on the website for more than a month or so and would like to be a mentor, let me know.
Finally, I’ve been working on a slider for the home page with quick information about the planned plot, recent events, current season, and out-of-character information such as warnings about postponed updates or announcements of out of character events, like the New Year's Gift Exchange. I’ve had some technical difficulties with setting it up, but have been in contact with Wix so hopefully that’ll be resolved soon.
There were also a handful of suggestions from the survey that I’d like to work on, but which I’m uncertain of how to proceed with. The first is a better way for members to anonymously report concerns or rule infractions. Currently, members can anonymously email me through the Contact Us boxes on the Members Page and Help Page and I’m not certain how I could make these clearer, or what other system I could use. Do any of you have an idea?
The website’s design was one of the more controversial points of the survey, with some members praising it and others referring to it as generic and as having too much white space. I’m uncertain of how to improve the design, as much of it is set by Wix and doesn’t have any personalization settings that would remove blank space and am reluctant to change the design wholesale because we just had a contest to determine the website’s design. We could re-run the design contest, but I want to know that you guys agree that this is a concern as the last contest only had one member-submitted design and very few members actually voted.
In summary, please comment with your answers to these questions:
What do you think of the new Plot Planning Channel?
Do you think the video tutorial would be helpful? What should I include?
What do you think of a potential oldie-newbie system? For this one, I'd like to hear from everyone, but particularly members who have joined within the past few weeks.
How can I make the channels for anonymous reporting more visible?
how can the current design be improved? Should the design competition be redone?
What other changes would you like to see?