Amassment Survey Results 2016

All important news regarding Amassment and its community at a glance.
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Lethe
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Amassment Survey Results 2016

Post by Lethe »

Hi, everyone! In March, we held a survey and asked you for input regarding various things around the community. After discussing your response extensively within the team, we're now giving you a rundown of said input along with the results of the discussions and Amassment's future direction. Some of the changes you've inevitably seen around the forums, while other features are things to come. With this post, we also hope to adequately address some of the concerns that were raised.


General Feedback
  • Positivity
    Members all expressed satisfaction with the community atmosphere, especially with regard to friendliness, inclusiveness and helpfulness. Marathons and challenges were also praised, as was the directory and forum reorganization and the new Fanlisting forum.
  • Events Input
    Firstly, there is significant demand for more challenges and marathons in general, especially concurrent ones in case the current big challenge doesn't appeal to some. Secondly, there's a lot of positive response to the recent member-run Fruits Basket marathon, both from participants and non-participants. Thirdly, there's overwhelming demand for activities of all kinds, along with a long list of great suggestions. As feedback and suggestions regarding events make up the majority of the survey input, these three points are further outlined below.

Changes in Effect
The following are changes we've already implemented based on survey input.
  • Forum Functionality
    Readability around the forums has been improved with changes to the font! (Read more here.) A "mark forums read" link has been added to the top right corner of the forums' index page.
  • Amassment Exchange
    The previous "Marketplace" forum was given a complete makeover and is now a place where you can request and exchange site-related services. (Read more here.)
  • Shrine Spotlight Nominations
    Effective as of this month, nominations have been decreased from five to three per person; we'll keep this flexible based on activity. Less shrines in the poll means more focused examining, less fragmented and "clearer" results as well as voting being less overwhelming.
  • Member Page
    With the introduction of the Fanlisting forum and the polishing of the community pages on all fronts, Amassment is striving to be even more welcoming. As long as you appreciate shrines, you are acknowledged as part of the community. Members who do not own shrines yet as well as those who may not see themselves create shrines in the near future should be listed on the member page as well.

    Since the focus is still on shrines though, collectives without shrines will be listed in italics. It's still just their main collectives that will be linked - even if those collectives happen to be fanlisting collectives. That doesn't mean we'll list every other member's fanlisting collective too; there's a forum topic for that.

    If you aren't yet listed on the member page but have been active, post here to be added now!

Things to Come
A lot of things have been happening behind the scenes in response to the survey!
  • Shrine Spotlight Voting
    A new forum mod is in the works to hide poll results while voting is still open. This way, members will vote for the shrines they like best, rather than giving their vote to shrines that are perceived to have a chance to win.
  • One Page One Month Marathons
    Events Team will try running two One Page One Month marathons per year in the future, rather than just one (not counting impromptu Encores). They're a good way to get into shrining, and they can easily run alongside bigger Challenges (combos possible).
  • More Challenges and Marathons
    A new challenge, Construction Zone has launched, and will run alongside Dynamic Duos for the next two months. More events are already being planned, and new Events Team members have been recruited to ensure that this well-received part of the community will keep going strong! There's only so many events that can run at the same time, but we agree that having concurrent events is of benefit to the community.
  • More Themed Events?
    There is significant interest in series-specific and themed marathons, and there doesn't seem to be a lack of ideas judging from very spirited conversations. As these marathons tend to be more "restrictive" theme-wise, with Amassment-run events trying to be fairly open so as to include as many members as possible, we will try to encourage more member-run marathons.

    Please note that we have a Joint Projects forum; we believe this to be the ideal place to brainstorm themed marathons and to gauge interest and participation. In case you aren't aware, member-run marathons can be posted in Amassment's events forum - just make sure to contact Events Team first to coordinate these with their own challenges and marathons to avoid thematic overlaps and stressful timing.
  • More Activities
    We've been lacking in activities recently, and there were a lot of great suggestions in the survey. Events Team is already working on something that should keep the community busy activity-wise in a variety of ways, so stay tuned!

Concerns
Any concerns not addressed in the points above are separately addressed here.
  • Member Superiority
    It's been brought up that there's an air of superiority from senior or staff members at times. We'd like to take this opportunity to draw attention to the Contact Information post. We have changed the Forum Guidelines to be visible in all boards, and you can find the link to the contact information there as well.

    If you feel like you've been treated unfairly or someone makes you not feel welcome at Amassment, whether member or someone on our teams, reach out to us through a channel or PM anyone from a team you're comfortable with. We're also working on getting an anonymous feedback form up in case you aren't comfortable with current communication channels. When contacting us, please do provide examples of such behaviour - if we do not know what's wrong, we can't address it.
  • Social Media Usage
    There's concern that the increased use of social media as well as the community chat may lead to cliques that leave out those who only take part in the community via the forums. It's a valid concern, especially if you aren't taking part in either of those aspects and thus don't know how things are playing out there.

    We'd like to assure you that our forums are the core and center of the community, as that's where everything is visible to everyone in the community. Amassment's Twitter account is mainly used to inform others of updates (including those not currently active in the community), and redirects readers to the respective forum topic.

    As for Twitter usage of members and further networking, that isn't something that we have control over; members have always socialized with one another in some manner - if not over social media (when social media wasn't prevalent yet), then through chat clients. In fact, we'd like Amassment to be a place where you can find not just people who share the same hobby and interests, but also longtime friends.

    Having said that, the community chat is what we consider an extra outlet and opportunity to chat together, but, again, it is not the center of the community, and you are not forced to take part in it. Please don't feel as though you're missing out either: In case of interesting discussion topics, for example, we strive to bring those over to the forums to hear from our forum members as well, and to extend and record conversations over here. (For example, Retro Shrine Features has been one of the most active topics lately, and it started out with random remarks in the chat.) Similarly, any great ideas that happen among members on Twitter are brought over too! The Fruits Basket marathon that was held started out with spontaneous tweets.
  • Non-Shrining Events
    It was mentioned that challenges and marathons are all about making shrines, which leaves out those who aren't interested in making shrines. We'd like to clarify Amassment is a shrining community, both for creators and visitors. While we have a Fanlisting forum now, the reasoning behind it is that many of our members enjoy making or visiting fanlistings, while others join this community with a fanlisting background and are looking to make their first shrines. For that reason, plugging in the Fanlisting forum is limited to fanlistings looking to expand. Challenges and marathons will continue to be about shrines only, but with upcoming activities, there should be more diverse activities that you can participate in!
Feel free to respond to this topic if you have questions or would like to discuss some of these points. If you feel like something you've brought up in the survey hasn't been sufficiently addressed, please reach out to someone on the Forum Team.

Thanks again, everyone, for participating in the survey! Our community and its evolution wouldn't be what it is without your activity and your input. :heart:
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Kula
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Re: Amassment Survey Results

Post by Kula »

For Social Media I would definitely recommend discord: https://discordapp.com/ (over stuff like skype) if you guys are still using it, idk about that since I just lurk the forums
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Camy
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Re: Amassment Survey Results

Post by Camy »

^ Would recommend too, been using it the past three weeks and it's still improving. Plus, it takes lesser resources :D

One downside though is that their mobile app for Android is really bad and it crashes a lot :(
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Masao
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Re: Amassment Survey Results

Post by Masao »

I never heard of it, but it looks really nice. I'm going to try it :yay:
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Kula
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Re: Amassment Survey Results

Post by Kula »

It has a lot of good points:

-Uses way less resources than skype
-You can make channels so people can chat via text or voice, important here: you can delete them so for example, you could make a channel for each marathon or activity so "general" or other channels aren't flooded and then once the event is over you just delete it.
-You can use it on web if you don't want to install it (yes, even the voice part can be used on web, at first it was just web based)
-You can give out roles in case you need stuff like moderation like on the forums

Below is an example of the RO server I worked for (it's really popular for gamers right now)
Image

Also @camy, it's weird it never crashed for me and I'm on android as well! :(
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Camy
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Re: Amassment Survey Results

Post by Camy »

I guess it's a 50/50 chance on it Dx Still, far better than skype and so easy for people to join in.
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Megan A
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Re: Amassment Survey Results

Post by Megan A »

Love seeing all of this organized and neatly presented!

I'd support moving to Discord as well mostly because my Skype crashes so much! I haven't used Discord much, but I know it's supposed to be way better.
Todd
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Re: Amassment Survey Results

Post by Todd »

Thanks for everyone's feedback on the chat option! I think we should make a new post about Discord and discuss it further. See how many members are interested, discuss the features that would be beneficial to the community, etc.

As for this topic, I don't think the social media part of the feedback was about Skype being used, but more about someone worrying about being left out if they decide not to participate in the chat. Bringing this topic back to the point, which is the survey results, I echo what Lethe wrote: the community's board is the main area of the community, and everything revolves around it. No one needs to worry about being less included or involved by opting to skip out on the chat or adding members on Twitter. The forum isn't going anywhere, and you can continue enjoying it alone if that's what you want to do!

By us branching out, we are attempting to offer more options to get more people involved in shrines. We realize not all branches will appeal to every member.
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