An excellent discussion in a feedback thread that came up over the weekend raised a number of interesting points for me and the team to discuss. One thing that stood out, which I realized, "Hey: I fully agree, and I can totally fix that!"... Was that news and announcements aren't consistently shared on the forums. So! I'm going to put my money where my mouth is, and fix that!
To start with, any site news relating to content releases, tool updates, sale announcements, and such will be posted to our forums News & Announcements section. Some of these releases also include a support forum thread, or a changelog post, in those cases I'll include direction over to those sections from that post.
There's other content we post and announce through our Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Discord that we currently don't post to the forums, though. This is where I want to collect more feedback from you all! I've provided a summary below of what these different types of content are, and what to expect from a forum posting of the content. Please vote in the poll to share your opinion, and comment if you have more detailed thoughts or questions!
Weekly Comics Each week we have a new comic by artist Luke McKay which is posted across Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Discord. My proposal for these on the forums would be to have a single thread for these comics to which I'll post the new comic each week.
Streamed Content Announcements We have several weekly streamed shows, and occasional one-off shows. We post announcements of streams to socials, including the topic and any guests that will be on the show. These would be posted as their own thread, with a link to where you can watch the show when it's live.
VOD Content Releases After being live on Twitch, our video content is processed and later added to our YouTube. If we have streamed content announcements on the forums, my proposal would be to add this update to that related thread. Otherwise, it would be it's own thread.
Article Releases Articles live on the home page, so currently I would be leaning towards not highlighting these on the forums. However, I'm open to see what you all vote for! Article announcements happen across socials. I think if I were posting them to the forums, I would create 'mother' threads which could hold articles of similar topics or styles. IE: Ravenloft articles in one thread. 101 Articles in another.
General Tool Promotions / Reminders We sometimes post to the social channels reminders or promotions about certain features on the site. Would you find these useful on the forums? These would be posts such as showing how to use backdrops, frames, and themes on your character sheet; how to change your digital dice set; etc. etc.
Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts, everyone!
Commenting briefly to say that I had no idea you guys even did 'Weekly Comics', and I'm super sad I've missed those. I'd love a forum archive of those comics I can enjoy. VOD content releases and tool promotions/reminders/ "how-tos" would also be really neat and useful for me specifically. My own personal Rei self is less interested in streaming announcements or article notifications, but I have no issue with those being posted either if folks want 'em.
Thanks very much for taking note of our feedback, Mellie. It's deeply appreciated, even more so that something like this is being acted on so quickly.
I'm not interested in any of these. I'm interested in why the dev updates seem to have stopped, when they will be coming back, and if we're going to get legible transcripts (straight copy-paste of the youtube captioning is frankly often unintelligible).
I'm not interested in any of these. I'm interested in why the dev updates seem to have stopped, when they will be coming back, and if we're going to get legible transcripts (straight copy-paste of the youtube captioning is frankly often unintelligible).
Dev Updates have continued, they air every Thursday at 9am PT on our Twitch, we haven't missed a week since Joe took over on the content side! VODs are available immediately after the show on Twitch, and available later on YouTube!
Unfortunately, due to my workload here and with our other Fandom Tabletop products, I have not been able to post those updates to the forums. I hope to have time to catch up in the future, but in this moment I don't want to make a guarantee that I can't, well, guarantee. 💔 But you can always get them on Twitch and YouTube, and we also post the released updates separately after they're announced on the show. (Or before, in some cases, where the new feature/product/other fun stuff is announced and then discussed on the Dev Update)
If you want to see on the forums when the Dev Update topic is announced, or when the VODs are made available, then those two poll options may be of interest to you. :)
I second the Dev updates in print. I'm an old man who much prefers scanning through text on the screen than listening to/watching a podcast. I understand the time issue with getting it transcribed and having been on a forum as a moderator many moons ago, we sometimes used member volunteers to drop things in to help the community. Maybe a mod-approved, point form list of what the devs did this update? Seeing the combat buttons on the monster sheets of the Encounter Builder was a surprise to me when I ran it for the group. I had been watching the dev forum for updates, but only saw the podcasts and, as before, I am an old fart who doesn't like podcast news stuff, lol. I might be a minority, but if not, a respected member of the community could point form the deve update podcast, linking to it for more detail, then a mod glances it over, approves and it drops.
It shouldn't take someone too long to jot down the points, so a new feature doesn't sneak in and surprise us too often, lol. All the surprises so far have been positive, though, so that's something.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Talk to your Players.Talk to your DM. If more people used this advice, there would be 24.74% fewer threads on Tactics, Rules and DM discussions.
Videos aren't a workable format for me. And they're terrible for referencing back to other people (there have been multiple times, when asking about Disciple of Life, or the Dragonborn UA, where people would ask 'is there any work being done on this?' For the first, we could literally point to dev update transcripts. For the latter, they were nowhere to be found.). Having a written transcript is what I need for accessibility. Having them for a while was great, and then the quality went downhill, and then they went away with no explanation. That was less great, and felt like accessibility is not something devs or mods care about, and is another example of the poor communication I often feel like we're getting.
I'm not interested in any of these. I'm interested in why the dev updates seem to have stopped, when they will be coming back, and if we're going to get legible transcripts (straight copy-paste of the youtube captioning is frankly often unintelligible).
Dev Updates have continued, they air every Thursday at 9am PT on our Twitch, we haven't missed a week since Joe took over on the content side! VODs are available immediately after the show on Twitch, and available later on YouTube!
Unfortunately, due to my workload here and with our other Fandom Tabletop products, I have not been able to post those updates to the forums. I hope to have time to catch up in the future, but in this moment I don't want to make a guarantee that I can't, well, guarantee. 💔 But you can always get them on Twitch and YouTube, and we also post the released updates separately after they're announced on the show. (Or before, in some cases, where the new feature/product/other fun stuff is announced and then discussed on the Dev Update)
If you want to see on the forums when the Dev Update topic is announced, or when the VODs are made available, then those two poll options may be of interest to you. :)
So let me ask a question then. Who puts together the slides for the Dev Update? I’m sure thats a discussion already as to what CAN be discussed. Why not have that meeting include a write up of the update, and the bullet points. It honestly can be done in a much more controlled environment as well, and then when it’s being posted to the forums that hey, a Dev Update is coming, the material is already ready for you in the post that hey, it’s coming. If you can’t commit, why can’t it be delegated to a forum moderator or some other staff member. Above this post, it talks about how this was really nice from an accessibility standpoint. This is something I’ve previously posted and fought for, and well, I’m going to continue to be vocal about it. So that thing we were doing for those people is now causing them to be excluded :(. There are already staff members whose job it is during the twitch stream to help moderate the chat or facilitate, why can’t they transcribe the answers to the community questions to provide some written detail later on? Then that can be promoted on your socials that hey, if you aren’t available to watch the video or need some written summary instead, those can be found on our forums at X link.
Honestly, this just kind of cements the point to me that the forums really are just an afterthought. Hell, just today Mellie posted in the discord that there were interviews available to have with a developer of the D&D Beyond Application. I absolutely signed up for that....but it was never posted here. I refuse to believe that it’s not because there aren’t enough people interested in doing it as right now there are still four open slots.
I am not interested in any of these items so I do not have a preference.
Based on these options it appears that staff is only interested in posting when it shares content that is made by Fandom? If I am off base please let me know but that is what it appears to be.
I would like to see more interaction in general from staff in any format really....even in the discord staff interaction is pretty low. You will see about 1-2 comments a day from Mellie and sometimes not even that over the course of several days.
Mods will discuss a lot on the discord but only come into the forums to remove posts and hardly interact with the community at large. There are some who do good works in that regard (Props to Dayvid) but its few and far between.
Overall I just assumed the staff would want to interact with the community more but it appears that is not the case.
I don't watch videos. I don't need announcements of the homepage articles, because I'm more likely to notice them on the front page itself. I am another who is requesting some form of text-based dev update. While I would like some actual meat to them, even just a post with screen caps of the video's bullet points/presentation would be good for me. I would also read the crap out of a dev AMA.
Is there any chance that Dev Updates could be released in written article form with the same amount of detail/coverage as the youtube videos? Or at least with the road map and updates? A large portion of my family has hearing issues. Apologies if this is somewhere and I've missed it, I tried to do a search but there's nothing as comprehensive as the videos that I can find.
Pre addressing some stuff - Youtube has subtitles - yes, but it's not the same as being able to properly sit and read an update. Especially since there's nothing that would truly require the information to be solely in video form.
The forums have updates - Yes, but again, having to scroll through non-related comments and topics is simply not the same quality of information sharing.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
Hi there forum folk!
An excellent discussion in a feedback thread that came up over the weekend raised a number of interesting points for me and the team to discuss. One thing that stood out, which I realized, "Hey: I fully agree, and I can totally fix that!"... Was that news and announcements aren't consistently shared on the forums. So! I'm going to put my money where my mouth is, and fix that!
To start with, any site news relating to content releases, tool updates, sale announcements, and such will be posted to our forums News & Announcements section. Some of these releases also include a support forum thread, or a changelog post, in those cases I'll include direction over to those sections from that post.
There's other content we post and announce through our Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Discord that we currently don't post to the forums, though. This is where I want to collect more feedback from you all! I've provided a summary below of what these different types of content are, and what to expect from a forum posting of the content. Please vote in the poll to share your opinion, and comment if you have more detailed thoughts or questions!
Weekly Comics
Each week we have a new comic by artist Luke McKay which is posted across Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Discord. My proposal for these on the forums would be to have a single thread for these comics to which I'll post the new comic each week.
Streamed Content Announcements
We have several weekly streamed shows, and occasional one-off shows. We post announcements of streams to socials, including the topic and any guests that will be on the show. These would be posted as their own thread, with a link to where you can watch the show when it's live.
VOD Content Releases
After being live on Twitch, our video content is processed and later added to our YouTube. If we have streamed content announcements on the forums, my proposal would be to add this update to that related thread. Otherwise, it would be it's own thread.
Article Releases
Articles live on the home page, so currently I would be leaning towards not highlighting these on the forums. However, I'm open to see what you all vote for! Article announcements happen across socials. I think if I were posting them to the forums, I would create 'mother' threads which could hold articles of similar topics or styles. IE: Ravenloft articles in one thread. 101 Articles in another.
General Tool Promotions / Reminders
We sometimes post to the social channels reminders or promotions about certain features on the site. Would you find these useful on the forums? These would be posts such as showing how to use backdrops, frames, and themes on your character sheet; how to change your digital dice set; etc. etc.
Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts, everyone!
Commenting briefly to say that I had no idea you guys even did 'Weekly Comics', and I'm super sad I've missed those. I'd love a forum archive of those comics I can enjoy. VOD content releases and tool promotions/reminders/ "how-tos" would also be really neat and useful for me specifically. My own personal Rei self is less interested in streaming announcements or article notifications, but I have no issue with those being posted either if folks want 'em.
Thanks very much for taking note of our feedback, Mellie. It's deeply appreciated, even more so that something like this is being acted on so quickly.
Please do not contact or message me.
I'm not interested in any of these. I'm interested in why the dev updates seem to have stopped, when they will be coming back, and if we're going to get legible transcripts (straight copy-paste of the youtube captioning is frankly often unintelligible).
Birgit | Shifter | Sorcerer | Dragonlords
Shayone | Hobgoblin | Sorcerer | Netherdeep
Dev Updates have continued, they air every Thursday at 9am PT on our Twitch, we haven't missed a week since Joe took over on the content side! VODs are available immediately after the show on Twitch, and available later on YouTube!
Unfortunately, due to my workload here and with our other Fandom Tabletop products, I have not been able to post those updates to the forums. I hope to have time to catch up in the future, but in this moment I don't want to make a guarantee that I can't, well, guarantee. 💔 But you can always get them on Twitch and YouTube, and we also post the released updates separately after they're announced on the show. (Or before, in some cases, where the new feature/product/other fun stuff is announced and then discussed on the Dev Update)
If you want to see on the forums when the Dev Update topic is announced, or when the VODs are made available, then those two poll options may be of interest to you. :)
I second the Dev updates in print. I'm an old man who much prefers scanning through text on the screen than listening to/watching a podcast. I understand the time issue with getting it transcribed and having been on a forum as a moderator many moons ago, we sometimes used member volunteers to drop things in to help the community. Maybe a mod-approved, point form list of what the devs did this update? Seeing the combat buttons on the monster sheets of the Encounter Builder was a surprise to me when I ran it for the group. I had been watching the dev forum for updates, but only saw the podcasts and, as before, I am an old fart who doesn't like podcast news stuff, lol. I might be a minority, but if not, a respected member of the community could point form the deve update podcast, linking to it for more detail, then a mod glances it over, approves and it drops.
It shouldn't take someone too long to jot down the points, so a new feature doesn't sneak in and surprise us too often, lol. All the surprises so far have been positive, though, so that's something.
Talk to your Players. Talk to your DM. If more people used this advice, there would be 24.74% fewer threads on Tactics, Rules and DM discussions.
Videos aren't a workable format for me. And they're terrible for referencing back to other people (there have been multiple times, when asking about Disciple of Life, or the Dragonborn UA, where people would ask 'is there any work being done on this?' For the first, we could literally point to dev update transcripts. For the latter, they were nowhere to be found.). Having a written transcript is what I need for accessibility. Having them for a while was great, and then the quality went downhill, and then they went away with no explanation. That was less great, and felt like accessibility is not something devs or mods care about, and is another example of the poor communication I often feel like we're getting.
Birgit | Shifter | Sorcerer | Dragonlords
Shayone | Hobgoblin | Sorcerer | Netherdeep
So let me ask a question then. Who puts together the slides for the Dev Update? I’m sure thats a discussion already as to what CAN be discussed. Why not have that meeting include a write up of the update, and the bullet points. It honestly can be done in a much more controlled environment as well, and then when it’s being posted to the forums that hey, a Dev Update is coming, the material is already ready for you in the post that hey, it’s coming. If you can’t commit, why can’t it be delegated to a forum moderator or some other staff member. Above this post, it talks about how this was really nice from an accessibility standpoint. This is something I’ve previously posted and fought for, and well, I’m going to continue to be vocal about it. So that thing we were doing for those people is now causing them to be excluded :(. There are already staff members whose job it is during the twitch stream to help moderate the chat or facilitate, why can’t they transcribe the answers to the community questions to provide some written detail later on? Then that can be promoted on your socials that hey, if you aren’t available to watch the video or need some written summary instead, those can be found on our forums at X link.
Honestly, this just kind of cements the point to me that the forums really are just an afterthought. Hell, just today Mellie posted in the discord that there were interviews available to have with a developer of the D&D Beyond Application. I absolutely signed up for that....but it was never posted here. I refuse to believe that it’s not because there aren’t enough people interested in doing it as right now there are still four open slots.
I am not interested in any of these items so I do not have a preference.
Based on these options it appears that staff is only interested in posting when it shares content that is made by Fandom? If I am off base please let me know but that is what it appears to be.
I would like to see more interaction in general from staff in any format really....even in the discord staff interaction is pretty low. You will see about 1-2 comments a day from Mellie and sometimes not even that over the course of several days.
Mods will discuss a lot on the discord but only come into the forums to remove posts and hardly interact with the community at large. There are some who do good works in that regard (Props to Dayvid) but its few and far between.
Overall I just assumed the staff would want to interact with the community more but it appears that is not the case.
I don't watch videos. I don't need announcements of the homepage articles, because I'm more likely to notice them on the front page itself. I am another who is requesting some form of text-based dev update. While I would like some actual meat to them, even just a post with screen caps of the video's bullet points/presentation would be good for me. I would also read the crap out of a dev AMA.
Is there any chance that Dev Updates could be released in written article form with the same amount of detail/coverage as the youtube videos? Or at least with the road map and updates? A large portion of my family has hearing issues. Apologies if this is somewhere and I've missed it, I tried to do a search but there's nothing as comprehensive as the videos that I can find.
Pre addressing some stuff -
Youtube has subtitles - yes, but it's not the same as being able to properly sit and read an update. Especially since there's nothing that would truly require the information to be solely in video form.
The forums have updates - Yes, but again, having to scroll through non-related comments and topics is simply not the same quality of information sharing.