I’ve only just realised I should have probably posted this in Meta instead of Outreach. Oops. It’s fixed now.
One of the questions in the Thrive survey last year asked which of our web presences everyone used regularly. Though it’s not exactly up to date, it’s still a good indicator of where people get their information (Slack was entered as a custom choice which is why very few people voted for it):
We could do another survey now asking where everyone gets their information from these days and what suggestions they have for improving the various websites we use. In fact, I’ll make one after finishing this post.
EDIT: Here it is. I’ll wait for suggestions and approval then post it to all our media outlets.
I am in favour of this but it’d be difficult to organise. Multiple times in the past, we’ve been asked whether we have some sort of coordination system for handing out tasks, and while we’ve tried to implement them a couple of times, it’s impossible to stick to them due to the go with the flow approach we have to making feature lists for releases. We could try again, and with more input from the people actually making the things being planned it could work better, but I know a lot of us here enjoy the fact we can work on what we like. Perhaps there’s a balance to be struck - some tasks with high priority and smaller ones anybody can contribute to at any time.[quote=“Naggorath, post:5, topic:321”]
I think a great way to help insure people that the project is progressing, is doing something like what Chronicles of Elyria are doing; basicly giving an overall progress status every few week. We could use the community forum or the facebook page for that. In that way we can both show off how far we are along making the game and also show our transparency, which might attract people to join the project. I personally think it will bring a lot more optimism to the masses.
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This came up as a suggestion from several people in the same survey as above. My fear is several weeks of not much could reinforce perceptions that not much is happening.
I have had an idea though. Alongside the forum visual adjustments, I figured out (after much struggle) how to make a bot which would post in the Thrive Discord whenever a new post is made. It made me realise we don’t really have a centralised feed of everything within quick reach: the website, this forum, the community forum, GitHub, the subreddit, YouTube, etc. If we could collate the RSS feeds of all of these into one page somewhere linked prominently on the website, it’d give newcomers and veterans alike quick access to every new thing anyone does. If we were to do weekly progress reports, a feed like this would make it much easier for us to understand what’s happened at a glance, so we could cherry pick what we feel are the most important items and write a paragraph or two about them. Unfortunately, either would rely on at least one person being available at the same time each week to write and publish it.
I’m sure everyone would love you to do that, though we’d need topics which can be explained in video form. You’re the expert on videos - what would you think of making the above idea into weekly videos? Would screenshots and voiceover be enough?
Again, we’ve said a lot about how we should use the wiki more in the past. The trouble is few people bother to keep everything updated, so it falls into disrepair again. As with everything, it’s a matter of free time and motivation.