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The SE 2017 Survey - Results
Topic Started: Apr 23 2017, 12:25 PM (949 Views)
Holben
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Thank you to everyone who submitted their responses for the Survey. It was up for three days, and forty-six different people took part. I'll summarise what we found here, including a few of the interesting remarks we saw along the way.

How frequently do people visit SE?

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Over three quarters of responders here said that they visited the forums almost every day, and no-one responding said that they visited less than once per week. Perhaps we simply didn't cast our net wide enough, and the irregulars would have shown up over next week? Nevertheless, I think this is a sign of a very strong core to the community here.

What do people come to SE for?

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If you need a reminder of the options


By a little way, the strongest showing here was for people taking part in or viewing projects by individuals. That makes a lot of sense to me- many of our most-replied-to topics are just that kind of thread, and they also seem to attract dedicated lurkers too. Discussion and presentation threads weren't too far behind, and after them chat threads and community happenings were tied. The other three options all saw strong showings too. Some examples of the things people put in 'other' includes browsing old projects and posting/reading creative content in Cafe Cosmisque.

Which forums are most visited?

Of all the forums, General Discussion is in the lead here, with Cafe Cosmique also being highly visited. Among the Speculative Biology areas, Evolutionary Continuum was in the lead shortly followed by Alternative Evolution. There was a fair showing among the habitable zone crew, and of the five forums in that section alternate universes was the least mentioned with only two respondents mentioning it.

The Staff

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Generally, respondents seem to view staff activities quite favourably. Effectiveness and fairness were consistently at the high end of the scale. There was more variability with approachability and organisation, and most people seem to think we have about the right number of staff, with the skew being towards us having too many. The least consistent of these was transparency, with a positive general trend but a significant number of people choosing central positions.

Interesting remarks when asked for suggestions for improvements:
"I feel that Away Staff is an unnecessary grouping."
"Clarification what what each role means."
"I think there are certainly more staff members than required to keep the forum functioning, but I think it's great to have a large and active staff body. I don't think there's really anything wrong with the way the forum has been functioning in the time I've been here, but if there was fewer staff members there wouldn't be too much a difference in efficiency (however, discussion on moving forward with ideas in staff discussions might be compromised)."
"Staff introductions."
"As said in the Discord, try to fresh up the Mod list, some of them aren't approachable in any way as they aren't on often enough and don't really participate in any forum activity, be it discussion, chatting or actual speccing."
"A slightly more objective way of moderating would be nice. We should want to keep rules somewhat loose to prevent people from exploiting loopholes, but I feel too often whether someone gets punished or not depends on how popular they are."
"Maybe a pinned topic explaining what it is the mods do? (Or something similar.)"


Understanding of Staff Roles

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Ten of the 46 respondents didn't feel like they understand the role of a Global Moderator. People were even less sure about the Forum Moderator and Away Staff positions, with 13 and 16 leaving those two positions respectively blank. Respondents were all over the place regarding forum-specific moderators, with a tendency towards the centre- not being entirely sure.

Interesting feedback remarks:
"Better definitions of when a member is/isn't away staff, and clarification of what forum moderators do and where they do it."
"Forum and global moderators are a needless split. Second, Away Staff is utterly useless. Nobody needs that."
"I'd like to see minor tweaks - more specialization, clarity on the functions and roles of each member of staff."
"I personally feel like there are one or two Global Moderators who don't effectively use their position and who's responsibilities could probably be better handled by forum moderators if they were given the mantle instead."
"Why is there so many forum moderators if there's only a few community projects? For COMs sure, but it feels a bit odd that even though for some community projects that either completely die or never come into existence, the mods continue to persist. What are they doing? Are they putting stuff in the water and turning the frogs homosexual?"
"Good enough."


Do people feel able to give feedback?

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Most respondents feel able to give feedback about the way things are done with SE, though the modal group is the central position. Seven respondents chose the lower two responses.

SE Community Overlap

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The majority of people taking the survey put themselves down as members of the SE discord. The other three options had weaker but significant results. Only one other SE community was mentioned, which was the SE subreddit on reddit.

Use of SE features

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Relatively high usage of the active topics feature, and low usage of the affiliates page. However, active topics was still only used by 19 respondents, and only 32 survey-submitters gave an answer to this question, so we can assume the 14 left out do not use any of these features.

COMs and Community Projects

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The majority of respondents here have taken part in a COM and a Community Project, but submitters were more likely to have taken part in the former (for the interested, the Other option was explained as "An April Fools COM, but that's it.").

Interesting feedback on COMs:
"Have a consistent schedule on when COMs should be chosen and when they should be taken down. It's confusing to see COMs remain up two weeks after they were supposed to end."
"It's good and has improved in comparison in the last year."
"Better time management. It really isn't that hard to pick a new theme and do a short writeup in the timespan of 30 days."
"There could be more, and an allowance for regular member-based COMs, rather than staff-only."
"A clearly explained and closely followed schedule (competition starts on the first, polls open so many days before the end of the month, etc.)."
"The April Fools COM was really lame and out stayed its welcome. In all seriousness, sometimes the competitions take way too long to close."
"COMs appear to be decided far more a Moderator's whim than almost any of the suggestions provided. Public opinion is often not taken when deciding the COM subject, and often the voting process is hard to participate and monitor."


Interesting feedback on community projects:
"Personally I think it's really a hit and miss thing with projects. Sometimes they're managed great, other times not so much. (Compare Bygone World to something like the Future Evolution community project)"
"The library is the only one I am aware of. Little does not spend nearly enough time moderating and running it. Not sure if that really belongs in this question though."
"Community projects tend to die constantly, and I don't know if this is a staff issue or a lack of organisation from all parties."
"Personally I'm not sure why we need a strict separation between community projects and personal projects, but other than that, no."
"It is okay, it was good that finally the dead projects were archived in a special area."
"As far as I can see, I think the management of this area is done as well as the current situation permits. The most active community project run by mod (The Great Library) is a bit slow to update, but given the nature of that project I don't think it would be tactful to suggest any alterations be made there. "
"I think they would be less likely to die if one or two people leads the project like a GM (as in DnD) would, rather than the fully democratic process that tends to slow progress to a crawl."
"Community Projects can be overly selective and not adaptable enough to suit the audience. They appear to frequently turn into simply projects of the founding members rather an anything inclusive or friendly to new members."
"Properly organised before they are started"


Member Projects

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A lot of people weren't sure what the survey meant by member projects. However, there were fairly high results for all levels of understanding here. People's opinions of member projects trended very highly indeed.

Forum Management

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This may have seemed like an odd question to many- the majority of respondents didn't think this was a problem at all.

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Mostly people think SE has about the right number of forums, with equal numbers on both sides of the centre.

Interesting feedback on missing/unnecessary forums and subforums:
"General discussion/news and articles and Science central seem to be the same thing."
"News and Articles should be merged with Science Central, Forum Games should be made a subforum of the RP Sector."
"Spec Guides hasn't been used in over a year, and it never saw much use to begin with."
"I think you guys have it all covered, especially with the new RP forum."
"I think there should be a "pop-culture spec" forum, for speculation about the biology of organisms from works of fiction."


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Generally people are glad that the RP forum has been added, though a number don't mind much either way.

SE's Purpose

Here are some submissions from this section:

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"People talk about topics relating to speculative evolution, and end up talking and sharing other things as well."
"Scientific discussion and generally fun activities with a group of like-minded but different people"
"A place for all interested in speculative evolution to take part and share in their hobby. And having the ability to better themselves through interaction with other experienced members."
"Sharing ideas and information on evolution, both speculative and real as well as biology in general. It is both creative and informative."
"To teach people what we know about our world and to show and nurture imagination and creativity."
"It is a special space on the internet that provides help and home for creativity and the development of different activities related to the topic of speculative biology using always constructive methods, instilling and cultivating the development of projects and ideas, and allowing the healthy interaction of members of different countries and cultures."
"The goal is to give people an area to speculate on potential biota given any host of scenarios, and to review, collaborate on, and put to peer review their writings. Of course, with any small community set up with a specific purpose, there will be more than one shared interest, and people will want to talk about things with similar minds they might not have anywhere else to do so. I think this can distract people from the original purpose of the forum, but it's integral to the workings of the forum and in moderation, a lot of fun."
"A place for creative people with an interest in science, biology, and worldbuilding to share their ideas, worlds, creatures, and to talk and connect through our shared interests. Also hang out and talk about our days sometimes."
"Thoughts and fun, with science!"
"A place in which speculative evolution and related fields may be discussed, and related content created. The forum also possesses non-spec oriented features to allow it to more effectively host its distinct community."
"A nice place to look at interesting thought experiments, great artwork, and to meet decent people. Most of them anyway."
"The discussion of evolution applied to hypothetical scenarios."

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Most respondents here feel strongly that the forum is proving successful at its purpose.

Misc Comments

"A single collection of all non-pinned, more than average effort put into, long forgotten projects would be nice."
"I believe that the SE community has kind of moved beyond speculative evolution to an extent. It's hard to treat the forum as just a place for SE when the community is now more of a friend group."
"Seriously, what are member projects?"
"Everyone go read my stuff and like it."


novus ordo seclorum

Much to my shame, there was an error in the original survey that was not corrected for several hours. Monster was not included in this staff list, and therefore "all results are invalid, even the good ones." It's common knowledge that she would have won had she been on the survey from the beginning, so in naming the three 'coolest' - as chosen by the community- staff, we'll start with 2nd and go to 4th.

With 31 votes - dragonthunders flew ahead into the pole position.

Coming up only a vote behind, Sheather received 30 commendations.

But horror of horrors- there was a tie for the next place. Both Holben and someone called Troll Man both received 29 votes from the community.

Interesting responses to the desert island question:
"Whichever one is best at surviving on a desert island."
"Monster, so all the bad stuff will happen to her instead of me."
"A little bit of all of them so that they can be stitched together to form the ultimate moderator."
"Whichever one is quietest."
"Holben, so I wouldn't feel bad about having to kill and eat him for sustenance."
"Seascorpion, because he already lives in Australia so he could treat it like home."


And finally;

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In a wonderful display of positivity, the committal and non-sarcastic answer was victorious.

Thank you again all those who took part, and I hope these results give you something to think about!
Time flows like a river. Which is to say, downhill. We can tell this because everything is going downhill rapidly. It would seem prudent to be somewhere else when we reach the sea.

"It is the old wound my king. It has never healed."
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Icthyander
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Since Holben was too lazy to explain what people didn't understand, (there goes his tie with Trollman, I rescind my vote), I had to badger explanations out of him on discord.

"Member projects might need to be renamed but they are a way to recognising long lived and successful topics. Once they have achieved that, they are given a special topic prefix and pinned status.

Global Moderators are the second echelon of SE staff. They have moderator abilities in all forums and are important in the management of topics and the settlement of disputes, especially

Forum Moderators are users with moderative abilities in the Community Project subforums. They also lend their voices in staff discussions and keep an eye on the forum.

What Away Staff are is under revision currently."
Movie Monsters- It Came from Beneath...
Legend of Zelda- The Creatures of Zelda

We have a discord. If you want to join, simply message me, Flisch, Sphenodon, or Zorcuspine.

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Holben
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Icthyander
Apr 23 2017, 01:05 PM
-snip-
I didn't explain it because it is all under scrutiny right now and anything might change. So, it's unhelpful to make it sound concrete.
Edited by Holben, Apr 23 2017, 01:15 PM.
Time flows like a river. Which is to say, downhill. We can tell this because everything is going downhill rapidly. It would seem prudent to be somewhere else when we reach the sea.

"It is the old wound my king. It has never healed."
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LittleLazyLass
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Proud quilt in a bag

Okay, gonna touch on a few responses about forum mods and community projects, as one of those mods myself, and manager of the Library, which was brought up in three different responses, two of which are shown here.
First of all, as a forum moderator I disagree with this response:
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Forum and global moderators are a needless split.
I see where it's coming from but I feel it's a good way to see if someone has proficiency as a staff member before throwing them in a full-on global mod. Where Troll Man fits into this I'm not quite sure, several forum mods have come and gone but he's still there?
I found this response very interesting and I understand the lack of names, but as it is it can't really help at all:
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I personally feel like there are one or two Global Moderators who don't effectively use their position and who's responsibilities could probably be better handled by forum moderators if they were given the mantle instead.

The comments about COM management are completely correct in my opinion and we need to get our act together. Even as a staff member I'm completely in the dark about what COMs are chosen next, and the only thing I've heard about the selection process is that the skype chat apparently has a part in it, which seems really bizarre given that's not a large portion of the community or in any way correlated with the staff team. Whatever the process is it's clearly not effective in that COMs will come up late more often than is, in my opinion, acceptable. I don't feel like I have any power to get a COM up when it's not up on time because I have no knowledge about what the plan is regarding what we're doing in any given month.
This isn't really the time or place to go in-depth about the situation but I will throw out there I agree that the management of the Library has been unacceptable in the area of actually getting stuff done. I will stand by my methods of moderation and that it turns out a better project but that doesn't matter when work is getting done so slowly. Something definitely needs changing in respect to how things are handled.
When the Philotes project died, I commented about some factors that I feel led to its failure. This following response, I feel, suggests a far better method of moderation:
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I think they would be less likely to die if one or two people leads the project like a GM (as in DnD) would, rather than the fully democratic process that tends to slow progress to a crawl.
People like being able to make the project the way they want, but in the end this is lesser to the desire of actually wanting to spec and develop the project. I feel a more concrete starting point created behind the scenes by the mods is necessary so the time required to get the project in question running is more similar to that of Bygone World. The staff have discussed some other ways of altering the way community projects are handled, but I'm not sure if that's something we want to discuss here or commit to yet.
On the note of some of the other questions, I as a staff member would not rate the transparency as a five. This response to the question about forum staffing sums up my opinion very well:
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I think there are certainly more staff members than required to keep the forum functioning, but I think it's great to have a large and active staff body. I don't think there's really anything wrong with the way the forum has been functioning in the time I've been here, but if there was fewer staff members there wouldn't be too much a difference in efficiency (however, discussion on moving forward with ideas in staff discussions might be compromised).
On the question about forum-specific moderators, this refers to Watcher and Kamineigh in their respective sections in the RP forum, as far as I understand. They don't count as members off the staff team but have moderation powers in certain parts of the forum. On the question about forum features, I have no idea what "active topics" even refers to. On the question about unnecessary subforums, I strongly disagree with two replies in particular:
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General discussion/news and articles and Science central seem to be the same thing.
This just sounds inconvenient to me; there are a handful of semi-active threads in General Discussion that always stay near the top of the board, and merging to two would bury these and lead to inconvenience. The other response in question is the one that said Forum Games should be part of the RP Subforum; RPs are games but a lot of the games there aren't really RPs in the sense used here. I see no reason to sort them together. Lastly, you guys definitely missed out on one or two funny responses the question about the deserted island.
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Myxini
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I don't want to respond to anything specifically yet- not until it has been discussed by staff- but overall I am very thankful to those of you that responded to the survey, and hope that we can now begin discussing what to do with this information to get the forum in a better state than it is currently in.

Hopefully they speak for the other members of the forum as well- if anyone feels that issues weren't brought up here, please remember that the User Commentary subforum is a thing, where you can post requests/questions etc to the SE staff. People much more active and aware of forum goings on than I am will be happy to help :)
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Dr Nitwhite
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Apr 23 2017, 01:18 PM
This isn't really the time or place to go in-depth about the situation but I will throw out there I agree that the management of the Library has been unacceptable in the area of actually getting stuff done. I will stand by my methods of moderation and that it turns out a better project but that doesn't matter when work is getting done so slowly. Something definitely needs changing in respect to how things are handled.
As I have said previously, you really mustn't be so down on yourself here. The Library is a colossal project, that you where willing to take on not only canon arbitration but retcon is quite impressive. It's simply too big a task for one person to take on by themselves.



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I think they would be less likely to die if one or two people leads the project like a GM (as in DnD) would, rather than the fully democratic process that tends to slow progress to a crawl.


While I don't think that a project being led by a DnD-esque "gamemaster" is a good idea (in fact, the way I understand DnD works this would be a terrible idea), I have to agree that most group projects die in development, and that the ones that are successful tend to be the most decisive. When people deliberate on dozens of variables with little agreement on each one, the project is doomed to fail before it begins. Successful community projects seem to start out with a concrete premise and setting, which allows the members to get right into the action of speccing without worrying about worldbuilding.




I have several other thoughts regarding the survey results and the subsequent discussion, but I don't have all the time in the world. I'll try and post more later.
Speculative Evolution Projects-

Other Relevant Work-

Final SE Lifelist standings

BREAKING NEWS
We interrupt your regular programming to bring you this cutting edge report.
ATTENDANCE DROPS DRASTICALLY ON SE SERVER
This past Monday on Discord, famous server Speculative Evolution took a hit in the attendance office when it's offline member list suddenly reappeared. Mods scrambled to rectify the situation, but unfortunately there was little anyone could do. Server member Ivan was asked what he thought of the situation. "So long as Flisch, lord of machines and scion of Urborg lives, all will be well". SE, (in)famous for it's eccentric userbase, has recently been spiraling downward, and now we have hard conformation of the decline. Moderator "High Lord" Icthyander states "There is nothing to be concerned about, Discord is merely changing its UI again", but members are beginning to suspect the honesty of their staff.
Stay tuned, we'll be back with more at 11.
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opeFool
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I didn't even know there was a survey. Anyways it's nice to know that so many peoplemails visit the forums so often.
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