User blog:Bagwis/2021 Q1 Report

This blog is incomplete and may be updated from time-to-time.

Welcome to the first quarterly report of the year 2021. The aim of this blog is mainly to document extra information related to the community that aren’t normally posted on the #❖bulletin-board❖ due to plausible extensivity of the data.

To start, on behalf of the administration team, I would like to express my gratitude to everyone who contributed in the community in any possible ways – may it be as part of the translation and archiving team, events staff and participants, wiki editors and reviewers, original creators (fan fictions and fan arts) or as one of the people who keep the activity in the Subreddit or Discord server going. We never expected this community to grow so much way back three and a half years ago when Rinne, King, Lats, me, and other OGs changed our platform for correspondence here from wiki to Discord.

Without further ado, let’s talk about the main topic of this report -- the server progress.

On the moderation team, the general structure went under a third paradigm shift as soon as we commenced the 2020 Q4 promotion season. Two of the server moderators stepped down due to personal reasons that might have rationalized and explained their emerging inactivity. Not too long before that, two moderators also did the same thing, leaving the three moderators and two admins at the community's helm. While managing is not a real problem since everything is under control, the staff is facing a roadblock in rules revision that hasn't been reviewed for too long considering the active demographic is changing; and having a sufficient amount of people who can contribute into brainstorming will ultimately be the first step on resolving this issue.

To counter this high attrition rate, the admins decided to temporarily remove the restriction wherein a moderator shall only be allowed to manage a maximum of two among three platforms: Discord, Wiki (Fandom), and Reddit; making Quandlm (Candle) the first non-admin to ever hold power on such great scale. This decision is approved by consensus and nobody among the team contested Quandlm's loyalty and capabilities. I would like to thank him for his willingness to accept such a huge responsibility.

On that same day, the admins proposed to moderators on reopening the staff application which covers their purpose of joining, their outside of community experiences, and ultimately, how they can prove they were responsible within the community before this. 10 users applied and after the evaluation from all moderators, 5 of them passed the first filter.

For transparency, here's the evaluation provided by X and four other moderators. Names are redacted to protect the applicants as part of the agreement in the applications.

These five people, in no particular order, are: Botman, Vikki, Eto, Gasp, and Epic. They're currently in their last week of training and we're expecting the transition season soon before the camp generals' term ends. The main rationale why we have a three-month-long "training" in the first place is not only to test how good they are at their roles or how close they are to the goal they stated at the application form but also to build rapport among server members and their co-moderators that will last even after transition. The main plan after we complete the roster is to initiate the redrafting of the server rules. One of the main agendas will be about the relevance of camp generals given that lately, the whole batch is relatively underperforming compared to their predecessors.

On the camp generals, 7 positions were selected (via elections) for Batch 8 which maintains the same count as prior, however, their performance seems a little bit low given that their predecessor set a high bar based on how good they were on maintaining the camp engagement and unity. Two of them dropped their roles after one violated the server rule while the other left on his own accord. While we are currently experiencing a dip in this aspect, the camp activity remains the same and the reconciliation shows growth in all camps.

On the translation team and archiving team, the local translators with their groups released a bunch of updates to which we all know the main reason why there's still an inflow of people in this community. Alice (Cinnamon) dropped translations for 4 short stories, each pre-locked with a solvable link. Graze and his team from Confused Translations are still in the process of translating the latest volume which is expected to be finished before the next volume is released. Please take note that while we do support these fan translations, we primarily urge people to support Seven Seas' Translations for official EN translations as the copyright holder. For the nth time, I would like to reiterate that we don't condone MTL which other groups blatantly spread among people that cause misinformation and plot distortion.

On the event staff, there was also some attrition at the start but these were handled properly by the events manager, Jacob, by reopening applications and selecting active and innovative people. The documentation in #❖event-announcement❖ proves that events are usually bustling around the final quarter of the year. In fact, this is where the large server-wide events such as Zero Zodiac (handled initially by Heero, now by Pyguel), Tetris Competition (handled by Shissou), Chess Tournament (handled initially by Yori, now by Boo), Jackbox (handled initially by Gasp, now by Tuna) Waifu Gauntlet, FanArt Competition, Pokemon Tournament, and the recently launched Cooking with Jacob (handled by Jacob) and the Best of 2020 (handled by initially by Hieu, now by X) all commenced and happened.

On the wiki moderators, this sector improved the most given that there's a lot of movement across the database given that those who are currently handling the wiki and its sister wiki. Freak is added as a de-facto wiki moderator, and while he doesn't have the effective role, his decisions weigh the same as those who currently have the role. On the other hand, Boo and Marc are currently improving the French and Spanish Wiki at a steady rate. Of course, we can't ignore the efforts made by PercyJackson who also regularly edits the database in his free time. We offer our utmost gratitude to them since usually, we forget that being an editor and reviewer is a hard and thankless job. They're doing this for free and would have a large impact on community building.

On the subreddit moderators, there was no change in the management but the most noticeable among the things we can applaud them for is their constant attainment of every milestone. As of writing this, there are currently 35,250 users who have joined the sub.

On the server members, here are the metrics provided by Discord that will help us to evaluate things on a better scale. Based on this table, it is apparent that the rule applied as of the start of November 2020 -- where we have to manually verify each account of users via mobile numbers -- affected the number and rate of week 1 retention of new members. The number of communicators and visitors plunged down after the new year entered, signifying that the people who were once actively talking in the server are now getting busy in their lives. We expect the numbers to bounce a little bit once the new volume is released.

That is all for the quarterly report. Please look forward to the progress of the following season.