Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-168424-20190130223012/@comment-36009152-20190201183353

Brandon Rhea wrote:

Right now our biggest focus is on creating an organization that will support communities better than we have in the past. There’s a lot that we’ve had to change to get to that point, both in terms of staff of course but also just how we approach things. Product, Content, Community, and every other team has in someway had to reorient around to the notion that we are going to be more of a community-first company than we have been in previous years.

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That goes back to staff accessibility and interaction with the community too. The goal, as we bring Fandom and Curse together and finalize what the different teams look like and what their roles and responsibilities are, is to make staff even more accessible and helpful than we were before. Overall the Community team here has been a pretty reactive team. We’ve always been there to help users when they come to us, and I think we’ve done a pretty good job at tending to individual user needs as they arise, but that’s a world where users would have to come to us. We want to be more proactive. We want to find better ways to communicate, including in real-time, and be much more involved in and engaged with supporting community needs. I hope it is not minded that I invite myself in to share two main things. Though staff may not be practising it right now because they are busy, it is absolutely fantastic that it is planned for communities to be more supported more than in the past.

At this point have to say how it’s just dawned on me that half of the Fandom staff have in fact been fired. Not only was that really rude, I don’t understand how communities can be better supported when Fandom has crudely dropped exceptionally talented good community players who were already really helpful as they were. Will people at Curse Media be assuming the roles previous people already done well? Can they help make my lovely spoiler template required for synopsis pages, fix the bugs in Discussions, do they even know any communities here? The best outcome is to rehire the people who lost their jobs so they can continue what they were doing to a very high standard.

The decline does not just apply for communities, recently I have interacted with other staff members for the first time on the special contact thing, I think their names were “wait a minute, you’re not Kirkburn” and “non Kirkburn number 2” since I needed help with layouts and other technical modifications to directly improve wikis. For the first time was told they are no longer able to help and was advised to ask on the community boards here.

Half the staff are gone, the other half are understandably stretched to the limit since it is just them tending to messages sent over special contact. With fewer people to help there to begin with, how are they then also supposed to get involved with communities even more?

On this may I ask what exactly the vision is for the better help and further community involvement? Will staff for example be editing wikis out the blue randomly, will they be asking random people if there is anything specific they can help with? It was not right to dismiss people who were already doing everything seemingly wanted with this new direction, and it is tough to actually see what the plan is for these improvements less so with fewer staff.

Still, as said at the start and another reason why I commented is again to praise this sounds good on paper path. I believe it when you say the goal is to make staff more helpful and accessible. To that end Brandon Rhea since you are the lucky recipient of the Fandom symbol may you add the first Discussions post for the Maiden Rose wiki? This is one of two wikis I would like to add Discussions for to bring them up to date and embrace a feature Fandom seems very keen to implement. The thing is I would like a staff member to post the first Discussions post, just for these two, the one with all the helpful links stating what one may do in Discussions and other useful information related to that and Fandom overall.

I politely request this since I have already posted the first Discussions for another wiki so wanted to change things up. I’m tending to quite small wikis so was thinking people who come to them may not even know there are staff for the sites and it would be useful for them if they come across, say bugs and that.

With so many wikis I do not expect yourself or other staff to edit them, neither will I see it as precedent that I can just expect staff to appear at will to post something – though by all means everyone should feel free to do so, indeed this new direction does seem to suggest that, which is ideal really. I would just like the single introductory post for Discussions. Since these are under appreciated wikis it’s a good sign to show people that they have not been left behind and that staff are still present.

Besides with at least two people visible posting it could encourage more people to take part in Discussions, an icebreaker of sorts to foster a nice community spirit.

I have made the same request concerning the Yaoi wiki to Mira who is practically giddy with excitement and simply cannot wait to post such a helpful and meaningful first Discussions post there, so I hope you may do the same for Maiden Rose.

Working together, good informative communities, helpful people all round, and supporting the prized Discussions, the new centre piece of the whole of Fandom, it’s all an recipe for success.