How is the community doing? [2022] [duplicate]

Question

We, the elected moderators, wanted to take a minute to check in and see how the community feels like things are going on the site.

This community check-in has been done for the last few years (skipping 2020), and it was very helpful. As such, we'd like to share our thoughts and also get your feedback on what is going well and what we could improve. The process is modelled heavily on last year’s, but for everyone’s benefit:

How this specific Q&A is run so that we get good value out of it

One clear premise per answer

1. We'll post some of the things we've done/observations we have/things we think still need improvement. Please share your thoughts as well! Make sure to note whether you think the thing you’re writing about is an improvement, a problem, or some mix of the two (one person might see the same change as bad that you see as good, or vice versa)...

2. Post only one kind of thing per answer, so that when people upvote/downvote based on whether they agree or not, it's more clearly actionable. If you write an essay about 4 different things, it's not going to be clear what part(s) people agree or disagree with and thus it becomes difficult to act on that feedback. You can, of course, contribute multiple answers.

3. Upvote or downvote the answers based on your agreement with whether you see that thing happening and whether you concur with the answer's premise (that it's good or it's a problem). (In other words, if someone says "We get too many questions about unicorns and I hate them," you would upvote if you agree, and downvote if either you don't think we get too many questions about unicorns or if you don't hate them.)

No long comment threads

1. This post isn't the place to workshop solutions - if a particular problem gets a lot of votes, we should open a new meta question to do justice to that issue. Solutions hidden in a comment thread on one of these answers can not be clearly vetted and voted on, so they will tend to remain undone.

2. If you disagree with an answer, use your vote, but limit comment usage. Consider that it’s possible to disagree with an answer’s take, but that it’s possible the issue should still be discussed in full.

3. If appropriate, give your own answer, though having multiple answers on the same issue here is mostly gonna be hard to follow. If the answer would just be disagreeing with another answer, the effort would probably be better placed towards a dedicated meta.

As usual, the Code of Conduct, which we’d still like to summarise as Be Nice, applies to meta as well as the main site.

You may strongly disagree with other users or with the mods or whoever, but we trust that you can find ways to express what you like or don't like without being hostile or insulting to others. Focus on actions, rather than characterising people, and that extends how how those actions are characterised.

While we may have thoughts on things to bring up, in the interest of actually getting this started they're not gonna be here right away (read: we didn't want to delay this further in order to get those written). Hopefully others have noticed them too, and can beat us to it as well as bring up things we haven't picked up on.

Answer 1

The repeal of the "Don't Guess the System" policy has been exceedingly successful.

The Don't Guess the System Policy was repealed on September 3rd, 2021. The process was relatively free of controversy - no proposal for maintaining the policy was made, and the highest scoring proposal for repeal is currently scored at +65/-5: a landslide. In the time since, we have handled numerous questions with an unspecified system upon posting, my estimate based on poking around with SEDE is that we have handled somewhere in the realm of 80-100 questions that did not specify the game system. Under the old policy, all of these would have been closed prior to the OP themselves clarifying the system. Instead, most of these were able to get tagged and answered without ever having to go to closure review (I've added twenty-something system tags myself). We did recently have some discussion over the closure of one such question, but things were resolved in a timely manner, as is usually the case.

Overall, I would say the repeal has been a great success.

Answer 2

D&D and Pathfinder questions continue to comprise nearly 90% of our questions.

Year	D&D	PF	Total	D&D %	PF %	D&D+PF
2016	2756	948	4499	61.3%	21.1%	82.3%
2017	3566	1300	5664	63.0%	23.0%	85.9%
2018	4717	862	6257	75.4%	13.8%	89.2%
2019	4705	765	6246	75.3%	12.2%	87.6%
2020	3616	507	4622	78.2%	11.0%	89.2%
2021	2272	496	3094	73.4%	16.0%	89.5%
2022	663	110	870	76.2%	12.6%	88.9%

As you can see, the proportion of questions related to D&D and Pathfinder games is remarkably consistent at just under 90% of our questions.

I'm just reporting facts here, I'll leave it to others to discuss the positives and negatives associated with these observations in their own answers.

Answer 3

Activity is dwindling.

Users with the 25K privilege Access to Site Analytics can see for themselves: over the last five years (pulling a number out of my wool in order to ensure we're not overwhelmed by any signal unique to spring/summer of 2020) posts are down to about 1/3 of their previous volume, views are down to about 2/3 of their previous volume.

(Anyone with that privilege and an inclination to more-rigorously crunch/present the numbers, please feel free to edit ^^.)

Anecdotally: a few months back I started to run a game in an edition (and publisher) of Traveller that was new to me. When I had questions, rather than coming here--where Traveller volume is negligible--I went to the Traveller discord where hundreds of users are on any time I've dropped a question.

It makes me wonder if an age is passing....

Answer 4

As far as I can see, my reasons for no longer posting here have not changed. I come back every few weeks and up/down tick question or answers of interest to me, but can no longer see the point in actually using the site in any other way. There are better forums when if you ask a question you are not treated as some student that needs to learn how to ask a correct question. The fact that there was even rules about "having to specify the system" when someone might have wanted a general answer, or "asking about designer intent", is all part of the unfriendliness that I and others pointed out many years ago.

Answer 5

status-completed – see Are questions about rule intent on-topic? [2022]

Rule intent questions?

It is a bit disappointing how long it has taken to get a verdict on rule intent questions. The scores settled on the meta over two months ago, with votes currently sitting at an overwhelmingly positive +27/-1 in favor of "On this one, I think it actually should be up to ♦ mods". A month ago, in this comment linksassin stated:

we are in favour of seeing them return in some form but haven't reached a consensus on what that will look like,

indicating some level of general agreement about the direction to go. This comment was on this post, How can I ask a good designer intent question?, which was closed, with myself and doppelgreener providing close reasons in comments:

I’m voting to close this question because for now, designer intent questions are off topic, so the only answer to this question is “you can’t”. The mods have said nothing about permitting these questions again, so we should wait until they make that decision and hear what they have to say about it before we try to write guidance. – Thomas Markov Mar 22 at 22:22

I agree this is a little premature to ask. They're not allowed right now so this is jumping the gun; if they stay gone then no guidance is relevant and the effort is wasted. Moreover the nature of their return will inform how we handle this kind of discussion. KRyan's argued that "designer intent" is not even well-defined in our current community operation. Will we deprecate its use as a concept? The way forward for how we even frame approaching this issue again is yet to be fully determined, whether by the mods or anyone else. Mods might lead that discussion but we should have it first. – doppelgreener Mar 23 at 3:13

Linksassin's comment from above continues:

However I'm not opposed to the existence of this question, an answer guiding what the community feels a good 'designer intent' question looks like may help shape how we approach this moving forward. It would also keep us accountable to actually getting this done.

I went on to suggest that meta was already slow enough, and that we shouldn't wait on guidance to take shape before making a ruling on rule intent questions; link responded:

Didn't mean to imply that we would wait on this meta, sorry if it came across that way. I meant that the community (if it wanted to) could use this meta to get started on creating the guidance which will be required while we are still dragging out feet trying to get organised. Basically, we will keep moving forward, if someone makes a good answer here we might take that into account but it (hopefully) won't change the timeline either way.

So do we need to reopen Akixkisu's question and move the discussion along as link suggested? Is there something we can do to help you guys move this one along?

Answer 6

Our forum index hasn't been updated in over two years.

We have a handy dandy list of forums that we use to direct off topic questions. The last time it was substantially updated was March of 2020 (see revision 10), with the removal of the dead Story Games Forums.

I quite literally know nothing about other RPG forums, so find myself ill equipped for reviewing the list outside of checking for dead links. It would be great if some of y'all¹ could give the index a little audit, checking for dead links, URL changes, forum shutdowns, unfortunate changes in attitude toward minority groups, etc. And if you are aware of any good candidates to add to the list, propose them in answer so the community can vet and vote.

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^{1 A contraction meaning "you all", here referring to any reader, not just "you all the mods".}

Answer 7

The FAQ proposal process is still kind of in limbo, and has been for a long time.

See: FAQ Proposal Index for Role-playing Games Stack Exchange

I've made this observation before in chat (here, here, here). I think it's time to try something new for FAQ proposals. The current process is not working because of a lack of participation. I don't have any ideas at the moment. But maybe we can have a brainstorming discussion soon...