Some preliminary information, so the context of where I’m coming on is known — as I will be referencing things that I notice from my experience on site.
I’m an administrator on the Polish branch, who mostly focuses on new users on the site. I wrote guides, did an unhealthy amount of crit in my carrier, and try to make sure the site is welcoming to newbies. I’m trying to make sure the atmosphere is not hostile, people can navigate the site, and understand. I work with new members extremely often, both in the critique mentioned just a moment ago, and simply to help them start.
As a direct result, I have a decent understanding of the “new user” experience, and how things look from their perspective, and I wholeheartedly believe things are bad.
The way the SCP wiki (obviously I’m referencing the English site specifically) is structured is fundamentally horribly hostile to new users.
You enter the site and go to the “For new users” tab on the sidebar. It’s pretty easy to find, so it’s not a problem. You have the list of four pages, with three mattering in this case:
- Guide for Newcomers — Basically *the* designated guide for joining members, that should explain everything.
- Foundation Introduction Hub — A place that is supposed to direct the user to explanations of the lore and universe.
- FAQ — This one is self-explanatory, a list of potential questions one might have.
Let’s go in this order, shall we?
We are a new member and open the “Guide for Newcomers”, and start reading.
The first thing we get is a pretty incorrect and bad description of what anomalies and Foundation is — but there is a specific page to explain that, so it shouldn’t be a problem I suppose?
For some reason an explanation about headcanons, that looks like something from a FAQ and has no place being the second thing someone reads in the introduction.
Few snippets of Foundation lingo.
And a very brief explanation of staff and community.
THE END.
That’s the material that is supposed to introduce the users to the basics of how the site operates, the community, universe, how to engage — and the most basic basics that can be covered, should be explained in a way that is easily understandable, correct and informative.
Instead, the page devolves into overtly simplistic explanations, and mentions of things that have no place in the Guide for Newcomers, as they are not really important detail. A new users doesn’t really understand anything about how the site really is after this guide, instead at the end he is offered “more advanced guides” about specific topics.
So let’s talk about them.
They basically commit all the mistakes the main guide does. Focus on unnecessary elements, gloss over things that should be explained, and don’t properly introduce the topic at hand. The overall tactic for the whole 4-guide sequence seems to be to bombard the newbie with 50 different links in the hope he somehow learns or the things by themselves, instead of simply telling them.
Going from a hopefully objective assessment to an opinion:
I believe the way the guide is structured should offer a comprehensive understanding of the site on its own. How it operates, what’s it about, how to take part and contribute, and how to navigate the site. Offer a material that can actually make people know things, instead of hoping they figure it things on their own.
Most people joining have never been a part of a community like this one, never used a forum-based site, and never wrote anything outside of school — and the wiki should reflect that. So many people bounce off from the site, because they can’t manage it from no fault of their own.
The idea of separate guides for joining, writing and reading is good actually, but they should offer actual advanced material, that goes into the nooks and crannies of the concept at question, instead of a 101 that should be in the main guide.
Let’s now say you applied the wiki and got accepted. You want to understand the universe before you start creating and reading, to put your best foot forward. You don’t really have knowledge about this world, maybe outside of occasional snippets here and there that convinced you to check the site, so you are pretty much a blank page lore-wise.
And there you have three relevant pages:
The page itself is written in-universe. Which to me feels really weirdly, especially with constant reminders everywhere that the wiki “does not allow roleplay” and anything even closely related to it is not allowed — but the basic information page is written in-universe and talks to the reader as a member of a Foundation. Really puzzling and confusing choice.
Starting with the simplest, the object classes don’t really offer a good explanation of what object classes are and what purpose they serve. Everything is really brief as if someone tried to make the page as short as possible. As a direct result of this, most new users are incredibly confused about what object classes are and what purpose they provide, until someone explains to them in chat or on forum. Which means that this page is highly ineffective in one and only purpose.
Instead, it resorts to the “closed box test” as an explanation, which is an oversimplification that in my opinion does more harm and good, understandability-wise, and creates a lot of misconception about the topic. The guide uses a shorthand instead of properly delving into a topic, which fails miserably.
The clearance page is fine. It’s of similar quality, but the topic in question is a bit simpler and easier to grasp, so it’s less confusing. But I still feel the guide could do a much better job.
And the main prize — “About the SCP Foundation”. This guide feels so old and outdated, it was probably old and outdated in 2017. And by the look at the edition history, it was largely unchanged since its publication. In 2014.
The page does nothing to actually explain the topic of the Foundation and its universe, leaving people in the dark, until they read 40/50/60 articles and figure it out on their own from context clues — which then still leaves them quite often with a very warped view of the whole topic. This page needs to be simply deleted, as even a lack of explanation is better than the guide offers — youtube videos “What is the SCP Foundation” are unironically tens times better at handling the topic, that the SCP wiki itself.
And the rest of the page is simply a list of MTFs, GoIs, K-class scenarios, are utterly pointless to include in an introductory reading to a universe.
The FAQ on the other hand is basically just a big bunch of questions and topics that should be explained in the previous guides, but were not, so everything was thrown there, like cleaning a room by kicking dirt under the bed.
So this is it. We went through all the basic information, became a member, and have no clue how anything works. Great. Let’s go one step further and focus on writing, since it’s the main focus of the site and its only point.
“How to write an SCP”. Or how I would call it, “The worst guide on the whole site”.
Based on the statistic from the Polish branch, I would guess that around 70-80% of new writers on site lack experience writing, before coming onto the site — they have never wrote any creative work outside of school assignments.
And the main guide that we offer to them is designed in a way that makes it impossible for them to take away anything from it — and even if they could, there isn’t much to take away anyway.
The people reading the guide don’t really understand writing — they never had a reason to, as there isn’t a purpose to deep literary analysis outside of understanding how to write. The most experience they had with understanding the written word are boring language lessons where the teacher talked about the genius of Shakespeare or some other old author, which at most created a deep hatred in them for this type of thing.
They don’t really know how to make ideas, create concepts that will spark the interest of not only you but also of other people. So they latch onto the first thing they see, “an anomalous object that does anomalous thing” — and try to write an article or a post in the idea forum about an object that does stuff.
They don’t know what a plot hook is, they don’t know about narrative and logical structures.
Of course they don’t. They never had a reason to know these things.
And the guide offers literally none of it. Nothing, and I mean nothing the guide says is actually helpful to new writers. Instead, the first thing they get faced with is:
Many first SCP articles fail miserably for one reason or another, primarily due to the writer's lack of experience.
This is not an excuse for not even trying
This is not a curse befalling all new members
This is not just a fact of life or a universal truth
This is a challenge
Instead of offering help, the guide tells them to get good. This feels like an absolute joke.
Most of the pages are filled with one sentence “helps” that looks like they came from “writer’s twitter”.
The entire guide is clunky, unhelpful and disorganized. I believe that any experienced critic could make a better guide in a day, and there is absolutely no excuse that this is the state of the main writing guide on site.
This type of guide should introduce you to writing as a whole. Tell you how a plot is supposed to look like, how to make an idea and develop it, tell you what the purpose of the anomaly is in the article. The basics, because people need the basics.
Continue to explain how to structure a description to be logical and understandable, how to make conprocs that not only make sense but are also good introductions to the article as a whole. Actually write, instead of things like “if you want to write a scary SCP, think what is scary”. For those interested, this is an actual line:
- If you want to write a creepy article, think of what scares you. The site has its roots in Internet horror, and we try to keep with that tradition. The stranger the fear the better; a lot of the common terrors and phobias have been covered, and we love creativity.
This guide needs to be reworked, completely from scratch, because the consequences of such an essential piece being an old horrible piece of junk and crippling the site.
As a result of the “help materials” not offering help, we have an endless constant wave of low-quality ideas and articles, all of them with the same mistakes. Most of the problems with a “first-time author” articles are identical, and this means that all our materials fail at explaining those problems to people. They are so common and obvious, that I could look at an article and figure out its problems without reading it. Instead of spending time on advanced problems that need the attention of an experienced reviewer, they waste time having to play whack-a-mole with bad drafts.
The responsibility of explaining those basics, about writing, the universe, how to use the site, then falls onto the users, who have to do the job of the guides. Critters need to explain the very basics to new writers, 15 times in a row, with articles with similar or identical problems, because the writing guide doesn’t work.
People need to be repeatably taught how to navigate the site because it’s explained nowhere.
People need to keep explaining how the universe works because the materials for it are inexcusably bad.
So much effort is wasted every day, simply to amend the problem of how bad the materials for new users on the site are.
But, to be honest, most of the problems I mentioned are kinda obvious when thought about. Any experienced author can tell you the “How to write an SCP” guide is bad, almost anyone can tell that the “About the SCP Foundation” is horrible. Then why is this problem even a thing?
I think the quirk of the situation is that the staff is separated from the experiences of new users. Most staff is composed of members who ‘ve been active for many years, and the vocal voices in the community also have been there for a long time. And so, such problems like new users lacking materials, flies under the radar, as it’s not a constant booming problem like other things.
Much much bigger care needs to be given to how the site operates in regard to new members, or problems like this will continue and fester for years, before being fixed — if ever.
(account deleted)
