This took a little longer than "a week and a bit," but we finally have it here. After much internal discussion, we at the data analytics team have prepared the list of comments you have given us, both through the anonymous box and publicly on the thread.
We gave out the comments to everyone who'd be tasked with dealing with them, and they either worked on it, took it into account, or told us why they can't do it. Every comment, along with the appropriate response, is listed below divided into topics.
If we missed your comment or you feel like our answer was insufficient, please comment as such. We'll try to either clarify or reexamine what we wrote.
Articles and Posting:
Guides and Essays
Outreach to authors for rewriting existing guides
We will try to be more proactive when it comes to asking for help rewriting/creating guides, but without knowing who is and isn't interested in assisting it becomes a little difficult. We'd like to state here that if you want to rewrite a guide or assist in it, you are more than welcome to take part in it, and we'll try to help you the most we can.
Rework How to Write an SCP
Assumes more knowledge than average newcomer has.
Advice in guide is reductive to the point of being useless
Guide is weirdly condescending
Explain ACS modules on the writing guides
A rewrite of How to Write an SCP is in progress and will try to address all of these complaints. It will likely mention ACS as an option then link to the existing essay.
Rework newcomer guides to be useful to newcomers
Rework About The SCP Foundation
More in-depth formatting/theme/text color guide
We'll keep these request in mind going forward when considering other guides to rewrite or update.
Rework ListPages guides
Technical Words essay not focused
Both of the aforementioned pages are essays (guides written by users without staff involvement), and are not something staff has control over. We'll see if we can make a more focused ListPages guide, but we'd need to work out the specific issues with the current essay first.
Creating a better definition/explanation for Safe/Euclid/Keter
As stated in other pages on the wiki, the containment classes are intentionally left somewhat ambiguous. Authors who want to use more rigid definitions can use the danger classes or more specific esoteric classes, but we aren't going to mandate it. The guide to object classes could potentially be improved to better explain them, if anyone comes forward with specific suggestions for changes.
Guide to posting -Js or -EXs
This could be mentioned in the How to Write an SCP rewrite, but jokes may be more appropriate for a separate guide, if anyone is interested in writing that.
Have all guides, essays, and resources under one page.
While this was originally the case, to keep it from being too long most of the essays had to be hidden inside collapsibles. While the current split makes it easier for people to add their own essays, and makes the distinction between official guides and unofficial essays clearer, we would be open to changing this if users feel this was a bothersome distinction.
Create a page that explains some of the repeated terminology in the SCP Lore.
This was the intention behind the new collaborative Glossary of Terms, which people are welcome to contribute to or make suggestions for new additions.
Making the joining process easier/more streamlined.
We're currently working on a change to the Join the Site page to ensure it contains all the information required to create an account and apply for SCP Wiki membership.
Other
Notoriety for popular authors making it harder for newer writers to get a foothold.
This is a problem with any fiction / social medium ever. Sometimes you get a breakout hit, sometimes you stay unknown. It's hard to know what staff can do to provide a boost for newer good/growing authors, besides focus their spotlights and features on "unknown" authors. Community Outreach is currently brainstorming the viability of a "newbie" contest to address this.
Continue making the SCP Wiki a place where inclusive and diverse stories are told.
Thanks. We'll continue to make sure this place stays positive. We still have a long ways to go but we won't stop until we get there.
Make the wiki more immersive with a wikipedia-like link system with the addition of audio or video files
While there has been a recent trend of authors doing more to naturally link their stories together and embracing multimedia trends like audio, images, and video, this is largely outside of staff purview and we can't make anyone do this outside of existing Wikiwalk efforts. It's good to know that there's interest, though!
Increased visibility for international articles and branches
The ambassador team is trying to look into more ways to increase "passive" visibility, rather than "active" visibility boosts like contests, as the latter tend to only boost visibility for a short time. Currently they're trying to get authors to port INT canons and storylines over to the site, so they're featured on those pages as well.
Create an official canon and make an official 001
We feel this would overly restrict our authors, especially at our current size.
More short SCPs
Be the change you want to see! We have done some efforts to make it easier to find short articles, like the Shortest of the Month page, but what's written is dependent on the users.
Looser image policy
We don't want to get sued.
Remove slurs from old articles
While we don't condone the casual usage of slurs at all, we do feel like starting to go over and edit old articles for their contents, even like this, would be overreach.
Clarified whether -INT articles/translations count towards article total for author pages
They now do, the change was discussed before the survey but only recently implemented.
Clarified rules on anonymous posting
Revise the current criticism/greenlight system
Requesting feedback is intimidating to new authors.
The greenlight system is too reliant on subjective critter opinions.
We will be revisiting the matter of making sure forum crit responds in time, and the system will likely be revisited when the official discord is public. As for greenlights, the whole idea is that if one critter doesn't like it another might, which can help with the subjectivity of it all.
Site Navigation:
A way to read SCPs in posting order.
The SCP Calendar already exists, although it is admittedly hard to find and could be linked more prominently.
More focus on the User Curated Lists
As the name indicates, anyone can contribute to these lists. If there are specific lists you'd like to see on the page, it could be worth posting the list title on the forum, chat or social media, and seeing what articles members of the community suggest.
List MTF Hubs with appropriate tags (beta 7 with biological)
There is only one standalone MTF hub, and we feel like tagging it could cause more issues in the long run ("if this hub was tagged why not this one").
Comments regarding the topbar/sidebar:
Re-add “Tales by Series” to the sidebar.
The Foundation Introduction hub makes no sense navigationally nor in-universe.
Remove the Sister Sites section from the topbar.
Turn the new users collapsible into not a collapsible.
Easier way to access the info that was previously in the Universe tab.
Just reinstate the Universe tab.
Move the social media links from the top of the sidebar.
We're currently redoing the top/sidebar and trying to look for solutions to these issues that won't make it as bloated as it was previously. We likely will still need to keep the Foundation Introduction hub (while renaming it most likely), but we'll try to help the users here.
Listing ratings on the New Pages feed.
This is intentionally omitted to stop people from flocking towards pieces already doing well to avoid a snowball effect.
Creation of Genre Tags
This is an ongoing project by the Collections team, we want this as much as you guys do.
Random Page isn’t properly random, and shows the same page often.
The randomness caches and renews every 60 second - this is an inherent Wikidot limitation and is not something we can reduce, or bypass without adding an objectionable amount of overhead.
Add “start here” links to the start of every tale series article.
Staff are not comfortable making this change unilaterally for tales series due to not wanting to constrain creative liberty. Additionally, as not all tales series are linear there may not always be a "start" to the series.
Events:
Give “underdogs” (smaller authors) more support and attention, or at the very least, encourage discussion of more than just the top 3 articles.
Due to larger authors hogging the spotlight, it felt as if there was one contest for the larger authors, and another contest going on for the greenhorns who only really read each-other’s stuff.
One of the core tenets of contest organizers of the past has been to ensure that no particular contestants receive some kind of unfair advantage from anything we do as organizers. We try our best to keep from promoting any particular entries. For example, we do not show any official rankings as the contest is ongoing on any official pages to prevent people from being encouraged to only check out the highest-rated entries). We also keep a fairly hands-off approach when it comes to self-promotion as long as it does not fall into the territory of unsolicited advertising.
This is all to say that I do not have a great solution to providing extra support to "underdogs" that I do not believe would violate our philosophy of unfair advantages. Most solutions us as staff could provide would have the side-effect of making it unfair for those who are not "underdogs". On the aspect of encouraging discussion of more than just the top three articles, as mentioned prior we do keep the play-by-play rankings harder to find on purpose. Addtionally, our two listing processes include randomization and posting order in regards to most recent. These are some of our attempts, but at the end of the day discussion will almost always follow the most popular articles that pop up within contests. As always, we continue to review this and see if there is more we can do to keep our contests at a level playing field, but these are some of the solutions we have implemented thus far.
Limit scope of the next XK-con.
At this time, we do not have any current plans of making future XK-con's more restrictive than what our most recent one happened to be. We have actually seen some complaints that this time was too restrictive. Any less restrictive however and it becomes less of a theme and more of a suggestion. At the end of the day, we have to balance making the theme restrictive enough to encourage creativity while at the same time not too restrictive to force us to miss out on some great entries otherwise. In the future, it is unlikely XK-con's will be more restrictive, but we will certainly have other contests from time to time that should hopefully fill that desire.
Disallow referencing existing canons/material in contest entries.
Although we certainly can't do it in most contests as we would not want to stifle opportunities for some great story-telling that builds on what we already have, it is pretty likely that we will do this in the future as the theme for a standalone contest.
Increase event visibility outside of the front page
Currently, we try to advertise events through the main page, our social media, and through announcements via some popular SCP Discords. Beyond that, we are unsure of other options that wouldn't annoy users. If anyone has other suggestions though, they are more than welcome to reach out to CO. We are always on the lookout for ideas.
More cons like clichecon or cupidcon.
A little less collabcons.
We actually happen to already have plans for some solo-contests in the future, so this is already in the works!
Ban past kcon winners from participating in future kcons
We have had quite a bit of discussion regarding this suggestion in the past week or so. While this suggestion does have some obvious benefits while only affecting a minor part of the userbase, it will likely have a lot more side-effects than anticipated: Penalizing success like this could lead to people trying to write articles that are good but don't win in order to avoid the penalty. Removing some of the site's most prolific authors from what is the most well-known contest might make casual readers start to tune out. In reality this will only affect a small handful of authors, only changing who is taking the spotlight rather than truly killing the issue at the core.
We'll try to focus more on boosting smaller authors rather than penalizing successful ones, for example, featuring articles by newer authors.
Anonymous posting contest and a contest focusing on new authors
We're interested in running both of these contests moving forward.
More contests in general.
The seasonal contest system works; in 2020-2021 we had a ton of high-production contests and everyone was burnt out and sick of them very fast.
Technical Aspects:
Wikijump
Include gender options other than “Male,” “Female,” and “Other.”
This is already on WJ team’s radar – Issue WJ-176 on JIRA
Move off of Wikidot already.
This is an ongoing project that we are making progress towards.
Other
Pages not updating without refreshing them, such as static upvote counts.
Unfortunately, this is a wikidot-level limitation. We can't do much about it.
Wikidot search is dead, replace it.
CROM Search has been implemented since this question was submitted.
Crom search does not allow forum searching.
Crom currently does not handle forum data - and any implementation would be a very large project in and of itself.
Better sorting for the CROM Search Function, as it sorts by viewcounts.
That's not quite the case; CROM search first checks how relevant the query is for the article, and only then uses ratings as a tiebreaker. For example, if you search the word "Hello," then SCP-011-DE: Hello! would appear before Hello World, which would both appear before SCP-1171: Humans Go Home. Even though each has a higher upvote count than its predecessor, the "importance" of the word is in descending order (the whole title -> part of the title -> somewhere in the article).
If you search for a query, and you find multiple articles where it has the same importance, rating is used as a tiebreaker since it's assumed you were searching for the more popular option. Of course, you can choose to change the sorting method on the top right.
Make the tag search & recent pages’s listpages actually different pages, so they can be bookmarked.
Wikidot feeds don't allow you to do that, unfortunately. We do know that the -CN branch has managed to pull this off, but that seems to have required a large web of interconnecting modules and iFrames which, while impressive, seem to be a lot of maintenance for relatively negligible gain.
The ability to hide the sidebar on Sigma-9, for ease of reading.
This is done by default on mobile, but on desktop it's a little bit harder to pull off. This choice cannot "persist" between pages due to wikidot limitation, so every time you'd open a new page you'd need to re-collapse it. This applies to almost every other per-user function, like dark mode: until we have platform support we can't really pull it off.
Site Staff:
Increased internal accountability for Disc, AHT and IRC
We have been working on this over the last year with measures like public staffchat. Disc internal discussion have been made more available to staff internally and there is the always the 05 posts for the end results. AHT due to its very sensitive nature needs to stay private. See the later sections for changes to IRC as the Discord is leading to changes to that.
Staff are mean.
We're sorry. While this is a valid concern it would be immensely useful to know how staff are mean, and if there are specific offenses it would be worth following the proper channels and reporting this to their captains.
More greenlighters on the forums.
This isn't quite correct - anyone with surviving articles on the site can greenlight articles. The issue proper is that not enough people want to greenlight/crit on the forums, which is an issue the crit team has been dealing with for quite a while. Hopefully the discord might make this more streamlined, and crit are looking for more avenues to help alleviate this issue, but at the end of the day there's only so much you can do to incentivize critiquing 200 articles a week.
The greenlight system has the opposite effect as intended - making the forums less appealing for crit.
The greenlight system wasn't meant to make forums appealing for crit, it was meant to ease the burden of the critters.
Don’t make 05command mirrors for trivial matters.
Deciding what is and isn't trivial is very subjective. In general we're trying to streamline the work process, making anything that doesn't need to go to 05 not have to, but if something goes to 05 it means it likely matters to a significant portion of staff and/or parts of the userbase.
Staff are disconnected from the plights of new users.
That is unfortunately true. Most staff are people who've been on the site for years, and even if you join staff as a newbie, by the time you call the shots you've been on long enough to not be as in-tune with what a new user might think. We still do put a lot of thought and effort into making the site as appealing to new users as possible and we value all input from new users regarding how to improve the site.
Staff are overly bureaucratic and inefficient.
We are fully aware, and ironically this is one of the things we end up arguing the most about. We realize some level of bureaucracy is necessary to keep the site running properly (tech team overseeing changes to themes, making sure people don't unilaterally delete pages,) along with ways to record what we do and why we do it for future staffers, but we certainly could do with more straightforward processes. We're trying to improve on this, as you can see on 05command.wikidot.com, but we can't promise it'll be quick.
General accusations of author favouritism.
This is a problem that we are trying to work on. The problem is that currently the majority of staff are also active authors who are a tight knit community, which filters into subconscious biases. We would like to see more pushback on staff when we do this, given that we might not be realising what we are doing here.
This is especially important for readers given that, being authors staff do have an author first bias as well. We do recommend that non authors do post thoughts in our policy forum and join the staff discord server when that goes public. We also recommend for more non authors to apply to join staff, to add additional perspectives.
Teams should be more open about what are the qualities they’re looking for in a staffer.
Recruitment threads should state if someone was accepted or not, and why.
We probably won't state for every person if they were accepted or not, but the suggestion to list what we expect is fairly reasonable. We'll do so going forward.
Stop treating banned users as “cannot discuss nor talk about the topic” individuals.
This is something that the majority of staff is in favor of as well, and it's just taking some time to change and come into effect. AHT has started to write more thorough explanations of bans and discuss them when relevant, and Disc is trying to improve themselves as well.
Nonspecific complaint regarding Recap Team's inactivity.
The recap team has burnt out very quickly due to staffchat's increased activity, and the recent proposal to make staffchat open to the public has partially been an attempt to stop that from happening.
There was a message requesting the removal of staffers. The best way to complain about specific staff is to report them to either their team captains or the disciplinary team.
Other:
Fix SCP-009-J’s non-compliant CC images.
We will replace the images on 009-J all at once after all the images and their corresponding articles have had their replacements found and implemented.
Official SCP Youtube channel.
The Internet Outreach team has made a lot of progress with video content given the success of tiktok, so an official YouTube is something we're strongly considering as a future project. Keep an eye out - we'll let you know when we're ready to consider volunteers.
Not purely rely on transparency as a bandaid solution to issues.
While this is a valid concern, the complaint as phrased was vague to the point of being unactionable. We'd be interested in hearing specific issues that are being band-aided over by transparency as a solution.
Stop fearing controversy.
This is a pretty vague request that can't really be improved on other than going "we'll try," but… we'll try! At the end of the day, the difference between paranoia and adequate preparation is entirely subjective, so knowing when we shouldn't stoke the flames and when we should just do the thing is very difficult. We'll try to rely on our community's opinions and be more open about what our plans are in such situations, but we can't tell what the future will hold.
Loosen up “in general.”
This comment has similar concerns with being unspecific enough that it's difficult to determine which concerns need to be actioned. There are some rules that are hardlines. Roleplaying, personal attacks in critique, and slurs, for example. If there are more specific institutional issues that need to be addressed please come forward.
The site’s visuals are poor.
Unfortunately, this is also nonspecific — we don't know whether this complaint is with Sigma-9, Black Highlighter, dark themes, or any number of possibilities. No answer can satisfy everyone, and we're generally against mandating authors to have to use specific CSS.
Lowering the age limit to 16.
This topic is a… touchy one, in both directions. Right now we want to first contact a lawyer to make sure lowering the age limit won't put us in hot legal water, but this is something that deserves a conversation onto itself.
Raising the discord age limit to 18.
This is a discussion that's already been had in the discord proper fairly thoroughly, and both the mods and userbase decided on the age limit being 16. You can go there and check the backlog yourself to see what the reasonings were.
Adding excerpts of self-deleted articles to the deletion log.
Once we revert back to users being able to delete their own posts, we can't really do that anymore from a technical standpoint, so it feels weird to do so at all regardless of any possible merits.
IRC is intimidating/awkward to use.
This is true, but unfortunately that's just the nature of the service. IRC *is* a very old and barebones chat system, but we have tried to ease the learning process through things like The Lounge, directly connecting you to SkipIRC. Additionally…
Remove the IRC as an official platform.
…For better or for worse, we can only really properly reassess our relationship with the IRC once the discord is fully public, so people have somewhere else to go.
Increase visibility of the official discord.
As of the posting of this reply, we are planning to open up to a few SCP discords before going fully public, just to make sure we haven't forgotten to properly set up one thing or another. Hopefully it should be done by the end of the month.
Make the site’s visual style more consistent.
Our general mindset is that we should restrict contributors' potential creativity as minimally as possible, and this applies to CSS and stylizing too. People have made some really creative and unique themes, and we wouldn't want to stop that.
Mention all works published in a month in the monthly news.
We tried this before; it wasn't used all that often by users, and it burnt out the relevant staff in charge of writing the monthly news.
Cut all ties with SCPD.
There are no official ties with SCPD.
Dislike of the INT Discord server.
The server hosts people defending Ukraine’s invasion (supposedly with nothing being done to them).
This server is outside of the hands of the -EN wiki, but this concern has been passed forward to the INT staffchat.
(account deleted)
