User blog:FourSevensRueful/Some Issues...

Dear community,

Yay, mid-March. Woo. There's a little bit on my mind I'd like to share.

The WAM score on our community as well as our SEO is dragging down to an all-time low. This has a wide negative impact on this community. Our focus is for 1st-8th grades having an ideal knowledge base for Prodigy, literally the best place to go for information (I would like to finally state that our new community-building plans will incorporate the official site's Zendesk's content...YEET). I'm really excited for the many contributions yet to come to the community I would try to provide by the end of the educational year (pending on chronic depression and exam studies you people may also have).

I hope to boost the WAM and SEO with a variety of ways. I don't want to be repetitive and give you more endless rants, so all you have to do is scroll a bit downwards on my Profile's Blogs. I do this too much...//sighs, half-sobbing-half-coughing because currently I have influenza and had to be absent from my academy today//

However, another topic I'd like to incorporate into our community is our prolonged waves of VANDALISM we're weathered with. Say our community is like the Grand Canyon. Take one year of the existence of the river in the Grand Canyon to be one contribution having a negative impact on our wiki (vandalism). Well, the natural phenomenon of the canyon was caused by the river ERODING AT OUR EFFECTIVENESS for as long as the community existed a quarter-score ago (compared to the millions of years the river in the Grand Canyon existed). This was literally the best improv comparison I've ever made, horrible

However, we have adopted quite a few helpful users (Councilors, FANDOM Staff, etc.) that will help us! Flareon, GAK, Glaciersong, our predecessors, and I have tried helplessly to put an end to the erosion of our community's effectiveness through bots, Norton systems, etc. We knew that we would face a 50% failure rate, unfortunately we failed...until our amazing highly-trained defense system (of real people :D) came along!

I hope that through new topics and basic Zendesk items we'll include later (we promise not to plagiarize, we credit the actual Prodigy company for their writings and gifs they use on their Update Status posts), as well as our contributors and growing population of prankers (people who vandalize as their first contribution for no reason), we can change their minds and make them grow attached to our community as support and guidance for the game.

Frequently Boken Rules
In order to keep our community orderly, we strive to have only basic rules that all FANDOM communities must follow. However, raging backlash and criticism for our leneancy has caused me to indict almost every new user for something so minor, causing immediate blocking without warning. That's not what I wanted to become, that's not what I wanted to show of myself, if was out-of-character. However, the community made a surprising turn-around when I set up even more rules (it now takes about fifteen minutes to even skim through the entire pages the local staff and I drowned the community with). We even had to separate all of the guidelines pages. At one time I remember, we had just over TEN pages all about the rules here. TEN!!!!!!

We slightly lengthened the pages and reduced the amount, but still now there's the Basic Rules, Commentary Rules, Promotion Requirements, Discord Rules, and Manual Of Style (want the link(s)? look at the navibar at the top of the page). Still we have issues about people disregarding them, even though the WELCOME MESSAGE and several other warnings before users are given chances to contribute link the rules so users have the convenience of visiting them. But yeah, fair point...they need even more shortening after countless times I have made them straighter and more "to the point."

However, there are many rules still not being followed. The basic ones usually are: vandalism, spam (considered vandalism on our community), trolling (mostly on our Discord server which I honestly could care less about, I have apathy for all things social media, no offense), and hacking (many of our msot trusted users have been hacked into and have been confirmed by scanning that they were hacked). To this day, I get reports on this about daily. At least one is brought to my attention. I'm fed up with it that I want to transform my LEGAL sockpuppet, Noot the Fairy, into an actual defense bot that could be used on anime-related video game communities mainly because Noot is an anime-like NPC from our own community's topic.

Some of our local rules I have tried to enforce for some time were also: Other guidelines like that. However, there was a real pet peeve I've always had...non-child-friendly content on the community. UGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH that was the most irritating thing I've ever experienced as when I was promoted as a chat-discussions mod a few years ago. I do have to remidn people (even though I don't like to) that the only way to keep our targeted audience (grade-schoolers) feeling safe on the community is to have people not cursing or other pseudocurses (words in replacement for curses, like...I won't tell you, I'm a squeaky clean gal...//squeeeeeeeak//). That's irritating. I don't tell anyone directly about what they're saying is against the rules. I just take their content and edit it, replacing what they say with either with an ellipsis or with a replacement word, like the c-word for fecal excrements becomes "a dirty cpap machine."
 * not creating new categories without permission from the majority of the rest of the community
 * adding images or other media that aren't one's own (art theft) are punishable by temporary (if one-time) or permanent (if multiple-time)
 * don't solicit other people or advertise without my (or Flareon's) permission (unless on the Advertisement Thread on Discord I hope is still up, haven't checked in a week yet seen drastic changes to the site layout each new time I returned)
 * if you have something not blog-worthy, don't post it as a blog

Well, I'm sorry I have to say this, but these rules are really damaging to our community as a whole and I hope people understand. I'm sorry if I appear to be a stickler to guidelines but that is something that got me out of many situations I could have had in my life. FOR PUMPKIN SEED'S SAKE I COULD HAVE BEEN IN AN INSANSE ASYLUM IF I DIDN'T ADOPT THIS RULE-FOLLOWER BEHAVIOR

Welp I hope you understand these issues. I apologize for the inconvenience I've caused you about making you read this long rant, however I really intended to inspire a positive aura to emanate from you after reading. Sorry that it didn't occur...

Best regards,

~Four