A lot of fascinating responses to our survey though we still have a while to go to reach the goal of 1,000 respondents.
One person, under "Favorite Part of theOtaku" wrote "The Bossman" which made me smile
Another person left every field blank except, under "Least Favorite Part of theOtaku" they wrote "Adam" over and over again. Yikes, I'm glad Death Note was just a show or I'd definitely be in someone's notebook.
I think a lot of people will be surprised that so far in the survey theOtaku.com has a 91% approval rating. What's interesting is that I copy-pasted that last question from the political realm, it's the same format as the one they use to measure Presidential approval ratings. So Bush: 30ish%, theOtaku.com: 91%, not bad.
Now, how people view my "6 months of my life" relaunch is a bit more divided. Here's the break down: 24% of people say it's WAY better, 37% of people say it's better, 14% of people say it's about the same, 18% of people say it's worse, only 2% of people said it's much worse, and 8% of people say that they never visited the previous site so they don't know. That's about 80% positive or normal and 20% negative.
Digging into the comments of the people who said it was worse showed a lot of understandable reasons, divided into three categories:
(1) People with technical problems: It's definitely understandable that someone who runs into a frustrating glitch on the site or with computer settings that aren't friendly to us will be upset at the relaunch. We'll have to do a better job publicizing and listing glitches so that people can see them getting fixed, right now we do it all mostly in the background.
One thing I recommend to everyone is to use either FireFox or Internet Explorer 7. Using IE 6 messes up our layout a little bit which we're working on.
(2) People who want more: There are some limitations on the site right now that people get upset about. What's most interesting to me about this is that, if we were any other site, which updated a few times a year vs. every week, I don't think people would be that bothered because they'd accept things as they were. However, since we improve every single week, visitors wonder "why did you add THAT feature and not THIS one?", which leads to feelings of discontent and feeling like their issues are being ignored. I don't think a lot of people remember the frustrations of the old site, because it wasn't updated that often and they just got used to those frustrations.
For example if tomorrow our voting system went to the way it used to be, where it didn't go through instantly and refreshed the entire page every time you voted, forcing you to hit the back button twice to leave, I think I'd get complaints every day saying "I hate this system, it's so slow, when will you fix it" but back then no one cared because that was the standard.
This is a really difficult problem to solve. We just have to ask for patience or maybe post a public "to do" list so they see what's coming next, I'm not sure.
(3) People with nostalgia issues: A lot of people on the site are very sentimental and miss things, even small things, like one person was really outraged that we didn't have weekly DVD releases anymore. The major problem with this group is that, even if we re-introduced those old features, they'd probably become happy for a day or two and then quickly forget about it. We've seen this time and time again, where we've re-introduced old features because of member demand and then no one really pays attention to them anymore, leaving us to have to discontinue them again. That doesn't mean that old things can't be re-introduced but it's better to focus on the future and to leave the past as fond memories.
--
On another note, to show the kind of absurdity I have to deal with on a daily basis, I just got an email from someone complaining that one of our WORLDS has a picture of a muffin with frosting on it (a "fruffin") and that since this was his "invention" he was going to look into legal action against us unless we took it down.
As Desbreko said: "I'm pretty sure you can't copyright putting frosting on muffins."
--
Today I walked for about 8 miles total on a quest for great SomeGuy-territory food. First I went to a famous burger place and ordered an amazing chicken burger. Next, I went to a place famous for cinnamon buns and ordered this beauty:
--
I want to finally give a shout out necro64x. He really wanted a new feature on WORLDS and, rather than wait for us to figure it out, he wrote the code for it himself and PMed it to me. Soon this feature will be implemented, probably months before it would otherwise have been because of his efforts.
This is similar to how Desbreko made a new comment window for myOtaku and how Sabrina took charge of adding categories. Ordinary members doing extraordinary things.
