User blog:Holly Winter19/Community Involvement/Interactivity

So, before I begin talking about the topic of discussion, I want it to be clear that I'm not writing this in an angry, resentful, or upset way. That being said, the topic of today's blog pertains to what I see as a lack of community involvement and a lack of community interactivity.

Over the course of my time here at Naruto Fanon, I've noticed a severe lack of healthy conversation being taken place. For one, there are the instances of hostility and aggression (which I myself am guilty of from time to time, sorry), however this is not really the focus of this blog.

The second problem—the focus of this article—is the lack of article and blog post commenting. While there are instances of commenting on both articles and blog posts, the most I typically see are two, with few exceptions. There are articles and blogs with more than this, but most of the ones I go through have zero comments, which is upsetting to me. This fanon is a place where we can write characters and stories, create wild and crazy abilities, and let our creativity thrive, yet I feel like we share no connections with one another.

Feedback is very important to us writers, but there is so little feedback being given (I'm guilty of this as well). I often see negative feedback if there is commenting at all. Not even constructive criticism, but author-directed insults. Then, the author gets angry and fires back and we have ourselves a mini war of the keyboards. Now of course, there are often times when an author can't take any criticism no matter how nicely it's phrased and they go ballistic; that too is detrimental to the health and growth of this wiki.

Another issue is that while you are alerted of comments on your message wall via your notification box, you are not notified at all about comments on blogs or articles. This prevents conversations and discussions from taking place and discourages community involvement. I don't know if this is a feature that can be added, but if it's possible, I would highly recommend this option be made available to us.

Maybe there simply aren't as many people active on this sight as I think and that would explain the lack of community involvement, but I'm not sure. I do know that sometimes voting polls are added onto the wiki's main page, but there are so few votes that I feel like most users either don't care or don't know about it. That, and it's located at what appears to be the bottom of the sidebar. I have to scroll don to look for it and I'm sure most people skip right over it. It's such a useful tool to encourage community interactivity and to ask the community questions, but I feel it's being underused by both the creators of it and the potential participants. Admins should take advantage of it to ask us users what changes we would like to see, or if a certain element/rule/feature/etc should be added or removed. ("Element" is not used here in reference to ninjutsu element btw).

Currently the only poll available reads: "Would you like Naruto/Boruto to explore more alien clans outside of the Ōtsutsuki?" The poll was created at 19:20 on December 23, 2019, and so far 8 people voted.
 * Yes: 1 Vote
 * No: 0 Votes
 * Why did they even add aliens in the first place?: 7 Votes

The date of today is January 11, 2020. There are 8 votes total. That's around 20 days for 8 votes. Surely there are more than 8 of us on this server?

I simply think that if we as a community interacted with each other more often and in a positive manner, we'd not only be able to better our skills in writing, creativity, and our love for this wiki, but we'd also have more fun in the process. (But by no means should we be fake with our kindness and our ability to get along: that's... kinda like Danzo's ROOT Foundation and Sai haha. I'm sure you understand what I mean :p)

That being said, what do you think we as a community can/should do to improve the situation?