CCBBC Survey - Summary of Responses

[DeltaCore]

I received 23 responses to the Discord/BitBusters.club survey posted on October 23 and have not received any further responses in a couple days, so I figure it is now a good time to post a summary of the results. For those who don't follow our Discord announcements, the purpose of this survey was to better gather information about how people are feeling about our Discord community (as well as opportunities to give feedback on the BitBusters.club project as a whole) and to give everyone the opportunity to put their name forward to serve our community in roles like Discord Mod and Scorekeeper if desired.

It is not too late to submit a survey response if you wish: https://forms.gle/vqR9EYp9MJuLdawaA I'll keep the survey open for some time for anyone who wishes to contribute still, although I will likely not post responses left from this point forward for everyone unless it is of general significance to the community.

Thanks to everyone who took the time to contribute constructively! I invite responses below as long as they are also constructive and not an attack of the person providing the feedback.

What are some things you feel are working well on our community Discord?

I thought the responses for this question were excellent and have been able to reproduce just about all of them in full below as the feedback was very generalized.

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Very strong sense of community - that was more than clear from day one. Everyone cares a ton in their own way and want to see the server succeed. A lot of passionate chips players over the years have come together to make some great level packs, map editors, mods, you name it. I'm very impressed by what this community has done for chips challenge! This conversation and this survey wouldn't happen in a lot of other communities. I think it's great how all users are able to provide input and opinions and are listened to! The mod team has never felt like some separate group that is unreachable or untouchable.

Sense of community is strong. The Discord as it stands is the best place for anyone to go to for active Chips related discussion. I think that it is the best form of group messaging that the Chips community has utilized over the years. It is easy to access, reliable, and has lots of available customizability. It is fascinating to see members across several generations, new and old, all in one place. We literally have pieguy on demand now. How cool is that?

It's great for keeping tabs on all the cool stuff folks are making (levels, etc.), following along with CC2LP1 progress, etc. The strictly-game-focused discussions are usually pretty fun (at least when folks aren't ranting about things; see below). Gliderbot is best bot; just browsing random level previews here and there is super-entertaining for whatever reason.

Being able to bring up maps for easy discussion of levels, having several people who are excited to see new content and several more who continue to make and present it here, overall channel structure, generally just being able to chat about a game I like.

For the most part, I feel like a lot of things have been working well. I cannot name each and every one of them at this time but the server has been fairly good and am happy to be a part of it.

The collaborative efforts are really awesome. The efforts to put together CC2LP1 from the community's and the mod's perspectives are remarkable. The result is great to see others enjoy.

Well, I've only just joined, but it seems like a nice community from what I've seen. Very inclusive even of casual players like me. And the glider bot is damn impressive.

I love that this place exists for people to join around Chip’s Challenge. People are also very fast and helpful with answers whenever I have questions about anything.

The emojis are quite fun, I like how the community is sized, and also how for a change the people in the server seem to not be under the age limit.

Discussion and projects about the game usually go well and end in success, serious-discussion is also usually smooth running

The subject specific channels work really well and people have been willing and proactive at helping myself and others.

Competitive play, creative endeavors like level and CC-software design, #serious-discussions for the most part

Talking about CC1/2, level design... "light" topics in off-topic, like "had a bad day", "saw some movie"...

I like talking to people about stuff. Plus nobody has insulted me directly (yet, fingers crossed)

Rapid score updates in #feeds, GliderBot, #level-design most of the time.

It's a great place to aggregate information and discuss the community.

Gliderbot works extremely well, and the channel structure is good.

Feeds. The channels serve well to separate different topics.

The communication and all features are working well.

The bot and the level discussions are great.

You're keeping CC alive man, good job.

Seems to be plenty of discussion

What are some things you feel are NOT working well on our community Discord?

Here there were lots of concerns that I do not wish to share verbatim either because it would immediately identify the person who provided the feedback or because some of the concerns raised are best considered by the moderation team in private. That said, below I am including excerpts from the responses to this question that I feel are relevant to the community at large. Some of the responses have been edited or condensed to a summary to help preserve anonymity.

Please rest assured that if you do not see your specific concern(s) in this list that I did receive your full survey response and more complete responses will be shared with the moderation team.

Lastly, it is important to note that not every single item raised as part of these surveys will be taken as an "actionable item". As a path forward, I plan to post an additional thread soon to outline some changes in response to this survey that will attempt to address the highest priority items. However, I do still feel there is value in publishing as much of the feedback provided as possible.

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Too much vitriol

I don't feel there are any issues with the discord.

There's a lot of the same thing with little variations in views/opinion between members. No solution, just how the conversation and community exists.

Some people don't act very nice and there is too much memeing.

Use of reactions/memes in serious discussions that happen in on-topic rooms. Removing the emotes isn't going to solve the issue, nor is banning the people, because it's not an "always does it"/they contribute useful stuff at other times.

Not sure how to really fix it, other than getting the users to mature. Know when something is serious, and that they shouldn't say/do anything unless it's helpful to the conversation.

Haven't noticed anything so far.

Honestly, I am unsure what to put here. I have no current gripes with the community.

There's a clear lack of respect toward others coming from some community members. At times, this rises to the level of bullying where the only 3 options are to accept it, bring it to the mod team (this has not helped in the past either in public or in private), or ask directly the behavior stop (also has not helped and usually makes the problem worse).

There are constant interruptions and derailing comments during most discussions about the game. The overall atmosphere is exceedingly negative, with attacks on people, content and pretty much everything thrown around constantly. Sticking negative or hostile reacts on everything contributes to this atmosphere and it might be worth toying with removing the ability to react from people who show they can't be trusted with that ability.

It all boils down to some people being unable to follow rule 1, and hiding behind rule 3 when confronted, only enabled by a fairly passive mod team.

I think the server could be a bit more beginner-friendly — maybe just even having an overview of all the resources available in the community in a separate channel and some introductions.  It often seems like a cosy club with established participants and I'm not really part of it.  (I might be completely off though.)

I don't think #serious-discussions has its place in the CC discord. The CC community is tight-knit, but I believe it's at the point where people who are close to each other to talk about serious topics should feel comfortable and encouraged to do so in private group DMs and the like.

A lot of the server regulars get waaaaaay too vocal about stuff they don't like. It's kind of a minefield entering any conversation, 'cause there's like a 50% chance somebody's gonna go "I DON'T LIKE THING" in response to... anything, really. One example is pulling up a map and suddenly getting a bunch of unprompted feedback about my choice of tileset. There's a time and a place to get critical -- like if I post a level, then definitely critique it up -- but it kinda just pops up anywhere.

Reacts (lyingface, csb, residentsleeper, etc.) are sort of a subset of this, though after lurking about the server for a while it's pretty clear that they're used in jest most of the time. Could still be offputting to new users, though; you kinda have to stick around for a few weeks before it sinks in.

I still stick around 'cause I love the game and there's a lot of genuinely good content that crops up pretty regularly, but I don't comment a whole lot unless it's directly about the game (and even then I gotta second-guess hitting the 'enter' key a whole lot).

[Granted, I dunno how much of this is 'fixable'; moderating a community is a crapshoot and sometimes people's personalities are oil and water. Could be I'm the odd one out here, and if so, oh well. Worth a shot at least. :P ]

* Requiring respect for the rules and the mods' efforts to enforce them. Enforcement of the rules should never be a meme. Perhaps there is a way to insist people take the mods' authority more seriously, without being totally draconic.

* Setting standards of what actually constitutes "respectful" and "disrespectful" behavior, that the mods can use to guide them in enforcing the rules. This is not a job just for the mods. It's something the community as a whole needs to do.

It seems between certain users there is a lot of history or bad blood that can either be resolved in private or can just simply not happen. It seems petty things sometimes get blown out of proportion.

One thing that does feel kind of weird is that often I will see a productive discussion talking about something serious, then see the same people jump into the random channel and talk down on the discussion. It may just be an ironic thing but it makes it hard to take people seriously when making points. Even if it is the random chat, I still think it can be possible to enforce a policy about being respectful to each other. I feel like I need to justify any time I send a message in the case of it becoming a copy paste meme later on.

I also think the community can be a little more welcoming to newer players trying to get involved in certain parts of the community. It may just be that I'm being too sensitive but I've seen a couple questions I've asked or others have asked in serious channels about the game get ignored or criticized for something small. I think in general people should work on understanding that new players don't always know exactly where to find information on things, or in general that people should just be friendly and respectful online!

The memey-ness, disruptiveness, and dismissiveness of certain members. I don't personally find it offensive to myself, and tend to just ignore it, but I know other people find it offensive to them (sometimes to the point of leaving) and it does make the server look a bit worse to new users. A quantified warning system, where accumulating a certain number of warnings results in small but meaningful consequences could help with this. However, I acknowledge we don't want the mod team to come off as too draconian because a lot of the "problematic" behavior people call out consists of a massive accumulation of tiny incidents rather than severe, obviously-out-of-line incidents. Maybe this involves the mods being stricter with certain members due to their history.

I feel like a majority of legitimate issues that are brought up are never handled the way I think they should be. It feels extremely wasteful when any problem is brought up as a lot of them tend to be dismissed like they aren't problems when they really are. For me personally, it has gotten to the point where I have just lost interest in raising concerns about the server when I know 95% of the time, nothing will change. I either handle it myself or just ignore it at this point. In addition, most or all issues raised seem to be addressed by Cowman alone. More hands on help from moderators would be ideal in my opinion, including but not limited to, adding one or two moderators to the team to better handle and help with the control of the server as a whole. I really do believe it is what the server needs the most, to better assist and implement the rules that have been in place.

At the end of it all, I don't have as many issues with the server as I did in the past. I have my annoyances with certain things, but as a whole I would mainly just like there to be some amount of seriousness/strictness when issues are raised, regardless how small they may seem on first glance. I would also like the moderators to be a bit more active in their role instead of Cowman handling everything because it's not fair to him. Some examples: whenever someone throws a tantrum over the reacts their messages get, a map of a level someone dislikes gets pulled up via Gliderbot and they rage about it, or when unnecessary responses are given from parties not involved in ongoing conversations, which in turn derails said conversations. Things like this I don't believe should have much tolerance in a server of several dozen active users, especially when ongoing topics and conversations that have true meaning are taking place.

When I first joined the server I found the atmosphere to be quite hostile and confrontational and it took me a while to see past that and understand the humour. Without context and just as text (without intonation etc.) meanings are easily lost as this accounts for only about 7% of communication. Some recent enforment of channel subjects, especially the random channel, has no doubt helped the opinion new users get, though I think there should be some information added in rules about the option to opt out of random and using markdown to make comments more clear.

While I would like to interact more on this server, I don’t want to express any opinions because I’m afraid that they will be shot down (like they have in the past) with coolstorybobs and ’meh’s etc. I try not to be so sensitive about these things, but that’s who I am and it affects me a lot so I’d rather not risk it. I guess most of the Internet is like this but I feel like in the past, this community has been a much nicer environment than it is now.

I also believe (from what I feel is a pretty neutral perspective) that some people in this Discord are being bullied.

Interesting discussion is not highlighted in any way (which can be seen as the cost of using Discord, but at times it has worked, though it's hard to point out any reasons).
Many discussions devolve into pointless chat and meme comments or interruptions.

General rude/meanness towards server members under the guise of ironic sarcasm, "memes" that are just quoting what another person that in effect just dismisses anything the message was actually saying, good or bad.

Potentially more enforcement of rules 1 and 2 if possible

There's definitely a lot of snipping and kinda meanness, and it's kind of hard to tell how much of it is actually friendly and how much is just mean.

Do you have any other concerns with any aspect of the our Discord community or the BitBusters.club project not mentioned above you would like to raise?

Some scattered feedback which isn't necessarily related to the Discord server.

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Interactions with Allack... That whole last day with him, the whole new server... It really feels like people are just focused on Allack being the "bad guy" or useless, instead of taking into account the whole situation. Or, they discount the whole situation, and just say Allack is the cause. Either way, having Allack joked about/insulted seems really bad form. What if he had removed CC1/2 because he reported back that the community was reverse engineering it? There are worse things Allack could have done, and I feel that everyone just harps on Allack because he's the only face we see.

First off, thanks for keeping this community running - I really appreciate it. I mainly use the discord to chat about my CC related projects and I appreciate having knowledgeable community members with a long history of community contributions around. So I'm slightly concerned about people like James Anderson leaving as an example. I think what was recently brought up about irony poisoning and evaporative cooling are warnings worth heeding. The chat can be a little too memey for my taste sometimes (but I don't want to take away people's fun).

It just feels like we should all be having more _fun_ playing & modding this game, y'know?

The Bitbusters.club project is overall pretty great, although some links in the main page are outdated. As for the Discord server, I think more strict moderating is necessary. Thank you for running this survey.

To end on a positive note, this discord is the reason I downloaded discord on my phone and use it regularly, I had not in the past.

Certain members only contribution to CC related discussions seem to just be ironic sarcasm

It’s hard to remain interested in a community when there’s only a single driving interest.

[chipster1059]

I mostly agree with most of the positive comments, so there's not much to say, beyond a few specific points I wish to address.  Also, I'm rather ashamed of my own short response, considering how detailed some other people were.

I think it's great how all users are able to provide input and opinions and are listened to!

The "listened to" part could be improved.

having several people who are excited to see new content

It rather feels like this is not very balanced, though.  JB content is very popular and meme-y, but how many people actually check out Smol's videos?  Or even Dave's, despite his extensive self-promotion (and self-deprecation).  For the record, I don't watch anyone's LPs because of lack of enough free time.

Similarly, newer level designers seem to have trouble getting people to play their levels.  This can be demotivating, and also makes it harder to design better levels.

for a change the people in the server seem to not be under the age limit.

Wait, there's an age limit?

Regarding complaints.  I have a feeling that most of the "no issues" responses are from newer members, but it's nice to see at least SOME people are having fun

The memes seem to be a popular complaint, and I strongly hope this gets addressed.  But, as one of the responses points out, simply removing emojis or banning people isn't the solution.  The attacks are also a major issue that desperately needs resolving.

Also I'm getting sick and tired of getting called out every time I use strikethrough.  It's just part of my typing style.

It all boils down to some people being unable to follow rule 1, and hiding behind rule 3 when confronted, only enabled by a fairly passive mod team.

That seems to be a very reasonable summary of the main issues.

I think the server could be a bit more beginner-friendly — maybe just even having an overview of all the resources available in the community in a separate channel and some introductions.  It often seems like a cosy club with established participants and I'm not really part of it.  (I might be completely off though.)

I think the message in #rules does a good job at describing the main resources, although maybe it could be more detailed?  That said, the "cosy club" issue is somewhat of an issue, as I mentioned above.

I don't think #serious-discussions has its place in the CC discord. The CC community is tight-knit, but I believe it's at the point where people who are close to each other to talk about serious topics should feel comfortable and encouraged to do so in private group DMs and the like.

YES YES THIS SO MUCH
But unfortunately, whenever this was mentioned in the past, it was quickly shot down...

A quantified warning system, where accumulating a certain number of warnings results in small but meaningful consequences could help with this.

I like this idea.

Without context and just as text (without intonation etc.) meanings are easily lost as this accounts for only about 7% of communication.

I really struggle with this.  It's really hard to figure out if someone is joking or serious, if a comment is sarcastic or not, if a react is ironic or legitimate.

I also believe (from what I feel is a pretty neutral perspective) that some people in this Discord are being bullied.

I have a feeling that I may be both a victim, and part of the problem.

Interesting discussion is not highlighted in any way (which can be seen as the cost of using Discord, but at times it has worked, though it's hard to point out any reasons).

Yep.  It can be really hard to catch up with discussions that happened when offline.

Interactions with Allack...

Both sides could have handled all this better.

It just feels like we should all be having more _fun_ playing & modding this game, y'know?

This should be the ultimate goal.

It’s hard to remain interested in a community when there’s only a single driving interest.

I suppose that can be the case, unless it's a subject one is totally passionate about (as is the case with me and another community).  But I'm part of a community with NO main interest, and it feels like just an odd mish-mesh of people with nothing in common.

I'll be looking forward to the new thread about how these issues will be addressed.  I have high hopes, but (I hate to say this) I also have low expectations