08.22 | Development Update

Hello again!

Now that 1.10 has settled in and major bugs have been squashed, it's time to get back into our monthly dev posts!

Surveys Concluded

We had two surveys close recently, the 1.10 Feedback and the Patreon Census. Both of these provided a lot of information to go off of where to focus next, so an extra thank you to all who participated! The 1.10 feedback especially made some pain points very clear and is what I'm working to address the soonest. The teaser image is showing my latest experiment of moving to a full paged editor instead of the pop-up modal as an advanced editing experience while reworking the modal log editor to be more streamlined for quick edits. Think less options but easier to use. All of this is a work-in-progress so no promise this comes to light but you'll be the first to know if it does! I'm also hoping to put together a Medium post on the results of the survey to go over the exact problems I'm trying to address.

Patreon Results

The Patreon survey gave a good look into where Backers are valuing their membership the most. Here are the results for the top reasons for being a Backer:

It's still awesome to see that the #1 reason by far is to support the site, it warms my heart 💜 Profile stats coming in at #2 is also great since those launched about a year ago today, glad they're proving to be a welcomed addition! Many of the secondary reasons are pretty closely split which tells me each of the benefits are holding up their value in filling the membership value.

When looking at future additions, seems allowing customization for the new profile sections became a favorite! This was an idea I'm just playing around with so I'm happy to see excitement around it as well. Following up closely are some customization features of banners and showcasing reviews / lists. Both of these I expect to come in eventually, so it's good to see it's a priority with you all as well.

It's hard to say when anything will make it in, just because there's already a backlog of feature work to do. One already being a promised backer feature of the Favorites Showcase (I haven't forgotten!) and then it also looks like we're about to hit a new milestone any day now in which I'll owe you Yearly Stats (hopefully not jinxing it)! They're due eventually though, so I thank you again for your patience!

This one I like to ask to see how much of the future is open to moving off of Patreon. It's not a huge priority right now but is something I can see eventually happening. I did expect a divide but these chances are pretty good with most being yes / maybe. I do realize the ease of being able to use Patreon especially when supporting multiple creators so even if I do move away, there will be an overlap period of having them both to at least test out.

The main reason I want to move away is because it'll make the integration so much smoother since right now I have to manually update the status of everyone which only gets worse the more patrons there are (suffering from success am I right?). It's more of an annoyance than a blocker though, so there are immediate plans to drop feature work to focus on this. I do have a plan to revamp the Backer membership when this does happen for some incentivization but we'll see where that goes.

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That's a wrap for this post! Lots of new data to consider and I hope you can understand the more silent times where I'm experimenting when trying to tackle the more core design problems of the site. I hope the Patreon results gave a good look into how we're doing as whole, if you ask me I couldn't be happier!

Until next time, see you on the site!

MrProg