Forum:Ideas for user retention

It was brought up in #wiki-discussion recently that there might be some changes we can make in an attempt to improve the new user experience and retention. It became relevant during Forum:Removing Discussions that we should be doing more to try to bring new users in, and we should be exploring options to make this easier. This is an ongoing thing that is always important, but for this forum we have a couple of ideas.


 * 1) Get rid of templated warnings. It has been noted before in Forum:Warning templates and others that templated warnings for just about everything except vandalism are very impersonal, and that it can be harrowing for new users to be faced with a wall of text complete with a listing of things that they probably didn't do most of. If we remove them entirely, then each warning will have to be manually explained by whomever is posting it. This will grant a great deal of personability to each warning and will cut down on the monolithic nature of current templates. It could be argued that you can simply add a personal message in of any of the warnings, but far too infrequently is this ever done.
 * 2) Enable wiki achievements. We ran a trial run of these years ago but they were disabled after the consensus deemed them not useful. I think it's worth at least revisiting the possibility of using them since our current wiki culture and community is far removed from 2010's. Similar to discussions, achievements are a fun little supplement to the editing experience. They are definitely not strictly necessary in any capacity, but I would speak from experience to say that they have been a fair success on Crysis Wiki where I enabled them. They provide just a bit of positive reinforcement when new users do certain things (which can be customized); I think this could be a nice addition to our new user experience. It's no secret we have user retention issues, and given that today's users are a different breed than they were 7 years ago  (i.e. younger)  , I think it could help some users understand the fundamentals of contributing a little more easily.

Please add any additional ideas you feel are relevant to the nature of this forum. We have forums like this every so often and rarely do they ever produce tangible results, but each outing at least provides different perspectives dependent on the timing and users currently active. Joe 01:47, June 2, 2017 (UTC)

Relevant links

 * Forum:Discussion: Do we push new users away?
 * Forum:Removing Discussions
 * Forum:Warning templates
 * Forum:Wiki activity
 * Forum:Achievements