I kind of suspect that the resounding silence after your original questions was due to the thread being the 'responsibility' of someone who seems to be in a no-questions mood right now (check out her latest DW entries and the comments to those). Now that you've pointed another staffer to thread, maybe your concerns have a better chance of being acknowledged.
ETA for clarity: I was asking questions in one of the DW entries and got ignored there, too, but haven't really had this problem with other AO3 people. Replies from other support staff have always been prompt in my personal experience.
I hope that you're right and someone will answer, but I ... don't think "not in the mood to answer questions right now" is a particularly heartening representation, you know?
I'm sorry that the responses haven't been coming fast enough. I made this post because our handful of communications people were crunched for time, and we wanted to provide some basic introductory material to the skins system quickly. But as a result, they aren't getting notified about the comments, and because the post is older now and we don't normally get comments on posts after the first day or two, it's not a natural part of their routine to check. I myself haven't had time and energy to check my notifications and reply until this morning, which is why I am not on the comm team. /o\ Please don't assume deliberate ignoring where we're just all busy -- we're doing our best, but things do slip through the cracks.
As for skins, the one I described above would have been generally useful, but the example one was going to be done with manga-derived images and the inspiration for it was the feedback from animanga fans that they in general wanted a more decorated interface, without necessarily having to know CSS to get it. It wasn't intended to represent a general manga aesthetic, as we wouldn't try to impose our interpretation of something like that on other fans, but, like the rest of the skins system as a whole, to provide an additional tool to let fans express their own aesthetic sense.
That particular skin is no longer in progress, as the front end coder who had developed the concept has left the team, but since it seems you were hoping for something more specific, that is probably not what you wanted anyway. If you do know or are willing to learn CSS, our skinning system will allow you to completely transform the site interface from the ground up, since you don't have to build your skins on top of our own default CSS, which has also been broken into components so you can easily reuse those portions which make your work easier. We have posted a large number of public example skins that change various pieces of the interface which you can look at for examples, and links to our front end documentation.
So you can at this point build a skin that exactly reflects your own desires, though for now it does take some coding knowledge and some digging-in to understand the system and our HTML class structure. We'll be doing our best to provide more help going forward as our time permits, but we figure it's better to have the tools available now for early adopters even without more documentation, and as we get the initial feedback we will also hopefully be able to make the tools easier to use more broadly. We also hope that more users from all corners of fandom will now take advantage of this system to make and share their skins, so that even if you don't like any of the sample ones we've coded in-house and also don't want to make your own, you will soon be able to find one that you really enjoy in our library.
For what it's worth, that's the real solution we're overall trying to achieve: allowing fans to use the archive as they want, without trying to prescribe a certain appearance or aesthetic or genre (or language, or source, or type of work, etc). We're not there yet, but that's what we are aiming for, not just with this system but in general.
Thanks for responding to my comment. I understand that things have been busy, but it was difficult not to feel overlooked when I could see that there were active conversations going on the next post up. The other replies I've received from LucyP have clarified some of the reasons for that and the measures the comm team is working on to make sure that everyone gets responses to their comments, which is good to hear.
Now, on to the substance of this particular comment thread.
As an anime fan, there's one thing I would like the OTW and its various subsidiary committees to understand and show that they understand: Anime fans are not fungible. Anime fandom is not monolithic.
(And while I am using "anime" here because it makes a convenient shorthand, it's not actually a catch-all label for all media properties emerging from an Asian context, and shouldn't be treated that way.)
I'm an anime fan in the U.S. I do my fannish thing differently from anime fans in Japan, just for example. I participate in my fandoms in specific online spaces; other anime fans do their fannish things in parts of the internet I barely know exist. We have different fannish cultural values. But we're grouped under this huge term, "anime fan," like we all want the same thing.
You say this:
...but the example one was going to be done with manga-derived images and the inspiration for it was the feedback from animanga fans that they in general wanted a more decorated interface, without necessarily having to know CSS to get it. It wasn't intended to represent a general manga aesthetic, as we wouldn't try to impose our interpretation of something like that on other fans, but, like the rest of the skins system as a whole, to provide an additional tool to let fans express their own aesthetic sense.
Feedback from which animanga fans? What kinds of decoration? Which manga-derived images? I mean, are you talking about shounen manga here, or shoujo manga? Generically pretty bishounen with improbable swords and impossible hair? Big-eyed girls in moe outfits? God help us all, big-breasted girls in scanty outfits? Those would all fit under the rubric of "manga-derived."
The thing is, I don't get the sense that you (as an organization) have a real sense of what it is, exactly, anime fans want. A more visually appealing layout for the archive could encompass skins that let people use images. That you are working on putting together modules that are flexible and customizable is a great thing, and certainly beneficial to all users of the Archive. But a more decorated layout could just mean that your overall default layout isn't all that attractive. Depends on how you interpret it.
We users have been hearing that there would be a manga skin, that there was a manga skin coming, there would be screenshots soon! And then the deploy happened and all we saw was that panda skin, and were left wondering "Is this what the OTW thinks we want?" And hence the confusion and the questions. And hence the problem.
If your goal was to put together a manga-derived and -inspired skin, how were you going to figure out what that should look like and include? How have you reached out to anime fans to find out what they look for in a site skin? How have you tried to involve anime fans in the process and make them feel like their voices are valued and heard (aside from the generic "You should volunteer!" pitch, which is a call that has a whole host of problems with it). How are you, as an organization, as a set of committees, as people who want to make this archive truly panfandom, reaching out to the members of fandoms that aren't Harry Potter/SGA/Supernatural to make them feel like they aren't afterthoughts?
Just to let you know we've seen this comment, and we'll answer asap - you raise quite a few questions here, so we want to pull together the information for you. But since it took a little time to get to you before, I wanted you to know you hadn't been forgotten!
I figured answers would be a little slower due to the U.S. holiday, but thanks for the check-in. I'm looking forward to hearing what y'all have to say.
Sorry it's taken a few days to get back to you here. First up, we would like to acknowledge your concern about the fact that we sometimes talk about anime & manga fans in general terms which tends to obscure the fact these are large and very diverse communities. Since fans who self-identify as anime and/or manga fans have tended to raise a similar set of concerns we do often use that as a shorthand, but we are sensitive to the fact that is is a shorthand and one of the things we are interested in figuring out is how to address the different concerns of the various groups who might commonly fall under that broad umbrella. Our International Outreach team have been working hard on figuring out the best ways to do outreach to these and other communities, and going forward we aim to work with them and to build those principles more firmly into our work as a whole.
Just to set the issue of the anime skin in a little context: the way the new skins system is intended to work is that it's a modular system where you can join up several skins to give you different elements. So, for example, you could join together one which gave you bigger buttons, one which changed the margins, and one which changed the colour scheme. More broadly, we basically wanted to set up up so you could easily take the elements of a skin you like, tweak a bit and plug in a few extra things and get exactly the skin you wanted. Our plan was to create an example skin which have demonstrated how you could use this system to create a skin that was tailored specifically to your fandom. This is, obviously, something which would appeal to most fans and we were pretty excited about it!
Now to the issue of anime/manga representation specifically. We've had quite a bit of specific feedback via our Support form and in comments along the lines of 'I'm a manga fan/an anime fan and the archives I use are much more visually exciting'. So, when we were thinking about creating an example skin showing how you could do this kind of modding, we wanted to create it using images from an anime or manga source rather than, say, the Stargate and Rodney McKay, both because that was the group who had explicitly asked for this kind of functionality, and as part of our efforts to make the Archive more explicitly welcoming to different fannish traditions. The basic plan was to use a set of images from one or a few specific manga; it would have been titled something like 'Choose Your Own Fandom (name of manga)' and then in the comments & accompanying documentation it would have explained how to make your own "Choose Your Own Fandom" skin with images from your own desired fandom, and how to chain it together with some of our other interface-modding skins.
So, that was our general intention; the aim was never to make a single skin that would be in our minds representative of the entire community of manga / anime fans (which would clearly be impossible and, as you note, fairly offensive). However, a couple of things occurred which gave very much the wrong impression of our intentions. First of all, Naomi referred to the skin as an anime / manga skin (because she was thinking about it in relation to all of the above) without setting it in context (due to RL and the holiday weekend, she hasn't been able to get back and do this whole answer herself, and we didn't want to keep you waiting even longer, but she did ask me to apologise for this). Secondly, a bunch of issues cropped up with the code which meant that the coder who was going to do the skin wasn't able to do it before the deploy, so we didn't roll anything of the kind out. This contributed to the third issue, which was that we did happen to include the panda skin, which was actually intended to demonstrate how you could use image tiling. Because that happened to have a few elements that could be associated with manga, in the absence of any other skin people assumed that was the putative manga skin. There was a little bit of confusion about this even in-house because it happened that when our coder was trying out some code to allow the header image (for the planned Choose Your Own Fandom skin) she sketched up a quick manga-style header and layered that on top of the Bubbler skin (which the panda skin also uses). A screenshot of that skin was shared with the name 'manga_preview', because it had the manga-style header; since it shared some stylistic elements with the panda skin that caused some additional confusion. Finally, a bunch of bugs which we hadn't anticipated when Naomi first mentioned the skin arose, so our coder's time was taken up dealing with those and the skin never got any further (when Naomi mentioned it, she was thinking the basic thing was maybe a couple of days away). We're really sorry about this - and even sorrier that in the end we haven't been able to roll out the actual skin which would have made it all a lot clearer, and hopefully just been useful for everyone!
So, essentially, this was a bit of a perfect storm of various bits of miscommunication and ill chance; we recognise that since we haven't done a great job of addressing this community in the past it was especially easy for this type of problem to occur. Going forward, we're working with our IO team and with the anime / manga fans in house to try and come up with ways we can do some useful outreach with various parts of the anime/manga community. One thing we'd really value from an Archive perspective would be some specific suggestions for features that would cater for these groups. We have lots of stuff on the cards that will benefit all fans - fanart, better searching and browsing, more subscriptions features - but if there's something which would be specifically valuable to your fannish practice then do let us know via our Support team, and we'll do our best to build that feature in. We can't promise we will always get it right (with anything!) but we are genuinely interested in making the Archive (and the OTW as a whole) more inclusive and are trying to figure out the best ways of involving more fans in the conversation.
Sorry for the tl;dr, and we hope this addresses at least some of your concerns, even though we know we have a lot of work to do going forward.
astolat has replied to the specific question below, but I just wanted to reiterate the apology I left on the other thread for the delays in responding to questions on these posts: we haven't been able to keep up with them as well as we'd like, but it's not due to an unwillingness to answer. We're working on some ways of ensuring we can keep up better in future.
Comment on Introduction To Skins
Nele Tue 22 Nov 2011 04:22AM UTC
Last Edited Tue 22 Nov 2011 04:30AM UTC
Comment Actions
Lys ap Adin (lysapadin) Tue 22 Nov 2011 12:03PM UTC
Comment Actions
astolat Tue 22 Nov 2011 04:08PM UTC
Last Edited Tue 22 Nov 2011 04:11PM UTC
Comment Actions
Lys ap Adin (lysapadin) Wed 23 Nov 2011 04:30AM UTC
Comment Actions
LucyP Thu 24 Nov 2011 12:00AM UTC
Comment Actions
Lys ap Adin (lysapadin) Fri 25 Nov 2011 05:39PM UTC
Comment Actions
LucyP Sun 27 Nov 2011 04:24PM UTC
Comment Actions
LucyP Sun 27 Nov 2011 04:25PM UTC
Comment Actions
LucyP Sun 27 Nov 2011 04:25PM UTC
Comment Actions
LucyP Tue 22 Nov 2011 05:16PM UTC
Comment Actions