2025 Staff Review Results Are In!

In 2021, we had our first Staff Review on the 17th Shard, with the intention of it being an annual occurence. We did it again in 2023, and now in 2025, so it looks like it's become a biannual event instead!

17th Shard Demographics

We received 120 responses this year, a significant decrease from the 157 we received during our last review, which was particularly surprising given the overall growth of the community since then. If you're someone who answered the previous one but not this one, or know someone who did, we'd be interested to hear why! Did this year's feel longer or more complicated? Not as active in general anymore? Just didn't feel it? If there's something we can improve next time, we'd love to hear from you! 

First of all, we asked you: Which of our platforms do you use regularly?

About 80% of you use the Discord, whereas almost a third use the forums. That's roughly the same as in 2023, with a small increase in the Discord population and a small decrease in the forums population.
 

Our first big question: On a scale of 1 (terrible) to 5 (great), how do you rate the overall quality of 17th Shard Moderation?

Overall our results were pretty positive! Over 70% of you said our overall moderation quality is great, and less than 3% of you gave us a rating below a 4. Interestingly, despite us having far fewer active mods on the forums, our ratings remained almost identical across platforms, with the average rating being 4.68 on the Discord and 4.71 on the forums.

Do you think the mods are in tune with the general 17th Shard Community? 

Here, we asked you to rate us from From 1 (No, they have no idea what we want) to 5 (Yes, they're just like us). The response here was pretty positive as well, with results being pretty consistent with our last poll. As mentioned before, we're aware that we're a bit less active on the forums, and we were eager to see if the poll results reflect that. On average, forum users rated us a bit lower on this question than Discord users, with the average being 4.45 for the forums and 4.61 for the Discord.

How strict do you think the mods are as a whole?

The vast majority of responses were positive, with a large portion of voters saying that we're neither too strict or too lax. On the whole, these numbers are about the same as in our last survey. 

What do you think about the way the mods resolve problems and conflicts on the Shard? 

Here, 1 meant that we only make things worse, and 5 meant we always resolve any issues appropriately. While the results were overall very positive, 50% of you rated us a 4 out 5, so there's still clearly some room for improvement on our end. Several of you gave feedback in the open questions, which we appreciate! 

How do you feel about our spoiler policy and the way we enforce it?

87.4% of you said that it's fine and we do a good job of enforcing it, which is great to hear! 8.1% of you said that our spoiler policy is too strict, and we understand that complaint. However, we prefer to err on the side of being overly strict with spoilers, because some folks care more about being spoiled than others, and different people consider different things to be spoilers.

Up next, Have you ever reached out to the mods? If you haven't, why not?

The overwhelming majority of you either have never felt the need to contact us, or have done so, which is great to hear! 

Which contact methods have you used? and Which contact methods do you prefer?

The results for both of these questions were pretty spread out across both platforms. Pretty much all of these methods work great, though keep in mind that for things like bots or scammers, it's preferable to just report them (both platforms) or @staff (Discord) so that we see it and take care of it as fast as possible. 

Now for the fun question! Who is your favorite 17th Shard moderator?

This year, #1 Taln Fan snagged 1st place, with the the previous winner, Argent, in 2nd! LewsTherinTelescope came in 3rd, just barely beating AonEne for a spot on the podium. 
However, if we sort the results by platform, we see that Argent won 1st place on the Discord, and #1 Taln Fan won the forum vote. And on the forums, AonEne overtook LewsTherinTelescope to claim 3rd place!

Last but certainly not least, we asked you all to share your fondest memory from the 17th Shard!
We got a lot of great responses, and we loved reading all of them! Here's a few of the responses we got:

• Jasnah Debate Debate
• Getting to see so many fresh ideas as hundreds of people worked over each WaT preview chapter on release. It was like a theory supercomputer
• When Ben ate a shoe
• A lot of stuff on #you-people, but probably 17th Shard helping me come out 
• When I turned bacon into charcoal and everyone found it funny.
• Running RPs on the forums
• Every ping day in #writing is always great, but I really enjoyed a night a month or two ago where a few of us all watched Feather play E33
• Every time #you-people becomes #linguistics

Thank you to everyone who filled out our survey this year! As a reminder, you’re also welcome to give us feedback at any time during the year if you so please, via any of the various contact methods.