As you may or may not know, I track a variety of activity metrics and statistics when it comes to the club’s overall health. Last year, I started providing those and some analysis to the Dark Summit (or is it just the Summit now?). I’m not going to go into the whole song and dance here, but I do want to highlight something for the general membership.

From 2018 through 2021, tracking metrics was not encouraging. Not every metric fell every year, but overall we saw a big dropoff in activity and the size of our active population in 2018 and for several years things were getting worse when they weren’t stagnating. In 2022, we started to break out of that rut. Last year, we saw significant growth. The roster of clanned members and the number of active members were both the largest they’ve been since lockdown in 2020. The number of competition entries and the amount of bonus credits members earned for their clan were both the highest they’ve been since my dataset begins in 2014. We awarded more CIs than any year in the past. With the launch of the Envoy Corps and RP sessions organized by the Exarch Staff, we saw continued massive growth in both how many members participated in RP and how much they were participating. It was a good year, and I’m pumped for 2024 to beat it.

This is not something the GM, or the Council, or even the Dark Summit as a whole gets to claim credit for. Big projects like XP and the work of individual leaders have a big impact on the health of our club, no doubt. But if you told a friend about the DB last year, if you organized a competition or an RP session, if you contributed to our community with your activity and your presence in chat, if you were ever there when another member needed you, then you’re responsible for our growth. Likewise, if there’s another member who helped make your DB experience better last year, please let them know that. We’re only as strong as our community.

HM Staff Announcements

First, I’ve selected Alaris Jinn as my new Praetor. I got five applications and some of them were very strong indeed, and I had to do some thinking. But ultimately, Alaris has a deep well of experience building out templates and advanced content for DJBWiki, familiarity with multiple DC offices and clan leadership, and I know from our time on the ACC staff way back in 2016 that they’re a reliable editor.

Second, I will be out of town for a funeral beginning tomorrow or Friday, so anything urgent should go to [Log in to view e-mail addresses].

New SA Feature: Search

One of my primary goals for my HM term is to begin the transition away from the Shadow Academy as another activity to do and towards the Shadow Academy as a tool that helps you get the best possible experience out of the club. One of the obstacles there is that if you need to know something, even if you think to check the SA, you might not know where to look. A lot of basic topics are covered pretty openly in the Fundamentals department, e.g. for gaming look at Activities 102: Gaming, but beyond that you’d have to do a lot of clicking around and skimming.

Thanks to James, now we can all skip that part.

There’s now a search bar on the Shadow Academy landing page. You can also get to it by selecting “Search Courses” under Departments & Courses in the menu bar for all SA pages.

The search tool covers all SA course notes, not just course titles or descriptions, and will show you a preview of where your search term shows up. Here’s an example.

Play around with it a bit and let us know what you think!

Something Wiki This Way Comes

Some of you may have been scratching your heads over why you couldn’t get your character pages to show up on your dossier. It turns out there was an issue with how the main site and the wiki communicated, which James and I were able to resolve. So that’s something finished, at least.

Second, it’s come up in chat that quite a few people are, like me, a bit annoyed by the current color coding for internal vs external and unclicked vs clicked links. That’s something James and I can tweak once we have a free moment in common. I’m open to suggestions, but I mention that mostly to let you know that going through and manually recoloring every link is probably not the best use of your time right now. That said, I’m always happy to see cool wiki formatting, which leads me to my next announcement.

Our featured article this month has been Morgan B. Sorenn: lavishly illustrated, thorough without being agonizingly long, and recently brought up-to-date. There must be something about former Heralds returning from extended absence, because our featured article for February will be Alaisy Tir’eivra, for similar reasons.

Our Wikipedian of the Month for January was Meleu Karthdo and our incoming WotM for February is… also Alaisy!

Let’s talk a bit about how one gets these prestigious—if not exactly lucrative—honors. WotM is pretty simple: I focus on members who are improving the overall wiki. So if you made 200 edits to your own character page(s), you’re liable to get passed over for someone who only made 20 but also cleaned up their clan history page or fixed a broken template somewhere. In addition to working on their character pages, Meleu and Alaisy did a good amount of work updating Taldryan’s military and system articles, respectively. We also try to avoid awarding the same member back-to-back, though as you can tell from Essik’s massive pile of Dark Side Scrolls, you can get this multiple times.

Featured articles should be complete, reasonably up to date, use good style including templates and categories, and not have been featured already. The idea here is these articles should be good for other members to read and/or steal from. We have over 4,000 articles, which is part of why we won’t feature the same article multiple times.

But because there are so many articles to go through, Bentre and I appreciate suggestions for which articles to feature. The official way to do this is for you to add {{Nominated}} to the nominated article and then go over to DJBWiki:Featured article and tell us why it’s awesome. But if that seems like too much work, you can always poke me and/or Bentre on Discord or email.

DJBWiki:Featured article also lists a bunch of articles that we think are close to featured level but need to make a few tweaks first, usually adding images or just updating them a bit.

Shadow Academy: Year in Review and Status Update

Lastly, it feels wrong to let January pass us by without stats, so here’s some charts.

The top 10 most popular SA courses of 2023, with the two GJW trivia exams for perspective.

Course	Members
Essentials 101: Welcome to the Brotherhood	127
Essentials 102: Progression	125
Essentials 103: The Brotherhood’s Galaxy	116
Essentials 104: Structure of the Club	114
GJW XVI: Transcendence - Research is Fun!	90
Activities 104: Roleplaying	89
Comms 102: Discord	78
GJW XVI: Transcendence - Yeah, We're Doing This Again	70
Comms 101: Website Navigation	67
Activities 101: Fiction	67
Activities 102: Gaming	64
Activities 105: Vendettas	61

The results here aren’t shocking: they’re all in DB Fundamentals and most of them were new. So here’s the top 10, excluding Fundamentals and GJW trivia:

Course	Members
Character Sheets 101: Introduction	58
Recognizing Members	57
Character Sheets 102: Possessions & Loadouts	56
Societies: Aurora Collegium	47
Creatures & You	46
Personal Armor	43
Mercenary Order Core	37
Sith Order Core	35
Force Disciple Order Core	35
Personal Starships	33

And then here were the ten least popular courses of 2023, excluding ones that were retired:

Course	Members
Descriptive Writing	7
Debate 101: Argumentation	7
Debate 102: Refutation	6
Leadership Competitions	6
Markdown 101	5
Writing Dialogue	5
Leadership Proposals	4
Cryptography 101	4
Wiki Editing	2
Markdown 102	2
Cryptography 102	1

So two writing courses, one of which didn’t even exist until late November, and neither of which was included in a degree until last month. And then everything else is in our Department of Lore, Leadership, and Communication. More on that below.

Lastly, we have our graders:

Grader	Exams
dbb0t	1821
Sanguinius Tsucyra Entar	195
Alethia Archenksova	169
Aldaric	140
Zentru'la	98
Crysenia Orainn	89
Aiden Lee Deshra	51
Bentre Stahoes	46
Zuza Lottson	30

We’re still working through the main initiatives I described around Halloween. I was hoping to be farther along, but things happened: revising the HM position into HM and Emissary, having to hire a Praetor, holidays, illness, medication supply chain issues, malfeasance, dog cancer, family death, the list goes on.

However, we’re still plugging away, and having a P:HM focused on course writing and editing, as opposed to the proto-Emissary work with new members that Zuza did, should help speed things up. As we knock out the remaining courses for the Brotherhood Studies and Technology savants, we can shift focus to Phase II. As you can probably guess based on those numbers, our leadership curriculum is going to be a major focus, alongside bringing Nora’s work on the graphics courses out into the light of day.

Closing Remarks

As always, if anyone sees any errors in the course notes or exam questions, please submit them through the form. Scrolls of Foundation are a nutritious part of a healthy XP diet.

And, of course, I am always available at [Log in to view e-mail addresses] or archenksov on Discord.

Academy Changelog

DB FUNDAMENTALS
Essentials 102: Progression
- Added wrong answer hints
Essentials 103: The Brotherhood’s Galaxy
- Added wrong answer hints
Essentials 104: Structure of the Club
- Added wrong answer hints
Essentials 105: Member Conduct
- Added wrong answer hints
Activities 104: Roleplaying
- Updated to clarify advertising and private RP sessions per the Exarch.
- Updated the Rewards section to cover the Envoy Corps.
- Update exam to reflect the above.
- Added wrong answer hints

LEADERSHIP, LAW & COMMUNICATION
Debate 101: Argumentation
- Updated an exam question to reflect position change.

LORE
Mandalorian History 101
- Tweaked an exam question to be less ambiguous.