Dear Litentry Community,
We would like to thank you for participating in Drop3’s community testing, which came to an end on January 28th after a two week run. We sincerely hope you enjoyed participating as much as we enjoyed seeing you navigate through the first version of our product.
We would like to thank you for your patience and understanding during the bot incident, in response to which we had to shut down the testing for a number of hours and resume the next day.
What did we observe?
Small hiccups aside, we were able to collect feedback from the community testing and we have identified the following top concerns which we will start addressing/fixing this coming weeks:
- Captcha verification/completion
- Wallet-Connect
- Reward Balance
- Invite-Link creation
We had two issues relating to the use of Captcha: (1) at the beginning it was too easy and we had hundreds of bot accounts passing the verification. In response we increased the difficulty of the task. (2) This in turn made it too hard for many real humans to read and thus pass the verification test.
Regarding Wallet connection, a significant number of the community testing Drop3 encountered issues with completing this task, mainly on the first day of testing. This issue was related to the aforementioned bot problem, whereas we had to disable the feature temporarily.
The bot issue also forced us to reset the balance of the Litentry tokens accumulated during the first part of testing, to make sure the scammers would not get away with extra LIT. We know many of you were surprised to see your balances suddenly drop to zero, before the balance was restored. No awards were lost, only the displayed balance was momentarily out-of-date.
Finally, the community had problems with creating invitation links to invite their connections/followers to the Discord server and get additional referral rewards. This, on the other hand, seems to have been mainly an issue of documentation and communication, where some testers didn’t easily get to the resources they needed to answer their questions and get help.
What did we learn?
Some of these problems, namely the LIT balance being gone, having issues with the captcha and connecting your wallet, were due to a number of testers who tried to game the system and earn more rewards through use of multiple bot accounts. Once our team found out we immediately closed off the testing for a number of hours to pay special attention to the situation and implement mending solutions. Nevertheless, it is crucial that in the next version of this product we are prepared to deal with this preemptively with better verification methods in place, and reactively with measures ready to be deployed including communication plans.
The second issue is mainly related to community support and documentation, as not all users managed to test the product on their own. This is the easier of the problems to address. Initially we were not prepared for the number of testers and didn’t have the resources ready to do proper community management, which we are now increasing. Secondly, we thought more people would be familiar with Discord, which was not the case and presented an additional layer of learning for our testers. And finally, the documentation we provided was not easy enough to access or to scan through, for testers to find answers to their questions.
What is next?
Based on the feedback and learnings we got, we will first focus on the following:
- Anti-fraud measures
- Documentation and Community Support
- WebApp
- Withdrawing Rewards
We know now that we need to invest more time into generating a solid verification solution not only due to how easy it is to be targeted by bots but also because how important it is to make it easy for humans to participate too. This fine balance will be key for us moving forward. We had a good understanding before that anti-fraud measures would be important towards a smooth performance of the product. We now see that not only is it important for the product to work but it is an essential pillar on which it must stand. In Addition to improving the Captcha service, we will add new tasks that will focus on human verification. As we aim to be the community engagement tool for Web3 projects, we need to guarantee that all users participating are doing so in good faith and will add value to the community.
Of course, as mentioned before, we will be placing more emphasis on community management and creating better documentation for users. Immediate solutions to this will include a step-by-step walkthrough that we are already working on, making sure that the pinned messages for each component of the testing are easy to find and not buried under other messages and adding more information to the chatflow with Drop3Bot. That being said, it is important to also point out that there are certain limitations to the Discord Server Setup itself and ultimately not all matters can be addressed there. From its conception, it has been our objective to use Discord as our starting point for testing until we move to the next solution.
This other solution we are already moving forward with in the meantime is the creation of a WebApp. This will allow us to create a more detailed user experience that should address the majority of the learning-curve issues. As it won’t be limited to the capabilities of Discord, we will be able to re-use the componentes we have created, but host them in a more dynamic environment to best manage tutorials, anti-fraud measures, reward allocation, user flow, etc. The WebApp will take a longer time to build so we are not quitting on Discord just yet. We still have testing and improving to do, for which Discord suits us well.
And of course, we are working on making it possible to withdraw the rewards that you have earned from task completion. We are still on schedule with the feature and aim to finish it within Q1 of this year.
Closing remarks:
Once more we would like to thank our community for participating in the Drop3 testing, as over 3700 people took part in the testing allowing us to learn from their experiences. We are actively working to create a better product that will benefit the community as a whole and your participation is essential to this process.
We hope that when the next version comes around you will join us once more. Additionally to the direct improvements to the product we have, we will also be launching other test versions with different projects, in order to learn about their requirements and continue learning towards how to create the best community engagement tool.
If you would like to give us additional feedback, you can do so by filling in this form.
Stay in touch with us through:
- Support The Litentry Polkadot auction through Crowdloan Campaign
- Community chat at Drop3 Discord
- Following us on Drop3 Twitter
- Technical discussion on Github
- More information on Drop3 Website
