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#1 WotC_Trevor Mar 21, 2011 13:24:43

Many of you have expressed concern over the frequency of Dragon and Dungeon articles this year, and we want to provide you with some behind-the-scenes insight into our content process. Late last year, we published a couple articles that failed to live up to our quality standards. Although the articles were corrected, we decided to make some internal process changes to address quality issues up front. One of the changes was a more rigorous approval process that slows the rate at which articles get through the system, but improves the overall quality of the material you see.   The new approval process made the daily content calendar untenable. We in R&D needed more flexibility to ensure that we were satisfied with the quality of each article. We felt the overall quality of the magazines would improve if we set a monthly timeframe within which articles would appear, as opposed to a weekly or daily timeframe. In January, we started redirecting people from the daily content calendar to the Table of Contents webpages for monthly content summaries. In effect, we shifted our focus from “Here’s what’s releasing today” to “Here’s what’s releasing this month." Unfortunately, this message has gotten lost, leading to confusion and anger in the community, which is never our intent.   In February and March, due to the availability of internal resources and our quality assurance efforts, several D&DI articles got delayed. In a couple instances, articles on the February calendar slipped into March, and that's NOT where we want to be.   We expect all of March's subscriber content to be posted in March, as planned. By the end of the month, we’ll be caught up with promised content. Ultimately, we're trying to get to the point where we can correctly estimate the amount of attention an article needs and plan accordingly, and we want an even distribution of content throughout the month. We’ve made slow but steady progress toward that goal, though our internal progress isn’t always apparent to subscribers. We are continuing that effort, and we hope the community stays with us.