This might be relevant. These are the guidelines I prosed when I started my closed alpha testing forum, in order to help shape the feedback I wanted and didn’t want:
There will be spoilers in here, please be careful and don’t share them elsewhere. I want other people to have clean reactions to the story once we get around to to the proper open beta.
Please make sure to only report bugs you find in the bug report forum. It makes things easier for me to find. DO NOT BOTHER WITH LANGUAGE, RHYTHM, GRAMMAR OR THINGS LIKE THAT. I have not smoothed down my language, this is literally my first draft, no edits.
THE FEEDBACK I AM LOOKING FOR RIGHT NOW IS:
1: Pronoun errors (nb they are a mess, I know, I will fix them. Don’t mind them.)
2: Bugs
3: Places where the story doesn’t make sense and makes you go ‘huh I thought I was…’
4: Very long segments of text. It’s hard to see when moving across labels, so if you find them, let me know.
5: The auction. You know the drill. Do you end up getting what you went there for or did the story forget?
6: I wish I could… If you have a strong urge that you wish that you could have said/done something that wasn’t in the story. SMALL THINGS! I am not going to make major changes (but there are things to be added), but if it makes sense, I can add dialog options and the like.
Now, the number 6 ended up being a lie since there were some VERY good suggestions that deserved a lot of reworking, but I didn’t want to tie myself down to every little wish there was.
I can really reccommend authors to spend some time considering what kind of feedback you want from posting your WIP and make sure to point that out. If you don’t have a dedicated discord forum, take a moment to add a standard feedback info thing at the start and the end of the demo, just to remind people of where you are in the process. If there are any particular points you are worried about, make sure to point that out too. I have several things like this:
IF YOU HAVE REACHED THIS SOMETHING HAS GONE WRONG WITH THE EPILOGUES. Please report and explain what path led here.
Just to point out places I know where things might be wonky.
Some other tips:
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From what I have learned it is a lot easier to get feedback that you actually asked for than just asking for general opinions, most people are not professional testers, they need to know what you need.
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You can post your WIP on Dashingdon, but just ask for direct feedback from friends, twitter, tumblr, whatever social media you use if you don’t think you’re ready for everyone to chime in.
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If you are testing out a concept and wants to see if people like it, then say that at the start of the demo and in the WIP thread. There might be people who don’t give detailed feedback, but might still want to chime in with a “cool, would like more” if they knew you were trying to find out whether to continue with the story or not.
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If you know that you are in a vulnerable place at the moment and only want to hear nice things in order to get the project going, please say so. A small “please, be gentle” or “I know there are issues, I just want to know if this sounds interesting” might give you more of the kind of feedback you are ready for. Then, once you’ve got used to people reading your stuff, you can ask for more.
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Writing a game/story is a marathon, and not a sprint. You might want different feedback at the start compared to at the end, the important thing is to be clear what you want.
And finally: It is the responsibility of the AUTHOR to set the limits of what type of feedback they want. A tester/reader can’t read your mind, BE CLEAR. Most people don’t want to be assholes, lack of communication is often to blame.