Game does rather piss-poor job at communicating to the player that they NEED to build a palisade, and it has to enclose their farms too. (Example is from 2014 but to shamelessly toot my own horn, the only real differences are that my signature links to guide that tells you to build palisade, I edited the main page of the wiki to have link to Palisade -page in the "Quick Help Guides" -section.)
Nothing in-game significantly hints that you should build a palisade, and there's also confusion from the fact that for the longest time, palisade was kind of useless once big boys got enough STR to hand-bash it.