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i think my site is dead but i dont want to give up....

I decided to close my site and actually make something i'll have fun with! I don't think I gave up on my other site, but i also don't want to keep beating a dead horse.

Last year I scratched an itch and created an entire RPG - designed the premise, wrote the rules, built out a forum, scrungled over code and customizations, and ... didn't open it. 😄 I showed it to a couple friends, but the point was, it was just fun to make something. The actual RPG I run now, I made with a team of people after the site we were writers on went down. We wanted to keep writing with each other.

Other than being scared of being the one to "lose the farm", it's stressing about the possibility of getting yelled at by rp directory/advertising mods for posting ads wrong. I seriously sweat over this.

My biggest fear is putting a lot of work into yet another site, and it dying all over again. i love writing lore and developing things within the rp. but i always seem to get two members who post a lot, and plot with one another, then leave and its like the site dies when they leave. i try to push activity and give things to do, but no matter how much i push and pull nothing happens. it makes me feel like i made everything for nothing, only for it to just sit offline and collect dust.

I'd like to get my community members involved in more OOC activities! Posting as our characters isn't everything! It's nice to be able to connect with other players outside of threads! I've put up a few challenges and even started a new "bingo" game for OOC fun on my primary site. So new goals are going well! I'd like to also learn more about coding where it concerns site skins. I know enough to manipulate and create from scratch some things, but not others. And scripting is lost on me except for VERY basic stuff, so I may try to pick up some knowledge there as well as time permits!

I've lost a few roleplay buddies through the years but the one that stuck with the most that I'm still sad about is one that just... disappeared one day. They were active in the community, and they had gotten the news that they were going to have a child. And further into the pregnancy they just... disappeared and didn't come back. Obviously having a child is way more important but they removed me on all socials we shared, everything. It sucked to not be able to even keep in contact as I considered us friends and I still wonder to this day how they're doing.

I met some of my closest friends and soulmates in my rp years of 2015-2016 and since then - no matter how long we may go without talking sometimes - we still talk like we've never missed a beat. One of them still rps with me to this day, but almost all of the rest have fallen out of the rp scene and have moved on to mostly video gaming and doing different hobbies. But we still keep in contact, share memes and everything. If it weren't for them, they wouldn't have shaped who I am today as a person, and they helped me through tough times through the many years I've known them < 3

The primary limitation was 'vaguely humanoid'. Could be an anthro, a human, a mech, an elf, a centaur, a ghost, a faun, made-up aliens... They got mad they couldn't be a sentient tire. Yeah.

I try to just put myself out there. As someone wisely said up above if the conversation isn't flowing offgame, it will probably be a ingame problem too. With advertising I honestly convince myself (it's not as easy, I know) that my board is effin' amazing and that people ought to love it, so I have to spread it everywhere, obviously. Sometimes it works. 🤫

I honestly don't really bring it up, but when I do, I basically just explain it as 'writing character stories online with other people'. Which yeah, the long and short of it I guess that is what we're doing. There ofc is more to it than just that, but that description usually covers it well enough for people to understand.

As a hobby in general, RP can be so draining and toxic. The writing is fun; the egos and cliqueyness are not. This community is made up of people who have gotten away from those awful experiences and created a truly safe place where OOC and IC are clearly separated. Then there's the stories themselves! Any character can quickly become intertwined within the in-character communities that have been built, and if something happens to one, it ripples out to others they knew. One move can set off a chain of events that culminate months or even years later (but usually much sooner than that!). It's so much fun to be here. The lore has also developed over time without retconning, to allow for more character development as well as rebalancing mechanics between different playable species. It's important to note that these things come about through discussion with members and testing out feelings overall. Feeling like our input matters is extremely important, and I have never been on a community that actually allows that. So, yeah, five stars, this place is the best.

This place is undeniably home. It is filled with familiar, welcoming faces and even if you're new you very quickly fall into the familiar heartbeat of Passing Strange. Everyone is always interested what everyone else is up to. The sense of community is undeniable. Not to mention that there is always something compelling to either read or be involved in. Everyone here is a wonderful writer who constantly goes above and beyond. Each character seems to be crafted with the utmost care. Each post, no matter how short or long, leaves you wanting more. I feel incredibly lucky to be a part of this community.

I love this place. The people, the admins, the atmosphere. It's welcoming to everyone who comes in. Everyone is always willing to talk and joke or just be there if you need an ear as well. The Roleplay side of things is pretty spectacular as well. You never know what is going to happen, theres a plot twist in almost every thread and they're always fun! Some are intense and others are silly. Just depends. I'd 10 outta 10 recommend this place to anyone looking for a great people environment as well as a place to watch your characters grow and thrive (or yah know kick the bucket sometimes lol) and just see what happens. I love this place, its my Rp home.

It was the community that first brought me in. I had stepped away from RP for a while and really wanted to start up again, but faced the problem of feeling awkward and rusty. The people from Passing Strange were more than welcoming and I felt part of the community instantly. Everyone is remarkably kind (even the self-proclaimed sour-pusses). The writing talent is top notch and so fun to engage with. The community is also very open to new RPers. No one is made to feel a stranger is this ground of Passing 'Strangers'. I've vastly improved my own writing confidence with this group and I've grown to really care for the other players. Real, long-lasting relationships have been built within the community and it truly is a place of constant support and motivation. All and all, I would come for the fun, riveting RPing and stay for the people at Passing Strange.

I love everything about this site. From the layout of the forum, to the writers, to the characters, to the plot and everything else that goes into it. You can truly "pass strange" because these people here are lovely. They will bring you into their lives and they will no longer be strangers after a while. I've been writing since 2012, and there hasn't been any place that's been as fun or as welcoming as Passing Strange. I want to be clear that I was not someone interested in vampires/werewolves before I joined this site. I liked fantasy, but it was more akin to Harry Potter kind of fantasy. But I thought the site sounded fun. Lurking through the threads as a guest let me know how active and entertaining this site is. I love this site. I love these people. Ride or die with Passing Strange, for real.

I hope you find them! ❤️

That the site will die with me. I have had a fairly long tenure on MRO, going on 7 years. It is a long running site having started back in 2005. I want to be able to pass it on to a crop of younger RPers and have it grow and evolve.

When I go into a site and staff show interest in your plot idea, but get upset when their friend cannot have the character you reseved. Then bully you using their characters. Like seriously guys... I am glad you're closed because you cannot bully your guests now.

Oh man, there have been some many over the last fifteen years! I mean, I am 35 years old and still make Admin mistakes but I hope my members can give me grace. Allowing bad people back onto my sites Allowing manipulators manipulate me into letting them do something I'm uncomfortable with Not allowing my site time to thrieve because other staff have said we need to do xyz to be active Catering to certain people who didn't deserve it Putting guests above my members... nobody is supposed to be above anyone!!! These are just a few!

For the site admins -- How do you manage the flow of time in your RP? Does your in-character timeline line up with the real timeline? How do you all row together? Do you date threads? What works for you?

My first RPG was actually the first every Harry Potter roleplay site! I was twelve at the time telling them I was 16 years old. I should not have been reading the things I was! LOL

Hello everyone. My name is Cheeca, and I am 35 years old. I am Indigenous to Turtle Island, and currently working on reconnecting with not only my people but the Earth Mother, as well. I am a Child and Youth Care worker, currently working in the school board but would love to work in hospital. I am currently working on my own book series, but that is taking a long time since there is so much involved in writing it. I have been roleplaying table top since I was right years old while rping online since I was twelve. I have admin everything from Real life to Harry Potter, Twilight to Teen Wolf. Honstly, I just like living a peaceful and quiet existance with sprinkles of adventure.

My first ever site went mostly dark after half the members left for reasons I still don't know to this day. It took me almost a full year before deciding to try another site. Lucky for me my favorite RP partner still wanted to write with me and invited me to join her on this other site! I'm so happy now 😄

Lately I've stressed about membership. For a couple of months after I opened the site, it really picked up and was fun and becoming pretty popular - then all of a sudden people were falling off. I've always preached an understanding of how busy real life can be (I'm a big perp of this too, getting married this year and starting a new job has taken a lot of my time), but it scares me that a lot of our membership has really dropped off, and it just makes me wonder if there's even any interest for it anymore. I have a few members who have clearly stuck around and want to get back into it too, but I don't know. It makes me nervous. I love my site and I love the characters I've developed, and I want to keep it going. I really miss the people who have stepped out because they were the ones who really helped the site blossom.

i have a hard time coming up with ooc activities or coming up with prizes for after events, so id like to come up with something along those lines, along with getting more active!

Back here again to say I'll only ever use MyBB lol. They are also steadily on board to getting everything PHP 8.0 compatible! Some plugins are now having issues so authors will need to fix them, if they don't you can always ask for assistance on the support forums over at MyBB for someone to help you fix whats broken in a plugin. I've always had tremendous luck getting help over there. Additionally I have MyRPG set up, it looks dead but I promise we're all around lol. Mostly in Discord but threads posted to the forum do get pushed to Discord so folks will see and someone can swoop in to assist. MyRPG is geared towards the use of MyBB software for Forum RP's so if you're looking for specific help/things RP related that most other folks have no idea what you're talking about we got you!

DMs badgering for romance or smut threads because I have a sexually active female character. I mean I'm not opposed to such threads or topics. But when the only reason I'm getting hounded is because my character is female and has had sex before... it makes me super uncomfortable. Maybe just open with having a regular interaction first and see where it goes. This I guess also goes hand-in-hand with asking to write with my character, but then not acknowledging their characteristics. I had a manipulative woman once who was not interested in romance. She was mostly a silent observer. Anyway, another writer wanted to thread which was great, but he wanted my character to pine over his guy and proposition him, fall in love etc. I kept telling this person that doing so just really wasn't in character for her, so I'd try to offer other ways to get our characters to interact or simply bump into each other and he just kept hounding it, even IC. HIs character literally asked mine why she was so into him even though she'd barely said a word to him yet. *sigh*

Working on a RP for the first time in like 2 years. Feels pretty good.

A group of friends and I wanted a place where we could hang out and have fun writing. We couldn't decide what kind of genre we wanted to write, so we decided to build our own site where we could explore a bunch of different ones and world build to our hearts content. Honestly, it's been really fun

I tell people it's collaborative writing or collaborative storytelling. If they know what D&D is, then I'll draw a comparison to that except say that it's on a forum/through writing instead of a tabletop, and that's usually good enough

I have definitely made the mistake of trusting people and letting them do things that my instincts told me I shouldn't let them do. I ran a site a few years ago that I had started with a friend, and she immediately began to change rules and give leniency to people she was close to. For example, she was allowing members to get started writing before their characters had been approved and allowing others to set up accounts and start writing without providing a character profile, even though it was clearly in our rules that all characters needed an approved profile before they could start writing on the forum. Unfortunately, I was too anxious a person to speak up very much — I'd mentioned a few times that I would prefer if they could follow the rules, and she always brushed it off and said that she would tell them, but never did. Eventually, she invited some of those people onto the site as staff and they began flouting the rules even more. This upset me, and I ended up calling them out for their behaviour one day and saying that they needed to follow the rules just like everybody else did because it was important for the overall site organisation and to make sure that no characters were made that blatantly broke the rules (as it turned out, they were making characters that did break the rules and hiding them by not filling in profiles and simply approving themselves). This resulted in a huge blowout between myself and the other three admins, and I decided to leave the site because I wasn't happy with the way they were acting. I learned a few things from that experience. Firstly, that I should trust my instincts when I thought people were doing things they shouldn't, and that I should call them out on their behaviour earlier on and not be afraid to assert the rules clearly, especially with my fellow staff. I also learned the importance of making sure that members that get put into leadership positions are ones that have the site's best interests at heart, rather than those who simply want to abuse their power to adjust the rules to their liking.

The only time I explain a ban to someone is if they will react with maturity. A lot of people sadly do not show this, especially when they treat people like shit usually or just treat a public area with a venting channel (now deleted) their entire vent room. I've had someone do this recently in a video game server. It was to contain it in our Discord and they kept going outside of it with guilt trips of no one joining their vcs to sing, being rude to people who tried to comfort them, and more. These types of people I do not contact on why they were banned. One of my fellow mods messaged them after on why and it made them more upset which I foresaw thanks to experience in dealing with people like this in the past. Wish I didn't. This person was an adult, mind you. The mod said it was the right thing to do [to msg them on way] but it made it worse due to their mental health. They have this idea that I was the villain and my friend/mod was the messenger when I fact I didn't want to msg them on why. They wished bad things to happen to my moderator which was shocking to see, as were others on the team when they saw the screenshots. No one is professionally trained to deal with certain people and it shouldn't be required to explain why they were banned. Especially when the rules are clear. They are responsible for reading those. The same person said we broke our own rules when I had implemented a rule before they even joined that in severe cases, there would be no three strikes or warnings before being banned immediately. This was one of those cases.

One of my closest friends, who happens to be a part of my ro community since "day 1", has been one of my closest friends in real-life even though we've never been able to meet face to face and live in two completely different countries. She has actually asked me to be the 'godfather' to one of her children.

Hiya, Honestly I'm mainly here to be able to advertise for my new board, but now that I've stumbled in here anyway, I do like the initiative a great deal and I feel like the discussions have a twist to them, that I haven't seen before, so I'm pretty happy I found it. Other hosting sites have been known to me for years upon years and I've never taken that much part unless I was looking for something myself as a player. Now, as I have good reason to keep coming, I might return, even when I don't actively need to. It's nice. I like it. Also I'm Finn - Scandinavian who's had the mad idea of trying to be an admin on an international board. Wish me luck!

It's taken me years to get to this point, but I'm mostly of a solid "eff it" any more when it comes to actively approaching other people. Same reason I will advertise the heck out of a site; like, no one's going to rp with me if I don't talk to them, and no one's gonna know my site exists if I don't tell them, eh?

Ours has a minimum of just 100 words but honestly we're not super strict on it. One should write what they feel like writing at the moment, whether it's heavily padded or not, so long as it's a fun time and everyone's happy with what they're getting. Enforcing word counts for the sake of appearing "literate" is something I don't really like, though. Literacy doesn't mean writing huge posts. If anything, it kind of just turns into work instead of a hobby 😕

I ran into a particular creator in a niche fandom who would open boards, get a bunch of members, and then just... disappear after about 2 weeks. Never any public OOC drama that I saw, there was always plenty of activity but people were still getting into their characters, and she (playing one of the main canons of course) would simply fall off the face of the earth and the site would die. Then she'd wait until after people left to finally put the board in offline mode. She changed her OOC alias a couple of times, so she got me with this routine more than once...

This is my confession I suppose. I had a very active board. It was thriving. I was a stay at home mom at the time but then me and my ex broke up. I had to get a job and I just slowly, very slowly stopped giving the board the attention that it needed. I did have one very amazing, active admin. He did keep the board alive but after I had just basically ghosted the board, it wasn't thriving the same. One day when I felt as though I could finally give the board the time it needed my admin and I revamped the entire board. I let him have a lot of say in any of the changes I was making as he had kept the board afloat in my absence. During the revamp we were speaking regularly, and we were exited to reopen because the board was like 3 years old at the time. Then one day, he just vanished and I never reopened the board. The board is still around. No members but also isn't offline.

I just do it. Indeed, we only regret the opportunities we don't take. And if I could do it when not being a native English speaker and not understanding some of the slang others spoke in, you can do it too... 😍 (For example of awkward, I asked if somebody wanted to continue a thread or not, and I expected a yes or no. I received a „I am good” instead, which I interpreted as „I am a good girl”, not being familiar with the expression meaning that it is enough or something. And I kept asking the question in the c-box and getting the same answer, because an American could not think that I am asking for several times because I did not understand her answer, and a Yes or No would have been better...)

Oh yes, when I do RL settings, I also choose names that fit in with their family background. For example, a jewish character with a jewish surname, taiwanese-american with an appropriate name. Naming characters is one of the most enjoyable parts of creating characters for me!

After being burned out for so long in Tumblr spaces, this place feels a bit of a safe haven to me, honestly. The community being relatively small and easy-going definitely helps a lot. Been there for 2 years already and I'm not planning on leaving anytime soon... so ya'll stuck with me. Always looking forward to the April Fool's jokes, the Yearbooks and all the neat summaries of the things I've missed because of my timezone. 10/10, great admins, great characters, tears were shed during threads.

Honestly, there are not enough kind words I can offer to state how I feel about this site and its lovely community. I'm so happy a close friend of mine introduced me to it last year. I feel like I've grown both as a writer and a person just by being here, and it hasn't even been a full year. It's such a supportive and warm environment, where I've felt completely safe to be myself and write. The lore of Passing Strange is amazingly written, but ever-evolving as well. The world is so dense with diverse, incredible characters that sometimes I just get caught up for hours reading threads my fellow members have written. The rules aren't too complex, the handbook is easily laid out, which was great for me as I tend to take a long time before I understand a world in which I'm RPing. I've absolutely adored playing each species the site has to offer (human, psychic, were and vampire). It really is a rich world to explore! Don't get me started on the incredible staff either! Fao, Kiew and Drew are all warm, helpful and supportive admins who have made my experience so much better. I feel completely at ease knowing they are at the helm of this wonderful site. I've never had to wait long for an answer to a question, nor have I ever felt they didn't have the safety of the community in mind at all times. Would recommend this RP to anyone who loves writing supernatural characters (or humans!) and a supportive community that'll have your back ❤️

I'm truly glad someone asked this question because I was discussing this not too long ago and was torn on where I stood! I actually paused rping for a short while as I thought about it. The opinions I read are incredibly valid and in the end, I think I came to similar conclusions. I felt it was more of a homage to the person rather than being disrespectful.

I have said this before and I’ll say it again, Passing Strange gives me the opportunity to read from all of my favourite authors in the one place. Everyone has a different style, a different spin to their writing, and yet everyone also meshes together brilliantly. I’ve been on so many sites - some short lived, others lasted years - and from my own personal experience I think it’s rare to see RPers complement each other as flawlessly as they do on Passing Strange. I believe it stems a lot from the community, because the community is like... it’s like a family, really. Uplifting, supportive, and outrageously funny with some of the greatest banter you can find. Real people with real perspectives on life and above all, real friendships.

This varies a lot for me. Some of the people in my current roleplay community have gotten me into the idea of character playlists! Which is basically just a bunch of songs that make you think about your character or put you in the mood to write them. These help me out a lot sometimes - other times, it's just a little too much for my brain, and I need silence and to be left alone to get the words just right.

When I first started RPing and didn’t have a helper or didn’t know how to get a coadmin, I would make a second account and we’d both run the site. We would rp together until new people began to populate the site and the coadmin would slowly ghost and disappear or step down. But i haven’t had to do that in years. Now I have people to work with me. Yay!