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I've been sick for most of December so sadly this was late, but what are your goals for this year as an admin or mod? You could also put your goals as a coder if you code here. My big goal as mod is to be more active here. I have a hard time coming up with questions or will debate on whether to put some of my thoughts down. It's something I want to work on this year. I also want to write a few guides. The big one on writing cultures that aren't your own. I see people ask about this and they get either no or bad help. I'd also like to get into coding. I know a little bit. I can read a good chunk of it. I just haven't known where to start and have felt intimidated. I'd also like to get a site up and running. What about you? What are your admin goals for this year?

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!

Definitely in the "collaborative writing" and "collaborative storytelling" camp, haha. It's a very friendly way of putting it. People read stories, and so describing it as "stories but you develop it gradually back and forth" is easy to parse. The bigger problem I have is people associating "roleplay" automatically with "ERP" lol.

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.

Definitely when it no longer feels fun and is having an impact on real life. I'm currently in the process of closing down one board because it was just frustrating me. I have moved to a new board and for now am mostly solo staffing (my hubby is helping out, but staffing is otherwise not his forte). I must admit I feel much happier again as well as refreshed. It's nice to look forward to writing and actually having people who are also happy to write. Given that is the whole idea, it kinda struck me that it was not the norm for a good while before, despite how much I loved the old board.

Like most of everyone here, I generally call it 'collaborative writing' too. However when my now hubby and I were just a year or two into our relationship, he mentioned something about dabbling in forum writing 'with friends' and I was shocked. Fast forward a bit and we roleplay together on the same board all the time.

I've always found this conversation awkward, not becuase I'm ashamed, but because people have such a skewed/warped idea of what "online roleplaying" means. Because the group I play with is so active OOC as much as they are IC, I tend to call it my online writing group. That together we create pieces of writing from the perspective of multiple characters set in a specific world. For those familiar with D&D/tabletop gaming, I tend to equate it to something along the lines of that but not necessarily as structured.

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've had those conversations come up both in casual conversations and others like job interviews when im asked what I do in my spare time, to which I tell them I roleplay online. I've had some interesting looks, and even a coworker ask if he could join my site that I'm putting together. I'm definitely not afraid to admit you this hobby as I'm quite proud of some of my sites I've led and the numerous friends I've made over the years.

When the work and stress of the site outweighs the fun of RPing. Sure, all sites are going to be work, but if you're not getting anything out of it then why do it? If an admin is just going through the motions it will be obvious to the other writers.

- When it starts to affect your real life or that of those around you in a negative way. Just like everything, roleplay is meant to be something positive. It's here to bring people many good things, but it can also affect a person's life in a negative way, through many various means. I'll try to list some of them below. - When a person begins to become to obsessed with the roleplay world they ignore the real world. - When a person gets too attached to other people within the roleplays, and can't seperate reality from fiction. - When people are harrassed by others because of events that happened in a roleplay. - Catfishing (People who pretend to be romantically attached to another person, but are lying because it's just roleplay.) -Rp Hacktivists (Derived from combining the words 'Hack' and 'Activism', hacktivism is the act of hacking, or breaking into a computer system, for politically or socially motivated purposes. These people will attack anyone for their goals, and try to get them to suicide because they were hurt or dissed in some way.) As you can see, there are some means that can lead to negative results, but hopefully that doesn't happen to anyone here...

To be honest, I think every warning should come with an explanation. It's your duty as an admin to educate your members and by doing so you're teaching them to be better members for other sites they end up on. We admins gotta stick together and think of the bigger picture!

It wasn't terrible in the "how rude" sense. But it was bad nonetheless. I used to play frequently with a woman I met on a forum we were both a part of. We just kinda clicked and our characters were always fun to have play off one another. We went this way for a couple of years until she had a pair of deaths in her immediate family that rendered her unable to bring herself to write, and understandably so. We parted ways as amicably as I think people can, although we still chat from time to time. She still hasn't made her way back to RP, and doesn't know that she ever will, and that's alright. In the meantime I fully intend to be available to talk when she needs it.

To start: I am going to specify that I lost an RP partner, but that partner was not a friend. (Long story ahead) So, I was on a board where we played Vampire the Masquerade and I was new. I made a Setite because I love them. So there's this player who's been on the board a while and has an established Setite who wants to plot and I'm like COOL. We exchange skype and he messages me a bunch of times to tell me what I'm doing right and what I'm doing wrong. (Irritating but oh well) and the game continues. Around March to May he suddenly stops logging in. Its weird but it happens. Then all the sudden a player who wasn't very active logs in and writes this huge blurb about how we're all scum for harboring a murder and that we should be ashamed for being friends with a criminal and they're leaving the board. We're all like What The Fuck. During the rant the person dropped the name of the Setite. Because I had him on skype I had his real name. So I googled that shit and saw an arrest in Kentucky for a man suspected of killing an elderly bus driver in a home invasion that had gone unsolved for ten years. I was blown away. Took six years and more shit than I wanted to think about; but every couple of months I would remember that and look up the trial (He was convicted of that and other unsavory things) but yeah: I lost an RP Partner because he was convicted of Murder

She was a very proud [professed] lesbian; I am a dude. I get along with lesbians more often than not because, when your lesbianism is properly firing on all cylinders, you do not see me as a viable romantic/sexual target. From the start, she was very emotional. Shared all her plights of overcoming persecution (often with large crowds of supporting cast cheering her on) with me. They seemed daily, but at the time it didn't stick out to me. I just wrote it off as "some people are just more ... emotionally open" and "she has a thriving social circle - no way she's fishing for something!". We talked every day. It seems more accurate to say she talked every day. The roleplay was ... eh. I'd wanted to drop one, since she'd wanted two ongoing 1x1 roleplays with me and both her characters were not especially distinct from each other (and it was hard to write as much as she'd have liked while she was constantly talking at me). Don't get me wrong: you can be a great, extroverted person and have poor character portrayal. This was not the case. I think she might have even [said she] had a girlfriend at the time, and certainly a few sexual partners. At first I thought the relentless hitting on was just an uncomfortable joke. It was not. I'd trusted her implicitly as someone with shared experiences, and tried that much harder to keep her in my life for it. I think that's what turned the knife the hardest. I don't remember precisely how I noped out, but the time she said "my estrogen needs your testosterone" is what's carved into our friendship's gravestone.