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I am looking for some feedback on a situation involving a pair of members. Member #1 joined and was an active poster with everyone then made a romantic wanted ad for themselves. Member #2 took said ad shortly thereafter. Since the ad was taken, there's became an obvious problem of them doing 3-5 posts back and forth with their ship which are all tagged in the shoutbox while ignoring any other posts they owe on the board. We use the tagging system and both members acknowledge they have other threads (even states in the cbox they know this other post is owed), BUT they continue to go back and forth with one another. Member #1 recently made a second character but has made no attempt to plot with anyone except the love interest played by Member #2 and has started a second thread between them that is prioritized. My co-admin suggests that we just ignore it and go about things, let them do their thing, but I feel like ignoring it isn't a good solution and this could become a bigger problem. Any advice? Anonymous poster hash: 6f15f...403

Hello Initiative! I've come to you regarding a trend I've noticed is very common now in roleplays and I'm curious to get opinions on it. First a little background: I am an old lady who's been around the RP scene for 20 or so years (we're talking the beginning of chat rooms, folks). Forums have always been my platform of choice and I've gone through the transition from PB > IF > JC. I've recently come back after a few years' hiatus and everything is different than what I remember from before! So now the real topic: I've noticed that many sites are doing a point system or a site shop where you accumulate points based on posting, events, etc. that allow you to "purchase" items in the site's store. I've seen things like "X many points and you can upgrade a character" or "X many points and you can buy a restricted character race/breed". etc. Back in the day this was never something I saw but it is extremely common now, and I feel like I am in the minority when I say I'm immediately a little turned off by a site that has a system like this in place. I am also a grown-ass woman with a full-time job, a mortgage, and a real life outside of RP so maybe I'm turned off by them because I prefer sites with a little more lax activity requirements (and therefore don't count on high volume post counts to gain enough "points" to do something)? What are your thoughts? Do you like the idea of point systems? Do you think this is just another trend that will eventually disappear, or do you think that all RP's will be using these in the future? I'm curious from a member perspective if these are good motivators for people to post, or if they just cause anxiety. From and admin perspective, is it worth the effort to set the system up and do members use it effectively? There are no wrong answers here, I'm just trying to test the waters! 🙂

Hello All, I wasn't sure whether to post his here or in RPG Confessions - please move it if it is not appropriate for this forum. I honestly need some advice on the often vague dividing line between having true concerns and just being paranoid. As an RPer and RP manager of many years - I have seen lots of issues arise. Some of them were repeated often enough that they became red flags for me when new people applied to my roleplays. I confess to now being a somewhat paranoid GM - mainly because I loathe confrontation, hate the thought of hurting feelings, etc. Especially since RP is supposed to be interactive and fun! Here's my issue.... A person has joined one of my sites (I have a few), wrote a decent character bio, and then proceeded to ask upward of twenty times how soon the story was starting. They received the same answer all twenty times. When the story launched, they leaped in with enthusiasm - which was majorly awesome! They are a better than fair writer and seems to be really nice. The issue appeared when they repeatedly did a thing that was very unnecessary in forum roleplay. A friendly reminder was sent out to the group at large that this was not necessary. The person asked if they were at fault and I diplomatically told them that yes, they were doing the thing, don't do it. The very next day, I sign on and that person has done the thing again - 3 more times. I have since sent them a private message on Discord asking that they cease and desist doing this thing. This is a very simple thing, not a complicated issue. You do it or you don't do it. Not doing it is the way forum play is designed. Am I being paranoid in that I feel like this person purposely did the thing to push back?

A survey that might help with my new coding endeavor: where do you like to have your cbox? Togglable? Always visible? Do you mind if a togglable cbox overlaps with the other elements while open? Additionally, what do you think about just having a button that opens the cbox in another window or page? The con is that you don't see what's going on at a first glance, the pro is that it doesn't get in the way.

So, this may be a bit specific but something that I'm still trying to figure out is how to make battles against NPCs an actual challenge. Yeah, you can talk with the participants and plan out who wins and stuff but that is not what I'm talking about. This is about PvE and cases like a "boss"-NPC. Or, to give an example, I want to have a hit list feature where bounty hunters and similar people can take on specific tasks and hunt unique enemies, no matter if creature or humanoid. I thought that I could combine this with a member shop and clearing these hits grants you hunter points or something which you can spend on something (I didn't figure out on what yet). The thing is - if it's predetermined that the players win, I can just give these points out for free and they lose their purpose. So my question is how can you make battles against NPCs actually challenging and even pose the threat that a player loses (especially against super-tough enemies)? (Without dying, of course, otherwise almost nobody would take the hits on)

So, obviously, you always start small, and after moves and big changes you can expect things to be a bit slow. However, I have noticed a weird pattern in people looking for forums. They don't want to join a small forum that's slowly growing, because they want immediate booming activity. But, how does a forum create that "booming activity" when people refuse to join and help them grow? We have advertised like crazy, affiliated like crazy, and we are still finding that people will browse the forum as guests, but never commit to joining. Those that do join, leave because they don't want to actually put in the work of being part of a growing community. We just did a huge move from Proboards to jcink, so of course, slow periods are to be expected. But my staff and I are pulling out at all the stops to do our best with keeping activity up, creating new threads, events, and perks of joining, but it seems to not be working. Are people not into multi-genre roleplay forums anymore? Is it more now that people want something super specific? My thoughts on creating a multi-genre, open world roleplay forum were to give people the chance to do ANY genre and ANY kind of roleplay they wanted. But, we can't show these potential members activity, when no one even bothers joining to try it out. Everyone has lives outside the forum, so we can't expect the couple active members we have to put the forum above their real lives because that's just ridiculous. So, how do we become an "attractive" forum, to entice people to ACTUALLY register instead of just viewing as guests? Any advice would be awesome. Thank you so much! ^^ ❤️

So I'm not sure I like it or hate it. It's really a whatever sort of thing, if I want to say hello to a site I will pop into their cBox. I love doing that when I'm interested in a site. I, as a long time site administrator, know that a lot of guest traffic is spoofed.from search engines so it won't necessarily be an actual person that upped that guest number. So to me I think it's pointless but I can see it actually bringing someone out too, but it could also run them away. How does it make you feel as the guest? How do people feel about members of the site greeting guests? Whether it be Staff or members.

Love em or hate em. Do not reply, all replies will be removed. This is not a discussion thread, this is an interest thread.

I know that jealousy is a common problem in the RP world, but usually I only ever hear about how it tears people apart. I'm hoping that someone out there has managed to survive their jealousy without ruining their RP partnerships, because I'm suffering from massive jealousy issues right now. I've fixated on the one plot my partner is doing with someone else to the point where I don't enjoy the plots I do have, and I lied and put up an away on our site saying I'm busy so that I don't have to post or talk to anyone. I don't like feeling this way, but I don't know how to get my emotions under control, either. Has anyone ever successfully broken a jealousy fixation without it destroying your friendship? What did you do? How can I get out of my head and enjoy what I actually have instead of looking at what I don't? Is the answer to take an RP break? Is it to just cry my way through writing my other plots? Is there a less painful way to deal with this than either of those? Anonymous poster hash: 5e3d5...a3b

Are you set on having faceclaims? Do you make them optional? Are they completely in place of a physical description or not? How far can you go with tweaking their appearance for your character/does clothing and hair style really matter? What about when joining a site, is the availability or lack of (or even the presence of a PB that is disliked) truly so important as to make/break joining that site for you? I fully admit that most sites I've RPed and staffed on have not had faceclaims as a requirement, and as a result I'm mostly against using them even though I do have FCs bookmarked for some characters. Though for each character it's only one and it took me years to find some of them, especially those who I've designed from the ground up. If you want to use them more power to you but I honestly don't see the point of them unless they're canon characters or it's an RP based on a show/movie/whatever. And if it's supposed to be an original RP with OCs that requires a PB? I can understand basing the appearance of a character on a certain PB but not when they look exactly alike aside from minor edits. I'm not even touching on tracking and reserving FCs and only allowing that FC to be used once and the hassle on the staffing end of it. Recently I was looking around for sites to possibly join and I have to admit the FC thing confuses me. Like okay, yeah, it's awesome that you can have a character and easily make graphics for them if you've got a PB. But it seems like most sites don't give you the chance to write an actual description of a character in the application anymore and idk. To me it's odd. I'm used to having 200+ word descriptions of what the character looks like, pointing out their physical scars and imperfections and how they carry themselves. Pointing out eye color and mannerisms and how they might blend in or stand out in a crowd. My vision is also terrible and I find that descriptions are easier to visualize in my head as opposed to figuring out how to describe the appearance of a PB most of the time if there's no description to go along with the image. Eye color is hard to distinguish, downright impossible actually if it's a small image or not a close up of the face. Then there is the issue of lighting and heavier graphical edits to faces which introduces a whole new set of issues for someone who has visual impairments or who may not be the best at separating lighting from actual skin tone. Generally that means looking up who their PB is and then looking up pictures of them and asking the RPer if I'm getting them right just to make sure. For me, it's exhausting. I see people who ban a certain PB or who won't join a site because either their PB was taken or someone had a character with a PB they hated. I understand not liking the PB because of something they've done, but the character isn't the PB. Imo it really stifles creativity and honestly, is it really such a huge problem? And how far is too far to go when editing the appearance of an PB? Eye color and maybe hair color/length are fair common and reasonable edits. The issue I have mainly with mine is finding someone who face shape/bone structure that matches the character. To date I've only had one PB I've found that matches the character's bone structure and didn't require much editing (none in this case actually), but tbf my little healer was half based on the Harp Twins to begin with so Kennerly Kitt being a perfect match isn't exactly surprising. But then I look at other characters, good luck finding a tall, muscular woman (wrestler/bodybuilder, because this particular character likes walking around in full plate armor with a sword bigger than she is) that also happens to have this particular facial structure, which leaves out a good chunk of the candidates there without even going into skintone/eyes/hair. How do you deal with the more niche or unique characters?

As I am working on the wiki/site lore portion of my forum, I am wondering what to do over the inclusion of character profiles and other content into the wiki. It would take me forever to write profiles of all the canon characters espeaically if I did this with characters that I am not going to play or have created myself as an npc/adoptable character. What do others feel about the notion of incorporating accepted character profiles into the wiki? Are there any potential problems to consider, for instance, when a member gives up a canon character and someone else takes it on? What would you do with the content of the previous player? What is the etiquette that a site would do if a member leaves? Would you keep their written content in the wiki or remove it? I don't mind leaving the content where it is and giving the member credit, but I am concerned if a former member wants to make an issue of it being there. What are site owners experience with this?

When joining an original sci-fi board, how much do you want to know about the setting? How much detail do you think is required about technology? And what about history from now to the future age when the story is set? To put things in their right perspective, I'm thinking to a science fantasy / space opera kind of thing, as opposite to hard sci-fi, however I also like to keep some internal consistency.

So this has always baffled/interested me about directories. Everyone seems to treat them like a safe space... but it's so easy to tell who/what site you're talking about if people know who you are and what sites you're on, even if everything specific is removed. I feel like an incredible amount of the time players and admins are effected by posts that have been made on directories that are meant to be anonymous/not important. I guess my question is... is this right? And also, if you realize there has been a misunderstanding, is it appropriate to talk to someone based on a directory post that they have made?

So this is something that I'm always curious about... What do you guys do when a new member joins or creates a character and then doesn't post a shipper or post in other people's shippers? Any suggestions for how to help these players get involved without making them feel pressured? EDIT: A shipper/plotter is a page/thread posted on forums that gives some basic information about a character's personality and who they get along with that is more subjective than the objectivity of the application and is meant to help people figure out whether a character would get along with/hate/love another player's character. They're kind of like a brainstorming area for a specific character or group of characters. ^^

Polyvore is gone. It was shut down by Ssense a few days ago (I think they acquired it) and they've stated that it's not coming back. Apparently Ssense wanted the email lists and user information of the polyvore members. I loved polyvore. It was a perfect platform to merge together visual art and writing, and now it's gone. All those pictures and collages I've made over the years have been vanished. I knew it was a possibility that if the website ever vanished, all our work would vanish, too, but this is silly. Now I'm not sure what to do. Does anyone know an alternative that would allow RPers to make collages for their characters and plots? All those poor people who spent every day on Polyvore crafting beautiful artistic pieces. . . . And those people who RPed directly on polyvore itself. . . . They're in even worse shape than the rest of us. Edit - If you're a polyvore user, visit their blog: http://blog.polyvore.com/ You can request your content to be sent to you, and you can opt out of having your information given to Ssense.

I'm not really sure which approach is the best. Yeah, I know, you can always just go with whatever you feel like for your site but I still want to do some research as to what people usually prefer since I can go with either and how people view the fourth option (which is what the site we RPed on used).

What are some good prizes/rewards you could give to members if they, for example, complete a challenge or "win" something? Like, if there is a "make this country more interesting" challenge or anything else, really. I thought about something from our artists but, then again, this would be pointless if a member is an artist themselves, so I'm not sure what would be a good way to make challenges and similar stuff more interesting.

So a few colleagues and I were discussing discord bots and how people use them for their discord servers. I have seen people use few in the other servers that I often venture, I have even found some roleplay groups that do everything on discord and don't use a site at all which was somewhat unique and looked aesthetically pleasing. My server employs a total of 11 bots one of which I script myself and is not an official bot. What kind of bots do you use for your discord server? Do you use a plethora of bots or just one or two? How many bots are too little and how many is too much? We also name them after the deities for our roleplay. Fain or Dynobot is useful for logging specific events, and moderation. If you have a massive influx of members and want to control what they can and can't see role management is a must, he auto assigns a role that will determine what parts of the discord new users are allowed to see. (Such as restricting new people from the NSFW content or keeping new members out of conversations until they have decided that they want to stay on the forum to prevent your ideas from being grabbed by others and things like that. (I apologize if that seems paranoid but I have seen it happen.) Fall or Nightbot is also suitable for moderation in that he controls the content of the text channels you put him in. If you only want a particular kind of link in an individual channel, he will only allow that link. So If you don't want people spamming your general chat area with images, youtube videos, and things of that nature. Fall will automatically delete any link you haven't pre-authorized and given the user a warning. If they continue to do so, he will automatically kick them from the discord. (You can turn it off so he won't kick and just warn the user over and over again... or set a threshold... say a user post the same link ten times rapidly then that user could even be banned if that's what you want to do) Mother or Ai bot is more so for fun then anything else but also has a few useful tools. We use her to award our members meaningless points and exp so that they can level up or purchase ranks within our discord system using points. The positions are pointless as well, but most members see the higher tier ranks as symbols of status in the community. Nox or mee6 is excellent as well as he provides music in voice chats, timed reminders for my users to vote on top rp sites or things like that. Custom commands that display custom information. For example a link to our rules, our map, our complaint form. Our user survey and other various tools. Spring or Mirai bot is good for.... well we are weebs we like Mirai... she used to play a jpop/jrock channel 24/7 she no longer does but she does other things like making our decisions for us if we can decide on something (RNG element built-in) or rating us as Waifus... she post random pictures of cats, and anime things like that. (I am trash, and that is okay) Next up is Summer... Summer is a great bot... she has all sorts of capabilities that could probably narrow down our total list of bots. The issue is she was the last addition to our bot list as we discovered her last. We wanted her for one reason and one reason only. A bot that posted hentai... yup she could probably do every job, but we just wanted her for one thing. (I am trash, and that is okay) Tiviere or Trello is possibly a bit harder to explain because I have to explain another tool entirely called Trello which is like a giant storyboard where you can slap up text, ideas, and put them on board for your team to see... kind of like a storyboard... Then in each of those cards and sticky notes on the board, you elaborate and flesh out your story as more people add to it. Trello boat post all updates of our trello to our update board in discord, so it sort of works like init does for the initiative only for what trello. Let me tell you about Winter Winter is an excellent bot because winter keeps me on time for all my duties reminding me by the second of when I wanted something done, or when I tried to start something. It also can do regular reminders and looks good doing it. Writger is widgetbot, he logs every IP that touches my discord server from the forum, and it allows guest to use our help and support chat area. It puts our announcements all in one concise location. Its all in all just a great tool in my opinion. Lastly the master of all bots... UberBot or American Father (its an inside joke because of the bot's features) If you say America UberBot says Fuck yea which is kind of funny... Uber bot logs every message edit, every message delete, every name change, every role change... it reuploads the photos that were deleted and all in all its magnificent because when people do wrong and they know they wrong, and they try to hide it. You need the evidence to justify your actions as an admin. That is ultimately the bottom line of it. TL;DR this is what all of my bots do. Do you think I have gone overboard? What kind of bots do you use?

I am always seeking ways that I can improve my sites, improve how I manage them and interact with my players. I am pretty sure that perfection is next to impossible, but I am service oriented so I will always keep trying. As always with my topics, I appreciate any and all feedback. Answer one or more of the questions or ignore them and just give random opinions. It's all good in my book! How communicative do you like to be as an admin? How communicative do you like your Admins to be? Do you like seeing routine updates on the site as a whole, plots (where applicable), general input and engagement from admin staff. Would you prefer they just chill out, write some NPCs or their own characters and stay out of the way? I'll start off this topic by saying I am a very hands-on game manager. I enjoy being involved and staying engaged with all of the members. Unless there is a major site or member issue, I prefer being just one of the gang. Since we have guided site plots as well as allowing all levels of sandbox writing, I do a great deal of communicating plot updates and the like. OOC drama on the board is strictly prohibited and handled behind-the-scenes. Honestly, I can't remember the last time we had a major player issue of any kind. When it comes to keeping members engaged, I believe it is a two-way street. If every effort has been made to keep a player engaged and they are just not responsive, they eventually get left in the dust. I am not running the Daycare of the Damned! I believe in providing writing opportunities and the means to find other members at the game to engage with. After that, it is up to each individual to stay as active as they wish to be. We are moving to allowing a 30 day grace period. After that, if the player has not put up an absence notice or made any effort at all OOC or IC to stay engaged, we'll archive their accounts. After 90 days, we'll delete them. Harsh? Yes. However, I have found our other attempts to be lenient and understanding because it is just a game gets taken advantage of. When I look at joining a site myself, I browse to see who is who and who is engaged. I find not having any site updates / announcements at all rather off-putting. It makes me wonder if the site creator and staff have just put the site together and leave everyone to their own devices. I am not criticizing this form of site management. To each their own! For me, personally, I like to see routine member and staff engagement with one another (on the site, in a cbox, Discord, etc.). As usual, that's just some of my two-cents worth!

I have been doing a bunch of advertising for my new Lord of the Rings/Game of Thrones crossover forum, and so far there have been between 30-60 guests visiting the forum every day, but I have yet to get a single person to join the forum. People have said that they love the idea or that the site looks cool, but I have had no luck in getting members. So how do you get new people to join your forum?

As I've mentioned in a couple of other discussions, I am migrating one of my RPGs to forums. I have been away from forum RP for many years and much of the common terminology is lost on me, so please forgive any gaffs on my part. When my site is completely finished, I will be adding it for a site review. Right now, we still have lots to move from the old Nova site and some cosmetic issues to fix. I would like feedback from both points of view: RPer looking over a site for the first time and Admin regarding what they consider must-haves. Upfront, I am a minimalist when it comes to sites. I like a graphically alluring site but there is a point where I feel that less = more. IMHO, a site should be focused on storytelling and character development. Lore (site wikis) need to be easy to find and contain enough information to make creating a character and a plot easy. Since I also love reading everyone else's stories, I also want IC plots easy to find and follow. As an Admin and a Player, what are the bare minimums you require or look for in a site? Site Layout: What do you look for first? Do you prefer the IC forums to be the ones you see at the top? Thanks! Looking forward to the feedback! PS: I searched for similar topics but had no luck. If anyone knows of one, point me in its direction!

As a prefix, I sit firmly in the camp of belief that advertising for a site does nothing for actually recruiting members. HOWEVER, I really don't have any other means of getting my site's name out there (I don't want any 'affiliates' other than sites my members are on/recommed this time around). So, thus begs the question: As MEMBERS, what do you think makes a good advertisement? What would make you say "Eh, lemme click and check and check it out"?

Rune's topic about site ages got me thinking about this... While I sometimes look at site ages, I'm more likely to look at the directory and character list for ages to see if I think we're going to be a good fit from a community standpoint. I often will shy away from places where none of the characters are over 30 (in appearance -- immortals don't count), because I assume that -- and usually this is somewhat accurate -- the age range of character appearance is with in 10 years of the players, so if everyone is in high school and college, then most of the characters are likewise younger. Obviously this is not a perfect system; some people who are in their late 40's like to write kids; And I certainly write characters upwards of 30 years my elder. Do other people do this? Does the mean age of characters and/or players affect your interest in a site at all?

We've had two people join in the past couple months who like to use their own pictures as OOC avatars. We don't have anything specifically banning it in the rules, but it makes me feel a little weird and I'm not sure why. How do you guys feel about people using pictures of themselves as avatars?

I think a lot of sites, if not majority of them, run events. I also think that a lot of admins are always looking for new ideas on how to run events or what kinds of events other admins find work the best. So this is just a question for Admins and members: what are some of the best or most enjoyable events you've run or participated in and how were they run? We're they prompted? Free for all? (For admins) Hiw much preplanning did you do and how much was decided as you went?