Search the Community

This is probably a dumb thing to ask, but I didn't see any forum that would relate to advice, haha! Anyhow, so I have this really good friend who I always help make sites with, and she always helps me make sites. But lately, all the sites that I've helped her with hasn't gone well. Well, I decided that I was going to make my own roleplay site without any assistance (I was very inspired, and I'm super stoked to open it tomorrow), but I didn't tell her about lolol. Now I'm feeling pretty sneaky and guilty on if I should offer her a staff position on it, or even be like "hey, do you want to join it?" She's had a history of exploding easily and getting angry over little petty things (we had a fight about 2 years ago that resulted in her cutting me off completely over an item in a SIM Game. She later apologized to me this January, and we've been friends since) and disappearing off the grid, leaving me as the only staff to run the site. Any advice?

So this sort of thing might have been discussed before but I haven't seen it & I'm curious about other peoples' opinions! Especially since it has happened on numerous sites I've been on. From a staffing perspective - how do you deal with members who join your site and appear to be really enthusiastic judging by OOC interaction in cboxes or discord, have their character approved, create a plotter and then ... nothing? They don't seem to reply to the plotters of any other members, start threads with any other members, etc? Sometimes they only try to plot with me, the admin, and nobody else, which I always find odd. It's like they're waiting for people to come to them rather than putting themselves out there a bit. I try to respond to every new member's plotter in the early stages of a site's life but that's not always possible. Or is this something only I've ever experienced? Lol. From a member's perspective - do you ever find yourself in this situation, i.e, joining a site , creating your character and then not really plotting with anyone? If so, why? Especially if you've been welcomed OOCly by everyone and involved in OOC conversations via site discords/cboxes and all that malarkey. EDIT: Rather than 'deal with', encourage is probably a better word.

Hello, Initiative! I come here again for your collective wisdom. I was wondering what's your general opinion on invite-only roleplays? To add some context, I have opened a roleplay recently (and closed it recently) that in a practical way operated like that, but it didn't have limited openings or anything of the sort, so it was basically "hey, wanna play? Come on in!". For the next idea I'm working on, though, while we can in theory stretch to infinite numbers of characters, there would be a small group making up the center of the plot, and, realistically, even for meaningful secondary characters there would be a limited space (one person can only have as many siblings, for example). So, it would probably be a mix of invite-only and a few wanted ads to fill the spots the people I plan on inviting can't/won't take, but for ease of argument I'm putting it down as invite-only. What do you all - members and admins alike - think of those? Okay? Unfair? Okay with some challenges? I would love to hear anyone's opinion! Thank you in advance! (P.S.: Hope I have posted it in the right place and explained it decently enough, let me know if there's something I need to clarify)

As my board starts getting, hm, more than two scenes, I'm wondering what's the best way to handle the timeline. To elaborate: RP moves slower than real life. A scene that lasts a few hours IC may take weeks or months to be concluded. And that's fine! But when a scene is supposed to have an impact on the setting and/or a development in other scenes, and meanwhile new plots are being started, you need to know what comes first. Now, the site has a Timeline. Things happen in an order and that's not random. What I'm not sure is how slow or fast it should be. The options are: - timeline as fast as RL. New scenes, unless otherwise specified, are happening at the time when they are started. Meanwhile, old plots are still being played, and you write new stories without knowing how previous ones ended. - slower timeline: all current plots must be wrapped up (or at least, if something has more impact than a random chat, we must establish how it will end and how it will affect others), before we can start playing in the following month/season/whatever. This is the most accurate option consequences-wise, but not everyone likes having a widening gap between IC and OOC time. I'm currently looking for inputs, from my players but also from people on sites such as this, since I'd like to know both what people likes, and what are possible solutions I might not have considered. NB - Please don't suggest timey-wimey / fully fluid time solutions. I know they are popular but I cannot stand them. A bit of vagueness is okay, a mess of paradoxes and having no idea what happens first on the other hand is not something I want to deal with.

So, I've had this experience before, but I thought I perhaps haven't always dealt with it in the right way. Basically, I have an app that is a copy and paste job. No reference to the setting, and a generic bio that could be lifted and placed into any fantasy setting. No reference to where or when they were born, or anywhere else for that matter. The only reference to an actual place is 'the Academy in the city'. Ok, what Academy, and what city? My draft PM is: 'Hello there and welcome. Unfortunately your application needs some work before it can be approved. You will need to take a read of our lore at <link here>, and better integrate your character into the setting. For example, there is no mention of where they were born, or any other location or quirk of our setting. The only location actually mentioned is 'the city'. You'll have to specify what city you're referring to, and similarly flesh out the rest of the application. Kind regards.' I don't know, to me it comes across as kind of mean, because it's basically saying 'I know you didn't read shit, so go do it' kinda thing. Is there any better or simpler way to express this? Kind regards and thanks in advance.

This has been a big problem when looking for members for my own rp. They'll like the premise, and be interested up until the point when they find out that my community has concrete game-like mechanics. Here's my problem with that. In my opinion, large-scale roleplay needs stats and/or mechanics of some kind to be successful. Sure, you can get away with having no stats when it's just 1x1 rp and both players are skilled rpers who don't powergame or anything like that, but how rare is that? So-called "open" or "consent-based" rp assumes that everyone is a perfect roleplayer. Sure, it may be a good forum for collaborative storytelling, but that's an entirely different beast from roleplaying in my mind. What are your thoughts? Am I completely wrong and no-stats rp is the best? Am I right? Somewhere in between? Let me know.

Since no one else has started the topic....I will 😄 Do you think that a staff member should endeavor to RP with all members? Why/why not? If yes, does this extend to attempting to having some kind of plot with all members? So going beyond the initial first thread. Things that are self-evident: large RP sites where it's not humanly possible to RP with literally everyone! If you're in that scenario, do you instead make an attempt to RP with most incoming members in addition to your usual crowd? Why/why not? If you're a member, do you think that staff members should make an effort to RP with you regularly?

So I have an odd problem on my current site. A character was accepted which had a number of similarities to mine. At the time, this comprised of a few major in points in common in their history, which struck me as an amusing coincidence that was No Big Deal if that was where the similarities ended, and so, I accepted the character. However, as time goes on, it has become apparent that these two are almost interchangable. Their history wasn't fully detailed in their app (fairly, nor was mine), and it appears they had almost the same early family drama, socio-class, relationship with their parents, motive for joining [organisation], career path, etc, that has been detailed in my posts and in my extended character material, as well as the same major defining life event, and a very similar track record after the start of the RP, as well as some degree of plot-line overlap, a large number of personality traits, world views, methodologies, in common, together with almost identical psychological issues stemming from said history in common. Trouble is, I'd already accepted this character based on what I knew at the time. They claim this is an old character that they're reusing, and it's clearly their favourite, and they have a lot of plot-lines and are very entrenched in the board with several taken want-ads, but, it's starting to make me very uncomfortable on my own site. Had I of known then what I know now, I would have asked for certain major revisions, unfortunately, alterations to the character is now highly difficult given the nature of their taken want ads and completed threads, and as their main, archiving the character will likely result in them and their friends leaving the site, but I'm still uncomfortable. Does anyone have some advice that may be useful? Anonymous poster hash: 05154...e84

We were chatting about this in discord and I thought it might be topic worthy. Do you invite guests into your discord? Why/why not? If you invite guests into discord, do you require that they join as a member within a certain time frame? Why/why not? What about members who become inactive? Do you clean them out? If you're a member, not a staffer, what are your preferences on the above?

Okay, I know that talks about quality, as well as boards calling themselves "advanced", don't get much sympathy, and I do understand why. My board is *not* labelled as advanced. I don't think much of word counts, I just ask that you write something your RP buddy can react to (so a short post where you do or say something meaningful is cool, while 1000 words of internal musing that your partner cannot perceive are not all that okay). As for writing itself, the only thing I demand quality-wise is that one doesn't use chatspeak and does their best to write intelligibly and with proper punctuation. I am not a native speaker, so I know I shouldn't be too harsh, since I surely make more mistakes than I can notice. However, there is still the fact that forum RP is a hobby focused on reading and writing, and there's a threshold after which a post is actually painful to read. It's still "intelligible", but it takes some effort - say, articles are either entirely ignored or used randomly, verbs, nouns and adjectives are used interchangeably, spelling isn't just occasionally wrong but a perpetual mess... It doesn't look like something one's likely to improve with experience, either - by playing you may expand your vocabulary and train your creativity, but odds are you won't learn basic grammar if you've managed to ignore it until 18+ (but most likely 30+). Not only it spoils the fun for me, but I suspect that people who actually love writing would be less likely to join. So I guess I should be more honest and say the board is "intermediate" or "literate" or add any sort of rule about writing quality. I hadn't done it at first because I assumed that, if either didn't care about writing at all, or you struggled terribly with it for any reason, you wouldn't be interested in joining a game where literally all that you do is reading and writing. I assumed that, and obviously I was wrong. The board is extremely new so adjustments are acceptable, I think. Well, I hope. However, even once established that, while you needen't be Shakespeare, you should not be such a poor writer to break immersion, how do you enforce that in a way that is somehow objective? Also, since some of the offenders are indeed native speakers, how bad is it if it's a foreigner that tells you that it's "courageous and deliberate" and not "courage and dillibirate"? Anonymous poster hash: 635bf...7ac

Recently, I came across a jcink site that basically ripped off all of my board concepts, some of them still keeping the names I named them, basically referenced our rules and board information (in the same order, but isn't copied word for word), and adjusted it to fit their site. Is there anything that can be done to report such a thing? I understand if it were copied word-for-word it'd be directly plagiarism, but since it's copying ideas and our basic structure of our information, can anything be done about that? Thanks! Anonymous poster hash: 0f5a7...0e1

It's always a sad day when you reach a point that you have to part with your site. There can be lots of reasons for it - you have creative differences, you're burnt out, major drama went down. etc. Whatever happened, you've decided to leave and let the home you've helped build from the ground up go on without you. You didn't shut down the site, you just walked away and left it in the hands of someone else. This is something I'm going through right now, and while I'm sad about it, I do wish everyone from the forum the best and hope their continued efforts are successful. So I'm wondering, how do you cope with letting go? After building a site from the ground up, putting countless hours of effort into a site, how do you move on without holding on to negative feelings? Do you have any tips? Any suggestions on how to keep your spirits up? Any clues to keep from being disheartened on future endeavors?

I know as a community we love things that are open and free, but stick with me here. Would you pay for a thorough, in-depth review of your site? I don't mean a few paragraphs on what looks good, what doesn't---I mean a fully developed report covering a wide variety of sections, including screenshots and actionable items that could improve the user experience, marketability, and function of your community. Three things I'd really like to focus on are: Advertising strategy (Suggestions on how/where to best market the site, the target audience, etc) Documentation analysis (up to 4 informational topics looked at in-depth, looking for tone/clarity/usefulness -- extra items by request) Action points (a summary of improvements that could be made, in a nice little list) Other sections might include: Navigation systems (and ease of use) Design features (colour, structure, images) Site performance (loading times, page size, etc) Cross-platform experience (mobile, tablet, different browsers) Community impressions (what the overall interactivity level appears to be, the general vibe as picked up from OOC areas) It's very much designed to give admins a solid base of advice, and perspective on their community -- plus some ways to move forward and continue building what they've got. I also want to help people really consolidate their vision of what their site is, and what it should be... most importantly, how to get there! And as usual, there will be space to look into any specific concerns/questions the admin has. Because it's such a detailed report, and I would intend to spend around 2-3 hours on each one, I don't feel it's something I can offer for nothing. I'm considering the following pricing structure: Full report as-is: $35 AUD (roughly $23 USD today) Additional documentation for analysis: $5 AUD for 2 (about $4 USD) In terms of time and effort, it's a ridiculously low price---but I understand that the RP community isn't exactly cashed up either. I want a price that is accessible, but also reflects the work that will go into the reports. Prices are in AUD as I need to know exactly what the income is on my end, to work out fun things like tax etc. The price does include 10% GST, so no additional sales taxes will be added on. Is this a fair price? Is this something you would pay for (if you had the money to do so)? Are there other sections that you think could/should be included?

My interest in my own site is drying up and I don't know what to do. Members are still very actively creating characters and plotting/posting but I am not excited about anything that is going on anymore. It takes me ages just to get to one reply. The guilt chews at me. I go between wanting to close the site and breaking from staffing positions for a while (take a break) to thinking "well, it's not harming me to let the members have fun." I could get my muse back and regret closing it, too, so I hesitate to jump to closing it. Does anybody else have any tips for how to get past this? Anonymous poster hash: f2d9e...c8b

I’m going anon here because I’m in need of some help! Ive been running a moderately busy site for around three months. I’m so excited with activity levels and quality of members. There’s four staff, only that many because myself and two friends did all the work setting it up, and another friend helped me write the plots. This is where the issues start. First, the moderator- let’s call her Amy- who helped me with plots does not do anything. Not claims like I asked, not event planning, and she doesn’t even post more than the bare minimum with major canon characters she’s created. A new person, let’s call her Tina, joined. Tina was active and brought a ton of friends. I was so excited! That’s how sites get popular and stay active, when groups of people come together! Somehow, while I was at work, Amy added Tina to the staff chat. For the sole purpose of talking shit about another member. I asked how this happened, nobody answered me. The next day, Tina was given admin powers. Everybody claims I was okay with this, and when I asked who made her an admin, nobody will answer me. Accessing admin logs, I know Amy did this. I decided that since everyone likes Tina, I’d roll with it. She’s super active and has some good ideas for plots. However, she’s still done nothing aside from plotting. I now have Amy, who does nothing, and Tina, who only plots and does nothing else. Recently, Tina has started trying to push members out of the site to give popular characters to her friends. I’ve firmly told her to stop, she asks me once a week. Tina and Amy have done nothing but talk plots in the main chat, ignoring all guest questions, and never ever post. They’re about to lose characters in an activity check. Tina has now started messaging my other two admins, who built the site with me, saying she’s worried I hate her. Every conversation we have, Tina snaps at me. She claims RP is a hobby, and that me writing long posts is a waste of time and holding plots back. She’s called me stupid in the chat for reading books after I said reading is what makes me a writer. I was willing to work with the situation rather than cause an issue. Now it feels as if she’s pushing me off of my own site, since my other two admins are telling me to “please talk to her” when I ask their advice on how to handle this as a team. I’m done. I won’t be pushed off a site I have put four months of work into. I created custom everything for this site, it’s definitely my baby. I’m tired of hearing “I’m not trying to be a jerk I’m just saying” from Tina every time I make a call as admin. I want to handle this calmly and rationally, as an adult, and cause the least amount of issues on the site. I do not want this to cause the site to die. I need advice and suggestions! I know I should have done things differently, but this is where I’m at now. Any advice is so appreciated. Anonymous poster hash: 1b190...de8

I have incorporated "Discord Challenges" to earn points and to give people things to do. It's random trivia, questions about the site and it's members/characters, ect. We also play the online version of Cards Against Humanity together, winner earns points. I have seen a Bingo card in play before; where you do something like "replied to open thread" and you fill in one of your squares. I am always trying to come up with new ways to entertain the members and be interactive. Does anyone else have anything that they do like this? I'm new to owning a game but like to keep something interactive going. ^.^

I'm looking for some help. The site I manage seems to have an unspoken rule on our site that is basically "Use the gender & pronouns of the faceclaim". I say this is unspoken because we have had no official rules on the matter, but the players complain if a new member joins and the gender pronouns don't match what the actor/model has requested to be used for them IRL. Someone recently joined that used a MtF (Male to Female) transitioned model as a gender-fluid character. All of the imagery they use is from the time while the model was still identifying as male. I found evidence after some research that the model previously went on record as preferring male pronouns, then some interviews that were more recent that they transcended gender, but since they have transitioned fully to female and currently use she/her pronouns. The player is staying true to their character concept of gender fluidity and has swapped the use of their pronouns as how the character feels, therefore they use both he/him & she/her depending on the character's gender in the moment. I've received complaints about the character and nobody wants to play with the new player because of THE UNSPOKEN RULE being broken and them not staying true to the faceclaim's identity. After a week of deliberation, I spoke to the player about it asking their intent and if they were willing to use a different faceclaim. The player is unwilling to use another faceclaim, despite my suggestions at us finding a genderfluid model or actor (even though I researched for hours to find many, and to find interviews to confirm their genders) and they want the character archived. Although this particular instance has ended (in an unsatisfactory manner let me tell you I really liked the character concept and wanted to see more genders represented on the site) I feel like this problem will only continue. I am happy to confront my complaining players about their weirdness on this issue - because I know for a fact they are all more than happy to change their faceclaim's sexuality, so it feels a bit, idk hypocritical to get all over a new player for their alteration of a faceclaim's pronouns even if that faceclaim is trans? What do you think? Do any of you have restrictions on faceclaim use particularly if the writer is changing the face-claim's biological sex, sexuality, gender identity? How do you handle unspoken community rules that affect new players? Anonymous poster hash: e3cb9...e84

Has anyone else ever had to deal with friends joining your board and wanting special perks? I'm dealing with this currently, they broke a rather big character rule on the board and I, like any admin, reached out and told them it wasn't allowed. If I'd allowed this rule to be broken it would open up a can of worms and I don't need that stress. So now they are being passive aggressive towards me in rp and real life. I don't feel like I did anything wrong, I addressed them like I would any other member on the board. I don't think giving perks to friends is a good way to run a board and really it has a major potential to blow up in your face. The rules we've set aren't hard but they should be followed by everyone, including staff but for some reason, this isn't clicking with them. Them acting like this though is really annoying me to the point that I don't want to interact with them unless I have to as a staffer. Friend wise, the passive aggressiveness has to go. I can't allow them to do something and tell the next person no. Anonymous poster hash: 03cea...f8f

We've all got rules for our rp - no godmodding, post requirements and character limits (or lack thereof), activity rules, etc. But, aside from the general "be nice to each other, treat others how you want to be treated" stuff, do you have any code of conduct rules for ooc chat and the community at large? Do you have any rules to foster a good environment for your players to hang out in while they're not writing replies? These could be Discord rules, c-box rules, or just some general chat rules. Do you even need them? If you don't, why not? Is there a point where you would consider making some?

Not sure how to-uh-explain this without... going into specifics? I will try to make parallels as best as I can so I'm saying real specifics. We have... a couple members who are threading together and... are disregarding 99% of the site lore in threads, but have looked enough to know the locations in our site. So, hm... Let's say we're a mafia RPG. A certain area has a lot of attractions that were once pedestrian but are now headquarters of the mafia. Let's say there's a mall that had been abandoned and taken over by the mafia. As a result, unaffiliated persons would... not be welcomed according to lore. What these players are doing is... writing about their characters going to the mall, having a good time, it's just a happy hunkydory... outing, with elements that shouldn't be there because of the nature of the setting. So, like, they're going to different "functioning" stores, basically... I'm not really sure how to approach this. I'm almost inclined to leave them be because they're not threading or talking to one else, and it would feel awful for one's threads to basically... not count? On the other hand, there's also the fact that guests can see and read these inaccurate threads and get the wrong idea. How... should I approach this, especially when they're mid-thread? "*NOT saying specifics." My RPG isn't like this it's just the best parallel I could come up with Anonymous poster hash: 2ff39...d61

My site has been open around two months now. We're small, but our core member base has been amazing and active. We're a marvel based site, set right before Infinity War, and recently I've had a horrible time with members. Since the hype for Infinity War started right before its release, I've had an influx of people coming through my site, which normally would be great, except all of these people are causing problems. In the past two weeks I have had to ban two members for copy pasting applications straight from wikipedia, another member for being belligerent in the discord, and another member who joined, demanded that I share skin codes with them - demanded that I link them to everything on the site - and then posted an application that was again copy pasted from wikipedia. They promptly cussed me out when the application was denied. I have been running sites for years and years now, seriously for the past four years, and have done mod work before that. I have NEVER had so many issues with this, with members who have no regard for how a role play works, refuse to even read the rules, and seem to be just around to stir the pot! I have changed our site rules to make sure that things are clearly spelled out, but this still seems to happen once a week! Has anybody else experienced this lately? Is it just new fans coming into the marvel genre with infinity war hype? Are trolls out to get us? How do you handle belligerent potential members?

Every now and then, I will come across normal small-to-moderate sized RP sites (not counting resources) that have 4, 5, 6, even 7-9+ staff members whether it's a just-starting-out forum or a seasoned forum. From my experience, having a lot of staff like that isn't actually beneficial. So far, I'm finding having only two staff members (myself and my mod) a lot easier to work with, and faster in every way. Perhaps this is just the teams I've worked with, I can't say? If my site gets much bigger, I might consider taking on a third but I don't think having much more would be all that necessary? So, my question is: why do you have a lot of staff members? What inspired you to have 5-9 staff? Do you find it beneficial in any way? What are the cons to having a lot of staff?

I'm starting to notice a trend that I really like. Back when I first got going as an admin, the forum software you chose was... very important. Members who liked Proboards would not join an Invisionfree board, and vice versa. There was (and can still be found) a strong reluctance to "learn" new software. Even though, as a member, basic forum functions are essentially the same---no matter what software you use. Register an account, create new topics, create replies... all that really changes is where a few things are placed, I never really understood the aversion people had to new/less common software types. Boards that were on phpBB or SMF were a hard sell, and the same with my beloved IPS. Now as I'm doing ad rounds, I'm finding a lot more self-hosted sites, and those on softwares other than Jcink and PB. I'm finding SMF sites that are incredibly successful, myBB is taking off, and even admins migrating over to IPS for the epic features (I have a whole guide dedicated to that alone). Do you guys find that self-hosting is becoming less feared, and more welcomed? Those of you who do self host, what steps have you had to take to ensure members feel comfortable coming onto your "foreign" software?

We have a member on our site that just... clogs the general chat room with stories of themselves all the time. And you can't escape this person. You go into the plotting channel to plot with another member, they pop in there, suggesting things, immersing themselves into a conversation that has nothing to do with them; someone asks a question in the help channel? They're in there, sometimes genuinely helping/answering questions, but other times, not contributing anything helpful (we've asked them two times now to not chat there if they're not going to answer questions); You come on the general chat after a long day from work just to talk with your friends? They'll be there. And they'll tell you a long-winded story about what they're doing at that specific moment or what they accomplished that day. Anything you say, they'll change the conversation to be about themselves. It's possible to talk around them (by ignoring whatever they say, and just continuing the convo between the lines), but it's annoying. And as a staff, we want to encourage others to chat in our general chat channel, not be deterred by someone who's constantly gotta have the conversation revolving around themselves. And we want them to be involved in the chat, too, but the way they do it is just... killing everyone else's willingness to hang out there with us. We want them to contribute to the chat, but we want them to acknowledge what's happening to other people or other's stories. Sometimes people just need to vent, and that's fine. Acknowledge them, don't ignore what they're saying only to contribute something that turns the conversation to be all about yourself. The only break we get from this person is when they're asleep, it seems. Otherwise, they are always around, hanging out in the chat. The other staff and I are not really sure how to handle this situation. We don't know if a warning is the proper thing to do, but if it is, what should we say to this person without sounding like petty jerks? What points should we avoid, but which should we drive home? What should this member's punishment be, if there should be a punishment at all? No one talks in our General Chat Channel anymore except for us and them and a few other members that can deal with talking around this person, and we want to change that asap. As always, thank you RPG Initiative community. You guys are always so helpful ❤️ Anonymous poster hash: 9628e...c8c

Hey guys, I was wondering if anyone had any thoughts on how their admin style has changed over the years? What would you like to get back to? What would you like to avoid from the past?