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I'm sure we've all encountered them. Those people that do nothing but talk about how they need to post, but never actually doing so. Needless to say, it gets old. Especially if it becomes a daily or hourly thing. "I need to post..." And then nothing. An hour later: "I need to do posts..." "I should write." "I should work on posts." "I should get tags done." "I need to do replies." Over and over and over again. Without any posts getting done. Just the repeated "complaints." How do you handle it? Do you get after them, do you ignore it? What is the limit? When do you break? What do you say when you do finally snap? Do you ban them? Ban the words? Filter it so you don't have to hear it anymore? Just ignore it and hope it goes away? Of course, there's nothing wrong with them doing this. If they want to waste their own time, that's on them. It's the fact that it's annoying as hell that generally gets to people.

You know how it goes -- new member starts looking at the site and gets extremely excited at the possibilities and what your board allows. Next minute, you realise that there are very few characters that are "average". You have a population that is littered with interesting half-breeds and "special" abilities.... but where did all the humans go? How do you solve that without placing heavy restrictions on new characters? So far I have: Introduced a "what we need/don't need" topic to guide people to fill gaps When new people come on board we do guide them (in chat) toward things like half-blood wizards, etc And we plan to: Adjust the species information so that the postives and negatives (with excellent potential for plotting) are more equally balanced Now -- I don't want to move to a points/shop system. I don't want to put down restrictions beyond "we don't need more of these". And I'm at a loss as to how I can incentivise creating halfblood human wizards. So what other options/ideas are out there?

Food for thought. I've tried running roleplays both ways, where I have a character, and where I don't. Pros of having a character with the rest of the players: I'm down in the dirt with them, so to speak. We're playing through this shit together. I'm just like one of them! Probably less intimidating for new players (aka people who don't know me yet) Cons of having a character with the rest of the players: Well that's just another profile sheet to fill out, ugh. I am not the main character, and yet, players' characters will follow mine like lost lil ducklings Players think I know what I'm doing in-character, just because I know everything out of character. Pros of not having a character: I AM FREE FROM THE TYRANNY OF MY OWN PROFILE SHEETS I enjoy observing the beads of sweat as my players over-analyze every single comment I make while trying to figure out what their characters should do. I can play the monster of the week without ending up in a weird situation where I'm writing my character versus my character. Cons of not having a character: I no longer get alerts for the thread because I stopped checking because I wasn't needed and now everything is stalled and I'm oblivious. Thumb-twiddling. So much thumb-twiddling. I have no idea how excruciating my profile sheet is because I haven't filled it out for myself. Now, in your experiences, what works better? What do you prefer?

What are the little things we tend to forget about when it comes to staff duties? And what are some of the little things that you found were really important to members, staff and the site? I'm trying to make a comprehensive list and make sure we are hitting everything important, but I feel like I miss some of the little stuff sometimes and don't want to overlook anything. Do you have a designated person for each duty? Or is staff expected to be proactive? And what has worked the best for you in the past/currently? Any and all suggestions would be great! Thanks! <3 BAMF

This probably seems like more of an issue to me now because I've been super busy on the admin side of things since September. We had our anniversary even in Sept. that I planned and ran for the entire month, then I had Halloween, and for some reason, I thought it was a great idea to run a mini event in November too. Then in December, we decided to commission a skin and since we were changing the skin we thought it was a good time to get all the changes that we wanted to make all in one go so all of December I was busy doing that along with one of our mods. We just got our new skin two days ago and it's amazing and I love it and now I feel like everything is done. However, I constantly find other things that don't necessarily *need* to be done, but I want to get done. And once I think of it I'm compelled to do it to "get it out of the way." and A lot of times this comes before posting. I'm not inactive, not by any means, but I feel like I get distracted too easily by staff things that can wait instead of posting (even though I really want to post). So how do you guys balance staff jobs/obligations and posting?

OK, so, I could use some advise. I have an admin in the community I help run that has become a speed bump. About a year ago, she started going through some things in her life, and stopped really contributing as a staff member or a player. She said she needed time but a few months ago said she was ready to come back full force. But in those few months there has been no change. She does not give feedback on application reviews until she has been pressed, sometime for days, to give an opinion, and when she does she give one or two word replies. She barely posts for her characters, and plays several important canons that are honestly holding up plot for almost everyone. She hasn't performed any of her staff duties since her return. We are lucky if she logs on once every few days. Now, she is a friend in real life, and I know what she is going through is hard. I feel like if I approach her, she will fall off the tightrope she has been walking. But several players are starting to complain... what should I do? Any advise out there?

Hey Initiative Fam! I'm looking for ways to do something nice for my members. I once changed an image on the main site page to rotate with an image of at least one picture of the member's character. And they loved it. I've heard of people doing music videoes and other things, but wondering if any of you have any ideas? I'm not sure I could pull off a music video :). Thanks!

For my next site, I was thinking to give shipper apps a try. Because traditional app + plotter sounds redundant, and while I love profile apps, I'd like to have a "first post to approve before sorting" (part of my battle against the spam flood -.-). Also it's cool to try different things. However, admittedly I don't have much experience with then, so I'm asking you, do you think they must have any special requirement, besides "this is my character, please plot with me"? Are they supposed to be short, to have friends and enemies, anything specific? TBH I don't like the "friends and enemies" thing, and I wouldn't enforce a length or a limit, what I want is just to keep all character information organized in one thread... Sounds right to you?

So, I've been thinking a lot about role play samples. On TNI, we really don't do anything with them, aside from having them there. I guess it can be useful to see that the person knows what they're getting into and perhaps getting a feeling for how they write, but I have never used it like that. So, questions: Do you use RP samples? What for? Do you like or dislike joining sites that have RP samples on their app? What requirements do you put on RP samples? What requirements make you roll your eyes? On a site where the characters are animals (cats, wolves, horses, ect), should samples be required to be of that animal, or are human samples okay? On a human RP, would you accept a wolf rp sample? EDIT: I think I've heard plenty of the "against" side, and would love to hear more from people who do use them, if there's anyone else who would like to give input.

I had this topic one up recently and thought it’d be a good discussion! When are design changes good to keep things fresh and new, and when are they messing with the consistency of the site? For example, do you like the banner or main graphics to stay the same or do you like a new one every month? How do you cope with skin or layout changes? Are there things that are too big a change and negatively impact your experience? I know if I had to find a whole new way around a site it would be a pain. As a member should you be on notice of changes and if so how long? How big does a change have to be to give notice?

Alright, so I have no idea how to put this lightly, so I’ll be frank. I’m looking for feedback on how to handle this, not plan reactions with no real insight please. Unfortunately my staff has to deal with a situation where one of our members who is around 23-24 is dating a minor who is 17. While this is typically something I wouldn’t care too much about, it’s the fact that the elder party has admitted to writing explicit material with the minor. To boot, the minor is also on our site. While this activity hasn’t been found on our site, it’s the fact that they have done it that is worrying. We run a 17+ site that does allow explicit material, but it is heavily regulated so minors cannot partake or even see it. Considering this member has decided to do this elsewhere, it’s a bit concerning on a site where it is possible to have a minor, even if they are a year off from the legal age. So this begs the question of what should be done? Since this isn’t found on our site, should we even do anything? My staff believes that this is illegal due to it being an online relationship so the Age of Consent rules that are typically by state do not apply. It become the standard 18+ because we have software platforms like Jcink that regulate people who can even visit the front page if they’re a minor. So our assumption is that this is illegal. I’m in the personal mindset to ban the older party, if not both, because I see it more as a liability for members who may be a minor to have what we believe is a predatory behavior. Any feedback is appreciated!

Branching off of the site plot vs sandpit discussion because I think Achera brought up a decent point. I've found the same thing, it's why I have a zillion characters on these kinds of sites because otherwise I get bored. I had thought that maybe you want to limit how many people are involved in any one subplot (with the idea that the subplot forwards the main plot in some way) but to make sure that everyone gets an equal chance of being involved, you have several subplots going at once. I can imagine that running into the same issues however, not to mention it sounds like a lot of admin handholding to me. So how do you manage your site plot? Do you have any tactics to ensure the site plot moves forward at a steady pace or do you just accept that it'll move forward very slowly? (Maybe that's your preference!) How about getting people involved? Do you struggle with it? Do you have any tactics to make sure people get involved or can get involved?

- or - Let's not do the time warp again.... How do you manage time in your RPG? This has been an ongoing bear for me. I do not do well on sites that have multiple timelines running simultaneously. I confess to being a linear thinker and having a marked preference for telling my character(s)' stories in chronological order. But this can become a boggle too as people wait for an event to conclude so they can write the next segment. At one site, we're moving things forward in monthly clumps. For example, we send out a notice that writing in early July should be concluding and we're starting Mid-July events. The goal is to continue with telling the stories in a linear chronological fashion but also give everyone the option to keep their characters active while events play out. In my experience, there is not a perfect way to manage in-game time flow. I would love to hear back from people about how they go about managing this. I'm always looking for better solutions to make writing and participation in the stories better for my players. Thanks! ~ Stormwolfe

I love writing threads set before the current forum time frame that the forum has ever been set in. Typically, I've always just posted them in the usual forums with a year in the thread title or the description. In the forum I'm building, I've installed tags so that past threads can be tagged and thus, easily found. But I'm curious, do people prefer another way of doing this? Is it preferred for past threads to be in a separate thread? Thread prefixes? Tags? Apathy? I genuinely do not have a preference in any direction, so I'm curious about what other people think.

This is something that I've discussed with my co-admin a few times over years, site plots vs sandbox. Our last board we had a huge site plot going on and people seemed to really like it and it was a lot of fun threading out though I'll admit it was a bit stressful at times. This time though, on our second board, we've decided to try out being a sandbox with a very light plotline just so people understand our setting and it's been a success as well. I wonder...are you more likely to join a site with a big plot or sandbox? Which does your board have?

To what extent do you support administrators making a site to their comfort levels when it means introducing unusual or "silly" rules? Many years ago, there used to be an X-Men site that forbid pretty much everything. I'm not joking. Swearing, violence, discussions of supernatural (including ghosts), characters who have sex out of wedlock, pretty much any sex at all actually, gay or homosexual characters, etc. This site got a lot of flack for it. For years any time a "ridiculous rule" thread came up on a resource or chat site, you could guarantee that this site's absurd rules would be quoted at least once. And then somebody pointed it out: why did it matter to the rest of us? The admin of the X-Men site was a Jehovah's Witnesses, and all the things that were banned were done so because they were against her religion. If she didn't have that site to play on, where would she play? And at least she wasn't coming onto other people's sites demanding us to cater to her preferences. This was very true, and I'm grateful somebody pointed it out to me. A little while ago in another thread here on the Initiative, I saw that people came across a site with the "no male players" rule, and I distinctly remember this being a matter of discussion on another site where people found the rule ridiculous, and others jumped into defend the rule because the admin had set up a "safe space" for herself and her members. Now these two examples (Jehovah's Witnesses vs. all-female safe space) occurred years apart and the RP community as a whole changed so much that to compare the reactions people had between them would be like comparing apples to oranges. But it did make me think about what is considered acceptable and what is considered ridiculous. Personally, I don't think that administrators should outright exclude people, though setting limits and expectations is perfectly acceptable, even if I don't agree with them. There's a difference between saying "We don't want to see these behaviors" and "We don't want to see the people who stereotypically may exhibit these behaviors even though we have no proof that any individual person of this stereotyped group has or will exhibit these behaviors." Prohibiting behaviors is understandable. Prohibiting innocent people is ridiculous. Besides, aside from checking IDs, how do you keep people of one gender away from a site? And would you allow biological men who identify as women to join, or are they "too manly" to be a part of the site? Too many technicalities and inefficiencies with those sorts of rules. But I digress. Is it okay to exclude certain types of people to make the staff and desired member base comfortable? (I think it's obvious, but I'll note here that said excluded people are innocent in the sense that they did nothing to deserve an otherwise reasonable ban, such as cheating or bullying.) To what extent is this okay?

Weird title but allow me to explain... There are some things that should go without saying. But they get rehashed over and over again because people either think they are still important or that they are, somehow, a selling point when they should be something present regardless... For example: Any site advertising themselves as LGBT friendly. Shouldn't that go without saying? (OOC, of course. IC is another matter.) Along these lines, any mention of not having cliques. You can't guarantee that and that shouldn't be the selling point of your board, that should just be how it is.

Branch off of this thread: How do you dictate whom a character belongs to if they've been created for a wanted ad? How do you handle someone that has taken a wanted leaving the site? What are your individual rules regarding wanteds? Is there anything specific you've found smooths the process out or has proven worthless?

I was just wondering how you all do wanted ads on your site. What's in the template you use (if you use one)? Do they help your site in any way at all, like do new members join and take wanted ads as opposed to creating their own charries, are people more active because they get their wanted ads picked up? We have a very basic thread for wanted ads, and it's basically just a list and nothing seems to get taken and I think that how they're presented has something to do with it.

What is the best way you've found to advertise? Which ones actually seem to work and what do you think is a waste of time? Personally, I think the biggest waste of time is advertising on other RP sites in their link backs or anything like that. I think that's because I just assume since I never checked out any of the sites that posted in the advertising board on sites I was just a member on I assume most other people don't look at it either.

Checks...ugh I dread them like no tomorrow and honestly if I could get away with not having them I would. Unfortunately, I have a few claims that have to be kept up with. The most important of them being canons since they are very popular but sadly sometimes they are taken and abandoned. With the player coming back on after an AC email has gone out then disappearing until the next one. So I'm weighing the option of leaving a traditional check to a passive one to help with this issue and I'm in need of some guidance from boards that run passive activity checks and how you do them. I'm under the impression that you don't announce checks? Due to people coming on just to pass and poof after. Are they better/easier? How often do you run them?

So there was just a thread about word counts (again lol) and I'd be lying if I weren't doubting having a word count. Here's the thing: I've always been on sites with word counts and the site my co-admin and I (along with our other two original admins) were on before this site shut down had a word count as well. However, I really hate this idea that people might think that because we have a word count we think that quantity = quality and that isn't the case at all. We also seriously don't enforce our word count rules when there aren't any other issues. We've had members in the past who consistently didn't meet the word count in threads (many of them with me) and I never said anything about and neither did any other members because no one ever had an issue responding to the posts. They weren't throw away posts that didn't offer any information or move the thread forward; they were good posts so there wasn't an issue. But then we get into the territory of being wishy-washy with rules and not being firm about them... But also, removing the word count seems like a bad idea because our members aren't used to responding to one liners, even the threads in our rapid-fire boards are usually 100+ words unless they're texting threads or something. And again I run into the rule-writing no-no of "We don't have a word count, but...." I don't even really know what I'm asking here, but I just hate the idea that people who don't like word counts think I, or the staff, believe their writing isn't good because they don't write long posts, which isn't the case at all.

So there have been a couple different threads here about deal breaker rules and rules in general and every single time it send me running to our site rules to make sure we're not coming off at strict or horrible or... you know, just bad. Lol Our site has been open for a little over a year and I feel like over that time we've added to our rules when we come across certain situations on the site or problem members. Like when we first started I didn't think we needed a rule about not sending unsolicited, inappropriate pictures of yourself to other members.... Welp, in the first two months of opening we had a member join and we found out that he had been sending close to nude pictures of himself to a member that repeatedly told him to stop. So rule added. Then we have an issue with another member not understanding that if their character goes on a murder spree in Times Square they might be shot and killed by the cops. Okay, rule about accepting IC consequences added. People putting up WIP apps *just* to save a face claim and never working on the app so it sits there for months, rule added. Members signing up for events where they know their character may be injured but then getting mad and all fighty at the staff for giving out injuries to characters, rule added. I've cut back on a lot of them and every one I mentioned today was because of some extreme circumstance that we didn't want to happen again. We felt that if it wasn't explicitly covered in our rules that we somehow aren't justified in reprimanding a member even though we assumed that rules we added should fall under the common sense umbrella. So I guess what I'm asking is how do you feel about rules that were added because of problem members or bad situations and how do you cut down on your rules so you don't seem like the staff is super controlling?

So there's a situation my co admin and I are going to have to deal with tonight but I wanted to post something to just to gauge how others would handle a situation. Background on this: I've had to talk to this member 3 times this week, once for being dismissive and direspectful to a staff member that started as something with our site vs. book lore our site is inspired by, the second time was for multiple concerns over them having an OP character and for pushing book lore as site fact to other members which caused more than one to come to me about how this person was making them feel stupid for having not read books even though the member that came to me has been on the site for almost a year. This last time started when a member said something as an odd handed comment about how their character didn't trust this other member's character and might try to attack them. The member responded in a rude and demanding way. This has spiraled a bit since yesterday and the member has told the other one that their character CANNOT try and attack their character because they don't want it to happen, even though the post would be open for the other character to dodge the attack. They said they would ignore the post and continue on as if nothing happened. After that convo between the two members the member came to me and told me all the things that definitely *would* happen to the character who attacked theirs which included responses from other player characters. It really seems like power playing to me and the refusal to accept any IC consequences (though I will point out that at no point did the first member say anything about causing definite injuries to their character) and really just doesn't seem to mesh well with the community because they just seem to be alienating people by coming off as superior for having read the books and basically just rude.... So this is just a question about whether or not you guys have dealt with things like this and how you would handle this. In the entirety our site has been open I've never had to talk to the same member this many times in such a short space of time over either new issues or continued issues they've already been talked to about. Honestly, the situation is just stressful and annoying because it doesn't seem to be ending and it's been making it hard for me to get any muse or motivation to post on my own site. Also, I'm sorry if this was hard to follow, I just don't want to use any names or anything. Anonymous poster hash: b387c...0df

How do you feel about suggested playbys? Do you like them or dislike them? Do they help to provide a possible face? I'm going to be putting up wanted ads soon I wanted other people's thoughts on it.