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This is something I've noticed in the short time I've been running my board, and I've recently seen it on other boards I've looked at, where a 'guest' comes to a site, and posts rude stuff in the c-box, usually an argument over an ad you've placed somewhere. They don't bother leaving any contact details, don't bother telling you which forum they are from (or if they do, they don't bother making it easy by linking their site - I wouldn't mind that, to be honest, because although it may look like they're advertising, they aren't, they'd just be telling you that there's a problem.) They usually try to be anon by calling themselves 'guest' or something, and proceed to tell admins how to run their site. I've also had guests who show an interest in the board, ask tons of questions which would be answered if they read through the information you've already posted, and tell you they don't like a certain rule, or concept you have on your site by claiming it's unfair or something along those lines. I was wondering how you deal with stuff like this because it seems to me that they like trying to get under the skins of admins to cause a fight. I'm not going to get upset with someone because they missed a rule, or haven't read something yet because I understand that sometimes people can be over enthusiastic when they come across a new site, but what is annoying is the attempt at being anonymous or telling the admins how they should run their site. Usually, I've just deleted such messages because they don't look nice to people when they first come to your board.

So, what methods do you guys use for avoiding the dreaded burn out if you're solo administrating on your site. I've set it up so that in a notes area on the site I have different days I do different jobs, so I'm not just posting roleplay threads all the time.

This is mainly a question for those people who run fandom boards. When I set my board up, I assumed that people who are interested in joining would already be familiar with much of the history, storyline, characters, the setting, etc, but I have been told that I should add some lore to the site. I was just wondering what you think is essential to include when writing bits of lore, what would be too much information (I don't need to recreate all the information found on Tolkien Gateway or the LOTR wiki! I don't have the time, nor the inclination to do that.) I just need the minimum and to be able to point people in the right direction if they wanted to know more details of something that isn't commonly known, etc. And also, when making canon wanted ads and lists, what information should be included there? This is mainly to spark people's interest in taking the character up, but again, I don't want to create a "Guide to characters" level of information, just the basics for the character.

S.H.I.E.L.D is primarily 3rd person, however for setting scenes on mission start posts, especially when its city sequences which are working undercover I'm finding I'm using 'You' more. Would you find this break from third person jarring or would you say it would add to immersion? As an example

Fellow admins- how do you feel about voice chatting with your communities? Is this something you feel is important? Do you want to have a community where you all can call each other and have a chat? Why or why not? If this does not matter to you, why does it not matter to you? Personally, I do enjoy being able to voice chat with my members. I don't expect it of them and wouldn't ever force them into it, but it does feel a little more personal and close when you can talk with a person and hear their voice. There have been certain RP partners that I would call and talk with alone, but recently it has been more in group calls when we played games or something together. In fact, most of the time when we have a group call it is because we were playing a game- and in that case, having a call going on made it much easier for us to communicate with each other than it did to use text chat.

so I'm contemplating posting up daily weather reports on SHIELD - something a bit joking, and I can't decide the best place to put the actual board. I'm going for a board because that way people can reference the dates and stuff through tags etc and it gives a more permanent reference then if I was posting it in a side area. Any advice though? Should it go in SHIELD Mainframe - Tutorial Loaded (where I have my rules and plot stuff etc) or in the SHIELD Mainframe - Present ID (aka Character stuff)

How do you build a community on your forum? And by that, I don't mean how do you go about obtaining members- but what do you do with your members to create an identity that is unique to the forum? What do you do to make your forum the forum that it is? This is something I'm extremely passionate about and have felt for a while that some RPs struggle with. I know it's pretty normal to have event sign ups and things like that, but from what I have seen they tend to require either a lot of time or for the member to have some sort of skill, such as coding or graphics abilities. For people who don't have a lot of time to do things ICly at the time of the event or can't code or make graphics, they can easily be left out. So, I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out a way to help build community that doesn't involve that kind of thing, and have recently started up an experiment of sorts. What I've done on my forums is create three kinds of events: forum holidays, community events, and weekend quests. Forum holidays happen once a month and are just days where we have a silly theme, such as Talk Like a Pirate Day or Impersonate a Movie Character. Community Events are events where we all try to gather around and do something together, such as watching a movie or playing Cards Against Humanity. Weekend Quests are basically like silly scavenger hunts, where members are given a set of tasks to complete and if they've done that they get a little reward. The tasks are always things to encourage OOC activity and for people to interact with each other (like posting in plotters, putting up wanted ads, using the comment system, etc.), or are goofy things like "find 4 gifs of squirrels." Participation in these is always optional. Generally, I'm satisfied with the results of this experiment. Although most members do not participate in every kind of event, almost every member will participate in at least one type of event. So some members never do a weekend quest, but they will always do the forum holiday for example. We also have a Minecraft server that we play on together sometimes. But! What do you guys do?

When it comes to forms of communication on your forums, how do you prefer to do it? What do you make the most use of? On my forums, we always have a cbox.ws cbox, but it does not get used as often as I feel other sites use their cboxes. The majority of our communication gets done on Skype, mostly because a lot of us are out and about much during the day and it's easier for us to chat with each other that way.

I recently had an issue that I thought I'd ask people's opinions on. Long story short, it is one member pretending to be multiple people. It started out by two people joining and telling me they had the same IP because they lived together. Fair enough, don't mind. Then a third joined, using the same IP ranges as them (must be dynamic because all their IPs change daily, but there are more than one that multiple combinations of the group has used, same ISP and country, all that stuff). Then there was a fourth, who introduced themselves by taking up a wanted ad from one of the others. This person was apparently from a different country entirely, was a stranger to them (they responded to their introduction thread greeting them and stuff), but the IPs were the same yet again. Not only that, but posting style and grammar is exactly the same for all four of them. All figure stuff out at the same time. One of them might PM me saying they had discussed various things with the others and what not. Now don't get me wrong. None of the above would really be an issue, except for the following problems. Between these 'four' people there are over ten characters made in less than a week, all from the same family, all fairly important, and they blatantly ignore other member posts, forming a closed off little clique. I have raised these issues with them and they are receptive toward them. However, I'm still pondering whether to call them out on their sock puppet accounts. So I ask you guys for your wisdom. My question: In your guys' experience, what do you do regarding the whole pretending to be other people thing? To call out or not to call out? And how to go about it if yes?

If you had the chance to talk to your younger self, when you first started staffing, what advice do you think you'd dish out? I would probably tell my younger self that not everything has to be perfect, that mistakes are bound to happen and not anything to get twisted up about. What about everyone else?

(First of all, if I put this in the wrong area I'm sorry.) Recently I have been debating whether I should move to Jcink. I am currently using ProBoards, and I LOVE ProBoards. I find it very easy to use and easy to navigate. I have always loved it, however, they are updating soon, and from what I've heard this update is going to change a lot. So I've been panicking on what I should do if I don't like the update. My brain's solution: Jcink. I've never been a big fan of Jcink, but I've heard a lot of good things, so I assume it must be alright. I have been messing around with a test site recently and have found everything to be to my liking. The other staff members on my site are fans of Jcink and have some experience with it, so they could definitely help me figure things out. The more I research about it, the more things I like. The idea of being able to have a rating higher than 2 1 1 would be amazing! Also the ease of switching between accounts. So all in all, it sounds great. The problem is, on the site I currently have, we have over 5,000 posts and 150 accounts registered. I hate the idea of uprooting so many people and having to recreate everything over on Jcink, but in the long run it might be worth it. So I'm looking for an opinion. Is it worth it to switch to Jcink if we have to move everyone and lose what we currently have? Thanks in advance for taking the time to read through my panicking.

So something that I'm doing for a site that I'm on is creating an event. It's something that I will need to find a theme and preferably images to help the visually stimulated people that are a part but I'm curious, how is it that you go about, personally, finding this sort of thing? The example, in context, is I'm about to run a ball, it's a modern day ball and I need to find images of a banquet hall, preferably with decorations etc. But I have no idea where to start? Any suggestions?

Continuing on my tirade of questions to get an understanding of newer site standards/wants/hates etc. How do people feel about stats. Now I know that most staff members have to manually update things and that can get tedious but I'm just talking in general. How do people feel about a site having them? Things like: How many characters of race/class? Gender Ratios? Players vs Characters? If you like them, do you prefer they are in a graph or pie chart? What sort of statistics do you like to see? If you don't like them, do you care if they exist? Would this be a deal breaker?

Hello everyone! I'm here hoping for your opinions on how to handle claims of one of your members using plagiarized characters for your site. I've never run into this particular problem before, and I think that's because for the most part, we all consider RP characters to be pretty personal. We put our time and effort into them, and as such we respect that others have done the same for THEIR characters. I know that for me, personally, the idea of stealing someone else's character never occurred to me to do, and I'm sure it's the same for a lot of people. Anyway! Last night, a guest popped up into our CBox and made a claim that one of our members had stolen her character from another site. The guest did not back up or substantiate their claim, and when we inquired about it, the member in question was adamant that the character had always been HERS, and that SHE was the victim, not the other way around. Personally, I know that plagiarism is a serious accusation. But I have also been accused of art theft on images that I myself drew from scratch (and spent hours on, no less!) and posted. People would see the image posted in two or more locations, and assumed that one of those was a thief. Taking that into consideration, I took to Google and searched for traces of this character on other sites. I tried copy/pasting the app text into the search, including the most commonly used strings of text. I visited the link the Guest had provided in the CBox to check for a copyright date, a "posted on" date, or similar, but found nothing except that it was last updated in June of this year. The earliest iteration of this character I could find was December 2015, using the same RL name as the person on my site, even though the OOC tag she's using differs from that. Someone suggested checking IP addresses, but as I personally know, that can change for a number of reasons, including switching from mobile access to PC, from PC to laptop, from home network to work or school, and so on. It can occur with a change in internet service provider, or sometimes even by moving houses, AND if you have a dynamic IP address, it can change from day to day. So checking IP isn't the best way to go about that, unfortunately. So, given all that I've listed above, how would you admin handle a situation like this one on your forum? I'd like to avoid placing blame or pointing fingers. At this point I have asked the member for evidence that this character is hers, such as logging into existing apps and making a note which contains our site name so that we know they are indeed hers. I've also made it clear that while we value her as a member, we cannot condone plagiarism and she may need to re-write the app from scratch as opposed to copy/pasting it directly from another site. Thanks in advance for your input!

Since I'm building a site (have been for a while) it always brings up the standard development questions, in this case it is whether or not I should put a sidebar on the site. While I know you can put all sorts of site information it always feels like it over clutters everything. I will warn I'm not someone that likes information in the banner so that's a no go. As an alternative I was thinking something on the main page of a carousel that auto scrolls, probably something that regular members can turn off if they want. It would be under the banner area but above the content. Thoughts opinions?

For me, I'm drawing on a lot of inspiration for my (still a) work in progress Sci-Fi site. Now there are a lot of things that I'm drawing the inspiration from and will suggest people watch/read to really get a feel for the setting but the overall setting is one hundred percent my design. I know it's not a pan-fandom as the fandom's themselves aren't included nor is their canon information or characters. So for me I'm pretty confident that this would be considered my unique idea but it brought to me the question: Where does Panfandom end and Unique story begin? For me it's when you don't actually use the information from any given fandom and draw/give inspiration from it. That's where I draw the line. What about you?

So as a staff member, when you are setting up a site you normally have a method to your madness. A specific means in which you set up your site in which works for you to get to completion. As weird as it is, for me? It's the skin. I start with the skin and work on the information as I design it. I like to come up with unique skins that really fit the setting. I mean from LCARS Star Trek sites to Star Wars Pads it is always an adventure to make a skin. It's likely one of my favorite jobs as an administrator to do even if I don't do the standard ones that people get so much praise for. I think mine are awesome. In the midst of this design I will also start the information. Once both are done I go through the information. If at this point I'm still interested in the original subject matter I release and start posting on directories. How about you?

So something that comes across the table every once in a while is account or character purges for inactive characters or players. My question for people is, do you do it? If you do why do you do it? Does it help or hurt anything?

There is a member who has recently applied for a second character after their first got denied. The reason that they got denied the first time is that the character over all was very unbelievable and overpowered. The weaknesses that were given, were not actually weaknesses. When explaining a weakness they would explain that this was not always the case and basically counter the weakness in the same statement. On top of that the character was the child of a famous person, yet the fact that they were missing did not appear in the media. On top of that they were semi famous themselves, yet when showing up in New York he wasn't recognized at all and no one asked questions. Now for this new character, once again the power this character has is a lot. Instead of starting with one like was suggest they started out with three while recently having gotten the abilities. They can manipulate emotions, sense emotions and through that predict action and on top of that overload people’s emotions rendering them unable to defend themselves. The weakness for these are mainly the lack of control, yet at the same time the character can manipulate up to 5 people at a time, can over load people’s emotions and pinpoint what someone is feeling in a crowd. This character also has a musician for a dad, somehow there is no mother in the picture yet it is not explained. They got kidnapped while on the way to a venue where the characters dad had to play, yet somehow their car wasn't found for a week and they don't explain why it took so long to find the car. After that the kid got experimented on, why is unclear. On top of that the businessman paying for the experiments treats the character like their own adoptive kid. All in all, it is a lot and in our opinion too much. Last time we wrote a lengthy pm explaining that it was too much for one character. There was more to the story than this, but it’s the basics. How would you deal with this situation and explain this to this person that they are not a good fit for this board? Anonymous poster hash: f46e0...397

So as an administrator I know how to do the base things for a site. i know how to run a site and I can do so very well however doing so alone is tiresome and tedious and often ends with poor results from my side because of discouragement. That being said when I look for staff I find similar results that are equally as discouraging. When looking for a staff member I look for someone that wants to build with me not me build and they follow however I'm finding that getting someone that is willing to put ideas out there is difficult. It's like just because you have an idea you have to do all of the leg work. That being said I don't have any friends I could rope into the setting as it's really my unique cup of tea (isn't that odd? I have few RP partners/friends that are interested in the genres that truly inspire me) so I have to look for someone new. Is it really that difficult to find someone willing to actually contribute and invest themselves in something? How do you find staff members? Anonymous poster hash: d2287...c60

So on a similar vein to this thread: I recently found that a new member on my site may be an old member returned, an old member banned for PMing members unsolicited and unwarranted PMs asking for inappropriate plots with canons without any of the build up. That being said they don't appear to be exactly the same as before but they are exhibiting similar issues however I haven't gotten any reports of the unsolicited PMs. So it seems like they've changed however the person themselves makes me a little uncomfortable because of what happened last time. Now a few things: I can't guarantee they are the same person. It's been like three or four years since this person was even on my site last. The username is similar (since the prior username was actually banned and is unusable). The IP address is in a similar subnet but not identical but appears to be the same ISP. The behavior is extremely similar but I could also be looking for similarities due to the issues I had with the first problem member. That being said I am not sure if I should just ride it out, just get rid of them or something else entirely. If you found yourself in this situation what would you do? Anonymous poster hash: 7221d...b7a

So most sandbox sites allow for the members to contribute their own lore and build on what already exists and that got me thinking about how I want to allow my members build the site with me and I came up with a moderately off the wall idea and wanted to know opinions as well as see if anyone else has done this before? Most of the time I would build the organizations, their hierarchy and allow the members to pick up the positions from there. This would include the inter workings of the the organization, the name, how they operate, what their purpose is and how they are viewed and whatnot. Pretty standard, give people the base and let them build. My idea is going even more skeletal then that, have an organization with a purpose and allow for a member to claim it and create all the details, from the name, when it was established etc. Basically instead of me building the organization the person that picks up the current leader makes this information the only thing I would provide is the organizations "purpose" so that they could build from there. So an example of this would be Naturalists (for my setting) which are the people that believe that putting technology in their body is unnatural and they won't do it. From there someone would claim the organization as the leader (subordinate characters would not be allowed until the organization is claimed and fleshed out). At that point people could actually be a part of the organization.

So recently my site had an issue with a member, and it was one, of many. I'm deep down, a kind soul. I wanted to give them a chance, but the complaints against the Player, and their characters kept building up, and I asked them kindly to leave, and I would happily provide all their character information back to them, but certain actions had crossed the line. They reacted not unlike what I expected, upset, and angry. To avoid problems, I banned their e-mail and IP, just to be safe. Certain actions, no matter the rating of a site, are just not okay unless previously cleared with your writing partner, you know? So all is quiet for a few days. Few new members show up, everything is rolling along. Then we get a mysterious application. The player not once spoke in our chat box, just all of a sudden, there is a 'completed' application submitted, but it's missing all the OOC info we require. As my Co-Admin and I are going over the app, the player PM's me. It's the one we banned. With a Proxied IP, and a new E-mail. Long story short, we are now having to doublecheck IP's for every new silent apper that appears, for fear it is this player again. If the IP doesn't match the listed locale of the player, we're hesitant to accept the application. Has anyone else ever run into something like this, where they've had to impose a Proxy Ban? We're very close to doing that, but I feel like that might be going too far. We just don't want this person back after threats were made against staff and players off the site. To top it all off, as I'm replying to advertisements, I see them floating around on other sites. Do you warn other admins of potential problems with a player's behavior? or just let them play in shark infested waters and hope for the best? I'm finding out after the fact that this particular writer has caused issues on just about every other site they were ever a part of.

So I'm bothered when I get a prospective member with a passive aggressive attitude. Example: GUEST: Disappointing (Failure to state what is disappointing, forcing someone to ask them) ME: What? GUEST: No <race/technology/lore>. (Note, I'm not against adding stuff, but in this example it's a huge sweeping change, for example adding elves to a human only fantasy setting) ME: That's right. GUEST: I guess it will have to do. So summarized, what have you guys found is the best strategy for responding to this kind of thing? I find it difficult, end up typing up all these differently worded responses, only to delete them all and not say anything. Should one respond concisely to something like this, or confront the person and tell them to cut it out, or just ignore full stop? Advice please, for when it undoubtedly happens again!

Does anyone else employ filters in their Cbox/board? CW puts ones for random words just to see how long it takes people to catch them then swaps them out after they're discovered. I've also filtered "I'm bored" to "I should look at shippers." I'm considering filtering "Is this site active?" to "Yes, we're active" but was curious to see if other people employed such a devious thing and what they filtered specifically.