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Activity checks are probably my least favorite thing to do but I have to hold them. We just turned 3 weeks old and so we haven't actually had one yet but in our rules, we say once every three months. Do you think that's fair? Also since we have a fandom board I was wondering how others dealt with canons and if they had different requirements for activity checks? Or really just checks in general. My biggest fear is someone will sign in and post in the checks and then disappear. I'm leaning towards them having a certain amount of posts in the last month, how do you guys go about it?

 

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I am extremely lenient with activity checks in most situations.  Here’s why:

 

One of the most important things for me in roleplaying is community.  I love interacting with my members and making people feel at home in my roleplay.  While activity checks have a purpose, overly rigid activity checks may impact the overall community and atmosphere of the site.  Not only does RPing start to become more of a chore (“Ugh, I have to post today or I will lose my claims and have my account deleted!”) but if someone has their information whisked away and deleted, they may not be as likely to return.  I know that from a member perspective, I feel like my time and energy wasn’t important in a site and that I, as an individual, am not valued if everything is trashed because I haven’t been there for a couple of weeks (or even a couple of months, depending how long I’ve been on the site).  I believe leniency should be given to members who have been there longer, and that no dedicated member should have their information removed just because they disappeared.  They are a part of board history and should be remembered!

 

That said, you can’t hold onto a face claim for 3 years because a good member went inactive.  I tend to delete claims after a couple months of inactivity, but I’ll hold onto other things for longer.  I only delete the profiles of people who registered and vanished with only a handful of posts (and it’s been quite some time since they’ve done so).

 

I won’t register on a board if they have a “Post X times for the activity check” rule.  Firstly because I have a life outside of RP and I might not be able to post all the time.  My interest in RP sites waxes and wanes.  Secondly because I don’t RP all my characters evenly.  Sometimes I don’t RP the “secondary characters” for a couple of months.  However, I do allow people to share face claims with me for those secondary characters so that I’m not hogging all the faces.

 

Some people will sign the check and vanish.  If it happens after a couple of times, PM them.  Figure out where they are and why they’re doing what they’re doing.  Come to a compromise: “Hey, we’re going to remove your face claim and take you off the tally so that people know our active characters are up to date.  But I won’t delete your accounts or give up your character’s relationships.”

 

Members really do appreciate the little extra steps that administrators take, and sometimes a few minutes of time and a bit of a work-around can help get them motivated to come back to the board.  At very least, they will think of your board positively.

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I think Activity checks are moot. Really you only need to do activity checks for canon characters IMHO. If standard characters go inactive what does it harm other than the threads that they are in and I'm sure the players will recognize it far before you do.

 

I understand the driving need for "neatness" but other than that what drives a need to place a character in an inactive status however the only time this is important is for driving character roles. Canons, leaders etc. Plus, I don't think activity checks work other than to stress out players that have enough stress.

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I can understand activity checks for canon characters, but they have to be reasonable lengths of time. I've seen some sites where a canon is taken away from someone if they've been away for two weeks (and the rp groups on twitter/weebly can be worse than that.)

 

I wouldn't delete any account unless it was spam, or the member caused trouble for the admins/staff/other members, or if a member asked for it to be deleted. I've found some admins to be impatient with new members and complain that they've not been active on the site when there are, literally, a lot of things that a new member need to read and take in before they can make their first character. New members need time to adjust to a site if they need to learn how the site's run and what's expected of them. (To me, I think the simpler this is, the better because it's easier for a new member to get into the site.)

 

If a site has only just opened, I don't think there needs to be activity checks and three months would be enough for me. I'd personally like to see members just being around though, and to only create small number of characters they know that they can keep active and have the muse for. (This goes for staff as well as members.)

 

It can be frustrating for people if they are waiting for people to respond to a post so that they can meet the activity requirements. This is something that should be taken into account with members.

 

Staff and admin need to be shown to be keeping their characters active because they set the standard of the site and if they don't meet activity requirements (unless there's a good reason for them not to) it's unfair to expect regular members to.

 

There needs to be some leeway so that if unexpected RL incidents occur that members can say that they can't meet the requirement and why. (But if it happens too often, then I think a member should cut down - perhaps by letting go of some of the canons they write for and opening them up for other people to take, or by cutting down on OCs so that they can concentrate on the more 'important' characters they write for. But by important, I mean ones that other members are relying on for their rps, rather than being 'important' because they are a canon.)

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We have monthly activity checks. Everyone lists their characters and at least one thread they're posting in currently.

 

All of that probably takes less than 5 minutes....

 

If someone doesn't post, they get a PM asking if they're okay - unless they put up an absence notice.

 

If they didn't reply to the PM and missed the next month's check, then get a 2nd PM and after a week with no reply, their characters are moved to Inactive and they have to go through the app process again to get them back.

 

Maybe that's strict but I don't think that 5 minutes a month is too much to ask. Once you get more than 10 players, each with 3 - 5 characters, the bookkeeping of keeping the players and their characters straight gets to be a pain for the admin; especially when 5 minutes from every player a month can make everything so much simpler.

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I've completely dropped activity checks in their entirety - all it does is create more "busywork" for the admins/mods and in cases the members too - as well as contributing to a rigid "if you can't be here every five minutes and stupidly active we don't want you". Now, we all KNOW that "be super active or be kicked" isn't the message we are trying to convey - but it doesn't stop the regimentedness from implying it like a backhanded compliment from the Promqueen about our dress.

 

That being said, however, once in a while when I have time (or are board between plots every few months) I will scroll through profiles/accounts and see who's not posted or logged in for a while. The profiles I'll usually filter to an inactive board. As for cannon characters - I follow the same ruleset. If somebody comes by and asks about said character I will say "We used to have a Soandso but they haven't been here in like 6 months so if you want to grab the character you're more than welcome to. Would you like me to send you a PM of what the last player did with people and you can then decide how you want to proceed?"

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Our game is slightly more complicated to leave without some kind of check due to us having claims for canons / playbys / creatures and abilities which are insanely popular and draws in a lot of new members. We have a set amount that we allow but are basing that off the size of the member base as a whole. It's not so much an issue now but I'm thinking future wise. I think I'm going to have people check in every 3 months with their most recent threads so I can keep my claims section orderly. We do have a section for them to post they are away and that saves their spot for that one check. Mass emails and PM's will go out. Currently, we've decided we weren't going to delete accounts but just retire them and remove their claims. Canons are set to be deleted but now I'm wondering if I should just retire them and change their name to Harry Potter1 or something just in case they want their character info.

 

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It sounds like you've got a pretty good system in place already. Retiring accounts, as you put it, is ideal. Plus, it can be helpful for people to go back and see what someone else might've done with a particular canon if they need to! Renaming the accounts could potentially be a lot of busywork, but that's probably how I would prefer to do it instead of deleting accounts entirely.

 

You're still very new though, so I wouldn't worry about it until you hit your 3 month mark. When a site is shiny and new, people come and go quickly. It's an important time to build up a dedicated community to have going forward, and having an activity check too early can be a bit daunting or send the wrong message. Worry about establishing your stories first, and then when everyone is comfortable and you're chugging along nicely, do some spring cleaning and archive/retire some inactive characters. If people are really wanting to join your game but their preferred canon is taken, they'll find another way to integrate themselves until there is an opening they want. Or they'll come back later.

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A thought, kind of unrelated to activity checks: what if you have some sort of "trial period" for the canons.  For the first X weeks, they have to make an effort to integrate into the community and get plots and threads.  That might alleviate some of your stress.

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I've always treated activity checks as a more passive thing in my games. Given that I use a system called Nova, instead of a forum, there's a mechanism built in that lets me keep an eye on all the account activity: it summarizes last login and last released post (as we write each log semi-privately) when any particular account exceeds a set time period.

 

Honestly, my biggest thing is communication. If I know what's going on with a player, and why they may not be as active as I'd like, I will do what I can to accommodate. If you can find a way to somewhat passively watch player activity, instead of making people jump through hoops at a particular time to prove they're active, your activity checks won't get in the way of your player base but still allow you to make sure that limited things (canons, powers, face claims, etc) aren't being horded by inactive people.

 

It's a fine line to walk between keeping players active and happy, and avoiding annoying things like extra work for staff or players only being active during check time. Good luck finding that balance that works for you!

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I have done countless Activity Checks and they always bog down the site.  The strategy I have tried recently is to not have them, but require that if members start in a major plot (I call them Featured Stories) they must continue with them or post an absence request.  If they don't continue with the plot, they get written out of it by the active members.  The only characters I maintain an activity check for are canons which is once every 3 months.

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With original fandoms (or maybe lots of sites except for those select lucky few), if there are not 50 new members daily and you have multiple staff then you could feasibly monitor without doing an activity check thread. This is how I do it since my sites tend to be niche and small. On the first of the month I just go through and determine which accounts are and aren't active.

 

But I think an activity check thread does serve a purpose for large sites where it's impossible to do the first method in a timely manner (even if people can kind of play the system by pretending to be active whenever a check rolls around).

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My site does activity checks every couple months, but it's mostly just "post that you're alive", except for characters who hold a rank, which do have a minimum post amount. It's when players can drop characters, and when general cleanup occurs. I've always felt like that was a good amount of time for that site, it's not so overbearing, especially since we have people (myself included) with a ton of characters, but it's like, a quick check-in for people whose lives have gone nuts but plan on things settling down and don't want to leave.

 

I HATE really rigorous activity checks, because a lot of the time I am just uninterested in posting a character for a while. I've got nothing with them, but I have in the past and I know I will again. The muse just goes on vacation, so I don't want to drop them or anything. 

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The Activity Check will always be something under debate.  In the end it comes down to what you are comfortable with. If people are posting on an AC then disappearing then that’s pretty amazing. That’s like taking a test for a class, getting an A, then dropping it.

 

My site holds monthly AC’s save for twice a year. In May we don’t have an AC because we are well aware that students are struggling with finals. In December it’s the holidays and once again, finals.  The idea is to keep stress low while still keeping everything organized.

 

No surprises.

 

The AC is held on the 1st of every month and goes till the 8th.

 

You only need one post within two weeks of posting on the AC. That is half a month.

 

Our absence rules are made specifically to skip ACs if you just can’t bother to post.

 

Skip an AC? We don’t delete you. We put you in a nice safe folder for an entire month until the next AC. Then the only thing deleted is your player account. If you wander back and want to play again then your character will be waiting for you.

 

To be fair, we don’t have cannons. If we did I would still go through everything but keeping the character after the second AC. I suppose a way around that would be to hold onto it until somebody else wants it. Then  either delete the account or change the PW and hand it to someone else. That way if the person who was rping it came back they’d still have their account, and if someone else wanted it there would be little trouble with transferring. 

 

Just my thoughts ^_^

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Your rule is fair! If people aren't posting even once every 3 months.. Then why are they there, what are they gaining if they're absent?

 

Besides which, people should be reading the rules before they join. If they read, they would know what the activity check entails. :E

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