Membership Profiles and Plotters

[Uaithne 543]

I'm building a new site and I'm trying to make it as easy to admin as possible. Therefore, we'll have profiles but no applications which I'm comfortable with, so no worries. I trust people to make decent characters.

 

The question I have is that I've seen some sites where plot pages and profiles are the same thing, and people reply to the profile itself rather than to a separate thread. The major pro I see for this is that the member doesn't have to go out of the way to make a whole new topic for a plot pages, which many members never get around to. The con, of course, is that people can't organize all of their plots in one thread. It also might look messy, or make people believe that one character is super popular.

 

Another idea (slightly unrelated) I had is that the profiles would be posted by the OoC account rather than the specific member account so that it's easy to see which member has which characters.

 

What are your thoughts on this and your experiences balancing profiles and plot opportunities? What approaches have you taken or admired on other sites? Do you find that profiles are better in the actual  account profile or as a separate thread, and why? Etc, etc profile discussion. 

[Icewolf 258]

I prefer profiles and plotters to be separate because the profiles (whether they are applications or a non-app one) are there to tell people about the character. People plotting on the profile thread itself will constantly make characters people want to write with more shoot up to the top of the board and perhaps push the profiles of newer/ or less established characters to the bottom. (When I was on a fan site years ago that had a super active fan fiction section it was very common for people to post a new story and then have it pushed down on to the second or third page within a day or so, and it contributed to some stories not getting many readers. I wouldn't want an important board to be too active so characters get over-looked, and most forums I've looked at keep profiles and plotters separate.)

 

I think I'd prefer plotters to be on a different page, where I can keep track of all the ideas people have come up with in one place.

 

Profiles all under a ooc is a good idea because then there is more transparency over who plays who. I like that idea!

 

 

[Uaithne 543]

Thanks, @Icewolf, you brought up an issue I hadn't thought about re: bumping popular threads above less popular ones.

 

I've been searching high and low for a profile with tabs in it, but I think I found one. I make two tabs for general information and one tab as a thread tracker and another tab as a development tracker. I like keeping as much stuff together as possible.

[xexes 108]

So both of these things get into the specific features of different forum softwares.

I've never seen a plotting comments area, but I feel confident that replying to a person's profile to plot is just some clever javascript to change the wording of the "comments" feature of certain forum softwares to make it look like it's for plotting. Xenforo, IcyBoards ,Proboards comes to mind.

 

The only real pro that I see is not having to create a plotting page. I understand that sometimes people forget but in my experience this is an omission made on purpose.  As you said the comment reel also inhibits organization, and thus the ability to keep things up to date.

 

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Certain softwares automatically show account linkages, and this is how one would tell what characters are played. SMF pops to mind for this one.

 

Not every forum has this but roleplays have been getting by for a long time:

 - a who's who / player-character list

 - a field in the profiles that name the player / link there

 - a player profile that lists characters as a field

 

 

Making a new roleplay forum can be a lot of work! It can hard to decide how to move forwards with so many choices running about !