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Activity Check Cheaters


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@Uaithne Now I have no idea. I thought it was the admin doing a normal AC behind the scenes without saying anything except deleting or archiving accounts?

 

If it's passive in that you don't actually have ACs until you are like "has name posted in ... Forever?" And then clean out accounts that haven't been touched in a month or two, that makes far more sense to me than doing a normal one behind the scenes. 

 

I think for me the in your face post to save your character AC is ideal because it's transparent between staffers and players. There's no one able to say "he didn't get deleted and I did!!" Because everyone has provided their own evidence for activity.

 

--- unfortunately though that can cause the ... Cheater issue. But I think that the activity check is not matching community expectations if it can be cheated to an extent people are angry/upset. (Like... Captain America on an MCU site should be required to post more than random oc #4. So make his activity expectations higher. ^^) just my two cents.

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Honestly, what sort of activity check is best for each community is going to depend on the community. I have pretty good success with passive checks in my game. The only time I've had anyone complain to me about them was a player that was impatient and controlling (and they generally were complaining at me about other players slower activity), or if someone was specifically holding up a plot.

 

The biggest thing is always setting expectations with your players. If you do passive AC, then be open about it and tell your players that's how you handle things... but I also encourage you to be proactive. If someone is qualifying for archival/removal/whatever, make sure you check in with them, not just to warn them they're in danger of being removed, but to find out why they're not posting. If they aren't posting because they don't care is very different than someone not posting because they have plot in progress but no one responding to it, or real life taking up more time than they expect. If you know why they're not posting, you can potentially do something to help (though not always, and that's okay).

 

I really hate AC that put the weight on the players to check in, because it leads to a lot of jerky infrequent activity, and my personal experience has always supported passive checks. I used to be involved in games where we'd release a weekly (or bi-weekly) report that summarized activity for everyone. Players did nothing for the report directly, but everyone could see how active everyone had been. That had a tendency to cause people to write things at the last minute to get in under the deadline, rush things that needed a little more time to develop properly, and generally was at the cost of the quality and enjoyability of the game. Since I've stopped doing those reports on my current game, we're a little more up and down on our activity, but my players are happier and they feel more comfortable letting me know when RL is going to pull them away. And that communication makes it easier for me to make sure that no one is holding up the game for everyone else, because if I know who's busy and who's not, I can nudge the plot in ways to take the pressure off those who can't write at the moment.

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As @Uaithne said, "Passive Check" to me only means that instead of a set formal minimal activity requirement, every so often I'll clean out stuff that's been sitting around for like 6 months or a year untouched. If the member is still around, I'll throw a mention of "hey I'm doing a little sprucing up, do you still want to keep such and such character?". This allows me to give my members freedom, and me less admin work, without having to babysit everyone to do the "right" thing.

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Okay, I'm totally glad that we're talking about this because I didn't realize that there might be other meanings.  I'll be careful what terms I use from now on.  I agree with @Thyme that there should be transparency of activity checks, and I shudder to think that there might be behind-the-scenes actual activity checks in which people don't get the time/notification that it's happening.

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34 minutes ago, Uaithne said:

 I shudder to think that there might be behind-the-scenes actual activity checks in which people don't get the time/notification that it's happening.

Shudder then, my friend. O.O One of my friends had a character archived once... And she had posted in a plotter for a plot with said character not a week before.  The character was immediately unarchived when she said she was still around but it was really stressful for her, as you can imagine. There was literally no notification of an AC on the board that we could find later when we were trying to figure out why she'd gotten archived. >.<

 

Live and learn I suppose. But yeah. What you guys are saying makes much more sense. I can get behind that kind of AC. It makes sense to trim accounts that are not being used, but also in OC sites no one... Is going to play your OC. XD so it doesn't super matter if you reply frequently or just whenever you want/have time. ^^

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In my experience running RPs, I try to establish a rule that players are allowed to skip over each other if someone isn't responding in a timely manner. I used to manually keep track of posts in a spreadsheet, but it was too much work. There was a forum software I tried out that had a setting that would automatically send users an email if they hadn't logged in for a certain period of time. If I can figure out how to replicate that on IPS, I'd be over the moon.

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Update your rules to account for that. You could switch to something like a per-week requirement, raise your requirements, or just add in a contingency that you'd like to see activity throughout the month and not just for activity check. You could also give the players in question a talk. Not fun for anyone involved, but what they're doing isn't fair, especially if it's a consistent thing. But certainly don't have the sort of activity check where they can still post while the check is happening and have it count.

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I don't really bother with activity checks because most people play original characters and we don't use face claims or playbys. So that means there's really nothing that could get passed onto someone else. All it does is hold things up a bit if people don't post. But even then, if they don't post in a week they're free to be skipped. (They can catch up in the next round of posts.)

 

But if I were going to use activity checks then I'd go for the passive sort (which I presume gets it's name from the fact members don't have to respond to it, they just carry on... only staff actually does anything) and check in the ACP who's not been on recently.  If they haven't signed on in 3 months, there's a good chance they haven't posted. (And I'd double check that to be sure.) But even then I'd only really be concerned about canon roles. As those are the ones other people could/might want to get. 

 

In the past on sites I was part of that did use the active checks (members had to reply stating active) we had a few key aspects. Like leave of absences could only last up to one month total time (no infinite leaves). After that they needed to re-evaluate things. If they couldn't resume posting then let us know, if they could then awesome. But if they couldn't then we did reserve the right to ask them to step down from any canon characters. 

Additionally couldn't use leave of absences back to back to escape checks. So if you just got back from one, you had to wait at least as long as your leave was before you could use one again. (So if you used a leave for 7 days, you'd have to wait 7 days to use another. Basically just to stop people from using one for a month, showing up and dropping another month long leave.)

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