phantom of the black parade
pronounsshe / her pronouns
4,383written posts
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what do you want to know? my height, hobbies, quirks, the color of my underwear?
Sorry it's been awhile. I fell silent because I took in all the information you guys were telling me, processed it and began finding ways to work on those things. (Having a full-time job makes it hard to do much coding, so it's been slow.) I appreciate each of you taking the time out of your day to detail your thoughts to help a fellow admin. I wanted to address each of you personally for your invaluable feedback. Kuroya : Thank you for your clarity. I agree, our information has been scattered and I've just not been good at finding organization for it over the years. Of course some of that is also that we've had information around since the archaic days, before post templates were the norm for the RPC. I really have been considering a move to JCInk just because I like it better, and thinking about what it looks like going forward, I think more of the creatives are flocking to JCink, meaning support and opportunity is likely to continue to follow. However, for now that's in the air for me, being a one-man code knowledgable-band). So I'm going to see what I can do with what I've got before I make a commitment to totally jumping ship. (However that may still be in the cards, who knows. ^^) When you mention being bogged down by the decades plus of history, where are you seeing that? Outside of the archives and the non-modern skin, we haven't really got much decades-plus to be bogged down by in the part of the boards most people should be looking. Maybe I'm blind, but could you be more specific as to what you meant? I'd love to be able to improve, but I don't understand what you're looking at yet regarding that bit. no worries! i completely get that life happens and you get busy.
as far as being uncertain on organization goes, i would definitely recommend taking a look through some of the bigger/newer sites that are around - not to copy them per se but to see how they're organizing things so you can model a similar system that works for your needs. obviously don't go with a system that you're going to lose track of but, y'know, having something a bit more like what people have come to expect in 2020 will definitely be helpful, both in terms of helping people navigate and in terms of cutting down on questions for that clarification.
honestly, i am a hard jcink convert myself - the acp was a little overwhelming at first but five years of working with it has helped me figure out how to streamline it for day to day use, even if i'm still finding new functions to this day (i discovered how to set up multimods with my newest site and holy crap it is such a quality of life update i never knew i needed). i personally find it a much better user experience from the admin and member side of things, as well as far easier to skin for, but you're also not incorrect that a lot of rpers have shifted over to jcink (and while animanga as a whole does more straddle jcink vs proboards, i also find it relevant to note that the animated panfandom, kingdom hearts, and final fantasy genres all seem to favor jcink over proboards to varying degrees). irregardless, there's a lot of people here on pixel perfect who are more intimately familiar with jcink and would likely be happy to help if you ask for it!
but to the actual crux of what you were looking for: clarity on my comment about the decade-plus site history.
i actually wasn't referring so much to anything specific per se - partially because i honestly didn't dig around that much on the site but mostly because i was talking much more generally. i know that i personally tend to get far more leery about joining a site the longer it's been open, to the point that i very rarely join a site that been open for more than a year or two, never mind a more than a decade - not necessarily because of anything against the site, mind you, but because i've found that more established sites tend to be harder to break into as a new member for a variety of reasons.
all established sites are going to have some kind of pre-established history hanging over them - that's kind of the name of the game since imo even if the site plot doesn't exist or hasn't meaningfully advanced in a very long time / since the site opened, individual character plots almost certainly have. and while some sites + people are really newbie-friendly in terms of helping a new member catch up to speed with their character, a lot of them in my experience just aren't, between having "out-of-date" want ads and character plotters (since imo if you've apped sora three months ago and put up a romance ad for riku when you were approved but since then got into an organic ship with axel but haven't updated your want ad or plotter, it's gonna be really awkward for me to show up for that ad for riku or to propose a possible ship with kairi in your plotter) or just in general making it like pulling teeth to try to figure out where people stand and what would be expected of you / what your options are. and that's just... inherently frustrating to deal with, to the point that "do i really want to deal with trying to catch up with everything" has become a legitimate question i ask myself now when i'm considering sites that have been around for a while.
but, like i said, established sites tend to be much harder to break into as a new member. if i had a dollar for every time i tried to join an established community where no one really wanted to give me much of the time of day for plots (because they reached their "thread cap", because they didn't want to invest the time or effort into me in case i ditched, because they didn't want to give me much more than surface level plots in case i ditched, because they already had most of their big plots taken by their friends and weren't really interested in branching out, because they rarely reached out to plot with newbies since they "didn't think it was their job to initiate plotting with a newbie"), honestly, i'd probably have a decent amount of change packed away. and granted, you can see this same thing in new sites that have communities where most everyone knows each other, and some sites are better at mitigating this than others, but it's something that's largely baked into what established sites are just because established sites tend to have a "core community" that's been with the site for a long time and that core community tends to have a lot of plots with each other since imo they're all the ones that stuck around, and to a certain extent, most of the time, i'd personally rather roll the dice and take the chance that this is the atmosphere of a new site than i would err on the side of "maybe this specific site isn't so bad" or "hopefully there will be a want ad i like to give me an in on the site".
plus i personally end up a little more leery of established sites that are smaller or slower since that's generally a sign that the site is likely about to die or be closed, and again, i take this chance on any site, but similarly, i'd rather take the chance on a newer site than i would hope that an established one will buck my expectations.
to reiterate - i don't know if world's destiny has anything like this specifically going on or if y'all take active steps to combat this (given that you are looking for advice, i'd like to believe you try to avoid these traps). but this is a general mentality i've come to after a lot of experiences and are some of the downsides of being an established site, especially one that has been around for so long (because a decade is a massive accomplishment when most established sites extremely rarely break five years) and is, well, in the boat its currently in. to that extent, a full scale revamp won't make all of that go away, but it will make the fact that you are an established community feel a bit less intimidating to a newbie who might be on the fence (or, on the flip side, give some promise of longevity to someone who's more leery of brand new sites).
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last edit on Nov 22, 2020 18:18:08 GMT by Kuroya
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