man, i always feel so awkward asking for advice about current rp problems, i feel like i always end up getting side-eyed about it, but here i am anyway.

like the title implies, the site i own, lovelorn, is currently listed as a semi-private site. my co-admin and i set it up that way when we opened, but now, almost five months since we opened, we've been debating whether or not we want to keep that semi-private label or not.

we became semi-private for three reasons. 1) to give us more breathing room as a staff of two (which is small for an animated panfandom), 2) to indicate to new members that they would likely struggle to integrate if they joined with a character that was largely disconnected from what already existed on the site (because we felt it wouldn't be fair to pretend otherwise the way a lot of sites do nowadays), and 3) to give more leeway in character creation than you see in a lot of sites (like with original + fandom ocs, characters that straddle the line between canon + oc, """problematic""" characters, and just general off-the-wall concepts).

we still like those reasons, especially the first two (as we're likely to stay a team of two for the foreseeable future + we both know we don't have the time or energy to regularly integrate newbies who aren't really making an effort to get us invested in them as well).

but on the flip side..... we are a little concerned that we're being passed over because people see the "semi-private" label and think we're invitation-only or otherwise just. sequestered jerkwads who are only interested in rping within our insular, clique-y little circles when that's very much not the case. (in fact, we'd actively like to grow a little bit - not enough to become a "big site", but y'know, enough so that one or two people taking a break from posting won't basically kill the site + to rp some of the plots that just aren't possible with the current member base + so that it's more than just a very small handful of us all threading with each other with no variety in our lives.)

i've also been considering trying to open up our affiliation slots on the site to allow sites to generally affiliate with us, but similarly, i'm concerned about whether or not we'd get side-eyed for it if we're still listed as a semi-private site.



tl;dr. we're already in the process of asking the site members how they feel about the site being semi-private, but i'd also like to get some outside feedback on it too because i genuinely don't know what direction it'd be best for us to go in. i still feel like the reasons why we're using the label are valid (aka that we're a small staff team in a genre that typically has far larger ones + that we're trying to encourage newbies to "read the room" and make their early characters ones that are going to be easier to integrate with the existing site demographics), but i'm also worried about how the label is being perceived, both in general and specifically in regards to advertising + recruitment (and, even more specifically, if it's having a significant stifling effect on recruitment).