For literally the entirety of the lifespan of my previous site - so two years, give or take - it always said, either adjacent to or beneath, the forum banner: "PLEASE REGISTER WITH YOUR CHARACTER'S FULL FIRST AND LAST NAME."

Then in my admin notifs:
dragonslayer420 has joined the forum
luciddreams has joined the forum
animelover69 has joined the forum


Every... day.

When you remind someone to do their claims and they STILL don't do their claims; especially when it is the face claim which in my opinion is the most crucial. I tend to be pretty chill with letting people do their claims when they can, but if I have reminded the person 50 times and they still have not done it, it gets me one step closer to finally spend a lot of time changing the grouping algorithm for boards. I would likely change it to "Your group allows you to post in the boards, which you do not receive until after you fill out your claims" which I should have done from the beginning. In complete honesty, I do not mind people ignoring the other claims, but that face claim tends to be the one I want to be filled out immediately. x.x

Alternatively, if they don't claim their face and someone else tries to reserve it... heckin' just give it to the other person. Like, if you're arm wrestling people to do a thing that takes five whole seconds and they won't after weeks and weeks, then they don't deserve the spot. If they try to pitch a fit, point out the fact that their character was neither reserved nor claimed, and it's not staff's duty to fill out people's claims for them. *shrugs*

If you don't do your part, don't expect people to bend over backwards for you.

That is how my staff and I have planned to handle these situations, I just figured changing how the boards worked would possibly motivate people to actually do them since they could not role-play until completing the face claim at least. It just gets obnoxious having to tell people a million times, and at least with a grouping method, if they personally message me asking about why they can't post, I can respond with I need their claims filled out. I figured it would make it a bit easier so nobody throws a hissy fit at me; it's happened before since I am a nice, chill person and people sometimes think that means they can push me around.

Either way, I would provide similar reasoning since for most, this is common knowledge and under most circumstances, if the person is new to ProBoards, I help them out with navigation, posting, etc. until they get the hang of it; and even then, if I ask them to post in claims, they go do it.

Guilt trips.

They work on me way more than I'd like to admit, and it has been abused quite a bit this past year. I've gotten a lot better about not falling for it, but oh boy it's a trip when people realize the best angle to mess with you and prevent you from actually standing up for yourself and just relentlessly smash at it until you can't tell up from down.

If people scream and yell at me, that's fine. I can react to that and it doesn't bother me. It's kind of the 'default' I expect. It's when people bring in some really rough IRL stuff to justify their actions (real or imagined, idk I'm not the FBI I can't verify it) as to why they're acting like a jerk and I just buy it a decent chunk of the time hook, line, and sinker. Be a total jerk and I'll put my foot down, but if you spin a story about how your dog died that morning and your house was almost burnt down by an electrical fire and your rent payment is looming and you don't know how you're going to deal with it -- I'm going to feel bad and be much less willing to be upset.

When that all happens once every two weeks, though, and just so happening to coincide with a 'crappy person defense' every time for a few months... eeeeeeehhhhhh.

I feel your pain, there. Gaslighting was the term I was looking for but forgot, and it's definitely not a fun thing to get every inconvenience suddenly turned around for it to be your fault and your fault alone through mental gymnastics done at the Olympic level.

With your point about the activity checks, it's the same thing with basic stuff like Face Claims for me. If I notice, I just add them in there because I feel like it's less work sometimes than confronting someone -- and if I do it and there's no change then I just 'solve' the problem by doing the stuff for them in the future. It's one of those things where like, yeah, they're disrespecting you but it's also minor enough to where I don't want to put down my flag and die on my sword over it should things go sour -- y'know?

So if someone's cat dies twelve times for twelve activity checks, I'll just do it. The activity checks don't really bother me as much, because at the end of the day I just offer some free stuff for doing it and if people don't... they simply don't get the small hand out which is fine by me. It's the Face Claims and other stuff that slips through the cracks that infuriates me, because especially when a site's big enough to get waves of 10-20 apps at a time one of the few times I will get legitimately angry over 'small stuff' is when a guest comes in wanting an FC/Power/something that should have been claimed and goes through all the effort of making a char with not a peep from the other person during the process and no claim -- and then getting mad when the new person has an overlapping <insert claim here> and suddenly comes out of the wood work to say that people 'should have known'.

I'm a staffer, not the NSA. I know all the people I thread with and the people I grade and the characters of people I shoot the breeze with on the discord. If you've never threaded with me and I've never graded your apps/threads and we've never interacted OOC, of course I don't know your character. It's your responsibility to do your claims, darn it!

@sylvia

I've never understood why so many follow the trend of having members post claims all over the place. I've always just coded the claims into the app in a way I can still just copy paste them on the various claims pages. Only reserves really need to post on the page itself.

It's the same amount of data entry and number of clicks for you. I find it just complicates the process for the member by adding unnecessary work for them.

personally, i've started doing it now not because of clicks or to make it easier for the members - i do it because if i'm the one inputting it (or any of the other staff), then i know it gets done. there's not going to be someone throwing fits over "i had that claim and no one said anything!" because it's all filed, it's almost guaranteed to be accurate and correct for what is actually snaggable until the next check changes that.

it makes me sigh a lot because i feel like i shouldn't have to go that out of my way to make sure people do the basic things they should know they have to do (since i mean, if all the sites use a face claim, it shouldn't be rocket science to know that you have to go file that after you're approved), but honestly? i'd take quiet exasperation over stressful drama any day.

Admittedly, I refrain from doing this - at least on current sites - because character acceptance is already, like, a seven step process for me, and the more steps you add in at once, the more likely you are to forget one or botch one up. Seven (ish, but it's probably close, sjldkfhdkjfshd) doesn't seem like a lot, and in isolation, it's not, but when you're accepting, like, four characters at a time, that number shoots up to twenty-eight things you have to do in a short span of time. Doesn't seem super unreasonable for me to ask a member to post a claim in a couple threads post-acceptance. At the very least, it gives me some time to breathe between rapid fire admin duties.

Granted, this is a hole I've dug for myself in the "amount of work necessary for moving an app through acceptance", but at the same time, with all the other work that goes into site building and maintenance, it doesn't seem like a lot to ask for people to accomplish all of two required things: a) post in the app notification with your app, and b) make sure your claims are up in order. On the flip side, members are more likely to notice their own characters missing from the bunch than an admin is to notice one missing character out of the whole lot of characters on site should something have gotten lost in translation.

If it's a system that works for you, though, like... honestly? Props to you. :O It's definitely a good system, especially in the instance of fewer character apps or fewer steps toward accepting a character. I was on a site where the admins updated claims manually, and even though about fifty percent of mine got missed somehow/had to be manually notified the old fashioned way, it was nice as a member to not have to worry about that... even if it was kind of the only thing as a member to be potentially worried about, sdkjfhlskfjdhs.

I know it'll get done (right) if I do it myself is very similar to my philosophy on staff work regarding things like claims and small mod work when it comes to member vs staff. Plus, then I can assure everything is uniform and matching.

When my members or site visitors feel like they need a certain writing level to join/stay on the site. I have honestly enjoyed role-playing with anybody, even if there are grammar mistakes, spelling errors or whatever as long as the site rules are adhered to. I have never created a rule specifically stating writing level is important, impart because I remember when I was beginning to role-play and could rarely find a site that would take me. Not to mention, people from other cultures learning the English language which can be a rather difficult study and use this to assist in learning the language or because they simply enjoy it.

Whenever I get these people, I immediately ask them if they enjoy role-playing and are having fun on my site. If they say yes, I just tell them to stick around and not worry about it. Memberwise, people who enjoy the role-play are valuable and enjoyable to be around compared to the contrast. These doors were opened to bring people in who enjoy a similar hobby to myself, thus if somebody is unable to write like *insert famous author name here*, so what? You came here to have fun, and I am not somebody who writes to complete excellence. Mistakes are natural, and the only way to develop your role-playing is to learn from your fellow members and learn your personal style that you're happy with.

The point is, if I have a member/visitor join my site, I do not like hearing them thinking their writing level is not good enough to stay/join since we are here to enjoy ourselves through mutually shared hobbies.

When people plagiarize something from the site or plagiarizes another individual's content. It really just grinds my gears whenever somebody does this crime. These are pieces of art which people created because of their unique perspective, imagination, aspirations, dreams, experiences, etc. Whenever somebody creates written, drawn or various other pieces of art, they are connected to the individual in question and are pieces they hold close to their heart. For example, my characters are frequently heroes since I wish I could become somebody willing to save others, but I have accepted I lack the bravery. While ideas can potentially become similar, I mostly me in regards to direct and blatant copying on account of various obvious factors.

Plagiarism is something not condoned for a reason, thus it naturally peeves me off witnessing these types of actions get accomplished. Receiving a message from somebody about another member or guest about somebody copying their written work is extremely disheartening to me. As a result, I maintain some strict copyright rules whenever it is discovered since I consider it fair. The main reason is simply that in a writing-based forum such as role-play, I consider theft of written material high crime in the role-playing realm. This mostly bothers me because whenever I confront these people, they never appear to understand how emotionally connected people could get to their characters, plots and various other forms site information.