may I confess that I still read “MLM” as multi-level marketing so I keep reading “multi-level marketing romance” at first without fail

do I ever learn?!

just living on one caffeinated drink to the other

The current format of plot pages was admittedly before my time, and it takes some adjustment now for me

Often what I used to do was to basically ask if anyone wanted to thread with my characters, then I’d read the character profiles of people who were all “yesss” and then present ideas that come up even if they didn’t have ideas. But that was mostly on sites where the ideas people had for characters were ones you could kinda glean from their profiles? If they had anything specific, they would make plot threads in the plot section of the forum, of course

But honestly most of my plots, back when I RP’d the most, happened spontaneously in open threads, and that’s ideal to me ...

Just, including what you want and throwing ideas out there, and openness for me to present my own, are what I really look for? I dunno, I’m the type of person who, if someone wants to write with me and I want to write with them (even though I have trouble approaching people first), I’m open to it

Should be noted I have yet to join a site that had those standardized plot pages (friends/enemies/lovers etc etc) so I can’t comment on how I feel about writing them. My idea of a plot page is to just throw a list of somewhat organized rambling out there for others to possibly latch onto while going “but also I’m open to other ideas so let me know!”

i'm sick but not too sick to draw my characters. and by draw my characters I mean draw hair for 10 hours because I love drawing hair so much

Let's talk favourite words! To use in writing, but also just in general. Any words! They don’t have to be words you find in the dictionary (for example: a typo a friend made once that’s stuck with you forever) and they don’t have to be English

 

Allowing me to use my own art and designs for my characters!! I appreciate sites that clearly state that I can use my own art and designs for faces, and are also clear about requirements for the sake of style cohesion. I’m aware that a few sites may allow it but since original art is less common it isn’t considered necessary to add to the rules/FC guidelines... I’d rather not risk joining somewhere, making art for characters, and then being told that it actually isn’t allowed, so again, just a single sentence being like “and we accept original art” can make me decide to join a site

Depends, usually only if prompted or if I say I’m busy and someone is wondering with what. I say it’s “collaborative writing” to most people by default because plenty people online are not as familiar with the concept of play-by-post RP as it was a few years ago.

I dislike donations for IC rewards, in situations where the rewards can be obtained through RP or rushed to using real money, and especially when they’re not obtainable without money. My philosophy is IC rewards should be rewards for roleplaying ICly, and not be pay-to-win. There’s been sites I haven’t joined because I realized they rewarded donations with important in-character stuff. Life situation permits me to spend money very rarely on anything other than essentials, so I pay (hah) close attention. Donations for OoC rewards are generally fine in my book, but it is always best to be critical and ensure the money is actually going where staff say it’s going.

In your situation, yeah, I wouldn’t stay there. The advice earlier was good — convince the members of the community who you like writing with to move somewhere else. There will always be other RP sites, and if push comes to shove, putting aside the time to make your own, based on your own ethics and principles, can end up really worth it, as you’ll find like-minded people. A better RP forum is possible.

For me...it depends how a guidebook is written. A guidebook that is hard to navigate isn’t much better than having a bunch of threads scattered everywhere. But most guidebooks I encounter nowadays don’t have that issue, so we’re good there.

And when it comes down to threads —I always preferred there being one for the required general lore and other for site functions & OoC stuff, and others for not-quite-required information for joining. As long as a longer thread has an index at the start of each post or somewhere easy to access, it wouldn’t be that much of a pain to navigate. And for sites that allow player lore, threads are pretty useful for that too.

So overall, to me it doesn’t really matter that much. CTRL+F is my friend when it comes down to both. Both guidebooks and threads can look good, be easy to read and navigate, it depends on the design. We can even do some fancy things with jcink with the coding for threads to make gudebook threads look different compared to regular threads.

Oh yeah, I can see having different forums be a decent solution to that? If only there was a way to make that process automatic, but I definitely support the idea behind it. Maybe even having a fun points redeem for styling member-specific boards, or just having that available from the start.

Yeah, Cbox being expensive is a shame and a big reason why Discord is much preferred I think, especially because Discord has more features still I think? I’m still grumpy about Discord's usernames change and such. z.z

And I agree, the speed of conversations on any instant messaging service is sometimes exhausting for me too, and I feel like ideas can get lost really easily — and not even always because anyone means bad, it’s just the way instant messaging services are designed, for endless chatter. I had this issue with MSN as well and other messaging services. It is a great place to chat and just casually share memes and such, but I love forums still especially for long form conversation and will go to bat for them endlessly.

I'm about 2% awake

I was active on a Discordless site for a bit, and will probably return to one eventually, but the site in question was more of a general RP forum, where most people there did 1-on-1 private RP (there were a few group RPs) — it’s still really active. The site in question ran on a newer forum software which held features that some of the most common free forum host software lacks — mainly drafts and the ability to sort private messages into folders. The PM folders in particular were useful for OoC discussion/plotting, and were honestly much better for me than doing any sort of plotting on Discord. It was also really easy to use on mobile.

Of course, I don’t expect anyone to have to pay premium for a forum software to run a Discordless site, and I think say, jcink or alternatives will work for a Discordless site. One of the most important things is making sure that the site’s layout is responsively designed, so people can check the site and even most on it while on mobile, and not using the built-in Jcink mobile.

Having Cbox but having it something you can toggle off has always been my preference. Maybe a second Cbox to post links to open threads, or having an automatically-populated open thread listing on the header or sidebar of the forum? Anyways, sorry if I’m stating the obvious here! But I have thought a bit about how to run a site without Discord before, and did brainstorm a few ideas last year a bit.

I feel like a downside, besides the fact that a lot is done on Discord nowadays, is that...so many people are used to Discord tags now and rely on them to stay updated whenever they owe posts. Even I have to admit that it’s a bit easier on my bad memory to check if I owe anyone anything using Discord. It may be hard to pull people in but there are people who do want Discordless sites, so it’s worth trying for such a niche. I know that I, personally, would like to see it.