ngl, i really wish i could find someone to do this with.

i've always really struggled with the actual design portion of skinning (i'm not good with colors + aesthetics) but i always find it really enjoyable to do the actual coding portion of skinning when i'm in the mood for it. honestly, that probably affects my enjoyment of it, the internal dread whenever i get the itch to skin and know i have to pull a design out of my rear and hope i don't hate it in a month's time (or immediately), but i digress.

i guess my confession is that i would probably enjoy skinning a whole heck of a lot more if i was converting like.... visual screenshot style design mockups into actual skins vs having to do the whole thing myself from scratch.

i actually brought this up in one of the original drafts of my post that was a lot longer + more in-depth, but i think search engine optimization has not been kind to forum-based rping either.

i remember the "how did you get into rping" thread here on p2 had a lot of answers where people started on other platforms + hosts but ended up on proboards or jcink after googling "[series] rp" (or started there by default) - which definitely checks out since i have vague memories of googling "pokemon rp" and getting 3+ proboards sites and "loveless rp" and getting the proboards site i was on as the top result, both back in the mid 2010s when i was an ad mod for the sites i staffed (hence why i was googling, out of pure curiosity). compare that to yesterday, when i googled "pokemon rp" and "rwby rp" (and "pokemon roleplay" and "rwby roleplay") and the only proboards or jcink site i got was a very old rwby site that's been around forever, but even then, it was the fifth or sixth result. the first result in all four searches though? the disboard list for discord servers for rps for those series.

tl;dr the search engine optimization does not regard proboards or jcink highly, which is really not good for getting new people into the hobby (and, like you said, makes it a whole lot easier for the community to be largely walled off unto itself).

oh hey look, another chance to yell about rp meta, my favorite past-time-

basically, when people say the animanga community is declining, they don't mean that new sites aren't being made and new people aren't joining the community; they're instead more indicating a net loss in terms of the overall number of sites existing and the overall number of people in the community.

vaguely in defense of the other side, animanga is extremely decentralized and has been for a very long time, which means it's very easy for sites to exist in their own little bubbles; however, that being said, it is also important to note that forum-based rping as a whole is in the decline since it's a largely insular hobby by this point (case in point: most rp sites don't tend to try to actively recruit from outside the community anymore) + discord is far-and-away more popular these days thanks to the ~instant gratification~ factor, the lower barrier of entry for newer rpers, and the increased amount of "rp starter pack" genres + fandoms.

animanga itself is also fighting an uphill battle with it being a smaller community compared to rl (meaning small shrinkages have a larger impact), the landscape increasingly polarizing into very large sites that are ~staples of the community~ vs fairly small sites that struggle for activity, and the proboards vs jcink debate dividing the community even further. the increasing prevalence of 18+ sites doesn't help, per se, but it's still far less of a problem for animanga than real life and i personally think the lack of "rp starter pack" genres + fandoms and the much higher barrier of entry for forum-based rping are larger contributors to the lack of younger members than any 18+ rules discouraging them when they're most likely to end up sticking around.

personally, while i do see new sites opening, i also see that existing sites don't tend to last very long if they're not starting out with a decently sized core of members and/or are run by a big name in the community (and even then it's kind of hit or miss), and the overall selection of sites to join feels more lackluster compared to years ago, partially because i'm much more selective about the sites i join now (aka i've shifted to mostly look to fill xyz rp niche i already like vs randomly joining a site because the ad looked neat) but also because there's just not a whole lot of "healthy" turnover in the community (aka your selection is either massive sites that have been around forever or brand new sites that rarely tend to last more than a month or two before sputtering out and it's very rare to find very much in-between that). along similar lines, yeah, i do still meet people i've never met before as far as i'm aware of, but the vast majority of them have been doing this for years now and aren't exactly new to forum-based rping (which i don't mind entirely since uh it's pretty stressful trying to deal with a newbie rper but it's still not healthy for the overall community to not get new blood coming in).

tl;dr it's a macro vs micro situation where like. yeah, you're not wrong, there's new sites being made and new people coming into the community, but if you step back and look at the bigger picture, the overall number of sites is pretty stagnant with turnover being more on smaller sites with v short lifespans over a general occurrence and the vast majority of the overall community are people who are already part of it versus brand new blood from outside the niche.

actually, jcink doesn't automatically push messages to the parent account. (alerts, yes; messages, no)

tl;dr, sites that have the message link automatically direct you to a parent account are doing it via a coding workaround, not via any actual option from jcink itself. not all skins have the workaround on it (especially since the variable that allows it wasn't actually available when html templates were first released + cfs didn't have a corresponding workaround either), so if it's not installed + you don't know how to get it there, you're kind of up a creek without a paddle. even if you do, imo, it's still not a perfect system since the workaround doesn't work on mobile.

imo, sure, the default system for accounts is that alerts push to the parent account + getting a pm will send you an alert (thus meaning you get an alert when a subaccount is messaged) but it's.... definitely not a perfect system, especially if you turn that alert push off + the site has the pm pop-up notification turned off.

honestly, this is like..... the one valid drawback of the ooc account system overall, in my opinion.

don't get me wrong, i think it's fine to not like ooc accounts just because they don't personally work well for you. that's fine! it really is! you do you! i just. wouldn't give the same weight to that personal dislike of them as i would a legitimate system-wide criticism like this.

since like..... the most common "criticism" i see is that ooc accounts "inflate the number of accounts on the site", but that's always seemed like a really weird argument to me since uh. for sites where big character rosters are common, ooc accounts tend to be a drop in the bucket compared to the overall member list. for sites where they're not, it's largely a nonissue, since it's only really ~deceptive~ in smaller sites (where the difference between 10 and 20 members is pretty big) and even then it's not as if it's amazingly difficult to just check the who's who or member directory to get a better idea of what the site size actually is. (not to mention that as more sites start using profile apps, it kind of makes it a moot point because imo how is the 20 active ooc accounts more problematic than the 100+ inactive accounts from archived characters? they're not, that's how.)

but the hassle + inconvenience it is for people who would otherwise only have one account? yeah, no, i don't have a solution for that. there's no way to not make this a problem for them to deal with, not without significantly weakening a lot of those "standardized account to message" benefits (which, for me, is the primary benefit of ooc accounts, not having to play a guessing game for which account to pm if i need to talk to someone about something i don't want to handle through discord). so. yeah.