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Roleplay Mismanagement


Sarki Soliloquy
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The experience of participating in the Roleplay forum within Creative has been clunky at best, noisome at worst. Regardless of the low activity rate compared to other boards, there's two problems that make navigating the board stressful, as well as hold its growth back:

  1. The spam of RP request threads. Frequently, someone will come out of nowhere & create vague threads soliciting partners for roleplay or invites off-site or a Discord server. These usually consist of one-liner OPs mentioning tenuous 'looking fors' or 'can dos' (even a few instances of implied ERP/NSFW). Not only do these threads lack the substance to organize on-site games (unlike interest checks or signups), but frequent users have grown so weary of & mods have not locked these threads, they often end up with no replies - flooding the front page as the few active games struggle to stay on top of listings. I've heard several active RPers complain about this spam privately, yet seem too jaded to address it.
    I suggest a crackdown to lock these inactive topics, outlawing them from being made in a sticky, along with a sticky to explain the resources & conduct of the board in order to foster healthy, on-site user activity. It might even be most efficient to consolidate my last two points into one sticky.
  2. Revamp subforums so specific types of topics can be easier to find & traffic. Currently, its Chat & Feedback apart from the free-for-all of the main board. However, both forums have been nearly 2 years & 1 year dead respectively, only showing vital signs with the newest threads within 3 months subsequently dead. Whereas the main board should contain at least game threads only, all activity has been cluttered onto its front page. Besides RP request spam, I've seen OoCs kept up outside of the Chat board (Realms of the Cosmic Mirror, Fate/stay night 6th Holy Grail War), duplicate OoCs across boards (World of Light), interest checks consolidating into signups & OoCs (Tales of Makaleth), etc.
    I've previously reported a few OoCs (may or may not be the ones I've just mentioned) for move to Chat, but to no avail. The most immediate solution would be to move all active OoCs to Chat. Otherwise, Feedback is obsolete with most games moving even their OoCs to Discord, but the board could be repurposed for resources, tutorials, etc. Additional board(s) for signups, interest checks, etc. should be made since there's enough supply - something to coordinate games for the main board.

These two problems are a symptom of a lack of clarity more than they are of low activity - frankly, which I take for an excuse not to at least clean up the board. Yes, there may bigger fish to fry & less mods to take care of the load. But that doesn't mean one part of the forum can be neglected like this forever. There's a necessity to have an RP board apart from forum games, and there's more than enough users who routinely visit even just for our RP community, who want to see it flourish.

Have the staff known about these issues? Are they deliberating on how to address these issues, and if not, why? What should we do about this?

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I'm looking into it presently. I used to be a vaguely active member of that section, so am hopefully not too out of step with its culture.

The 'looking for RP' spam is a very evident issue, and easily enough fixed by having a centralised, pinned thread. The rest I'll look over the next few days, but hopefully the effect is to clear out a few cobwebs at the very least.

Update: Did a bunch of shit without asking anyone. We'll see if it works.

Edited by Parrhesia
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The requests hadn't seemed quite like spam, given that they were, roughly speaking, on topic. That said, since they were generally doomed to failure, it probably is better to consolidate. Your point about the more thinly veiled erp posts is valid though, and perhaps it does need to be explicitly mentioned that the roleplay forum is designed for coordinating roleplays that are to be carried out on the boards. I don't feel we should necessarily foster connecting or organizing things that will be carried out primarily in discord, private, or otherwise off-site. There is room for broader discussion on this matter however, if people disagree.

The feedback forum has a bit of history, tbh, and imho, none of it really good. It was a solution to a problem that didn't exist, and when the community tried using it for things that made sense instead of its nominal purpose, there was some heavy-handed blowback. It really is a dinosaur now, and was never really relevant. I've pulled the trigger on that, since the mod team was in agreement.

As far as the difference between interest check and sign-up, I don't see the point necessarily in segregating the two. Actual OOC chatter for an established game should have its own place though (read separate thread, not separate forum), I can agree. I think most groups quickly tend to find out that real-time chat formats worked better for this, which is why board OOC has been so dead these days, so I'm not sure it's really worth splintering off separate boards for the different kinds of OOC threads, so imo they can all coexist in the one forum. That said, to help clarify this, I'll rename "Chat" to a slightly more descriptive "General OOC", but if anyone has a better suggestion for a name, give a shout. I'll probably start slowly migrating signups threads from the past over to it over the weekend. Keeping the main board itself to strictly all IC seems like it could be worthwhile. I don't know if it will help foster activity or ferment excitement, but I don't think it could hurt.

Edited by Balcerzak
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Thank you two so much for sprucing up Roleplay. This was long overdue, so hopefully the new format is all there needs to resolve these issues. (Lovin' the fresh stickies too, and I hope to get use out of some soon.)

Going forward, should the main board be IC only, with even interest checks & signups relegating to General OOC? Given which threads survived front page, I would err that the latter is the case.
Otherwise, do you think a sticky outlining general conduct on the main page is necessary for order (i.e., emphasizing in-site only, RP requests go to Parrhesia's "Looking for RP")?

On 7/26/2019 at 12:41 AM, Balcerzak said:

I don't feel we should necessarily foster connecting or organizing things that will be carried out primarily in discord, private, or otherwise off-site. There is room for broader discussion on this matter however, if people disagree. 

I concur, as it seems restricting services such as Discord kinda goes beyond the point of consolidating threads onto the board. So long as its not advertising something primarily off-site, I don't see an issue. This could be something to clarify in an additional general conduct sticky nevertheless.

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No worries. Sometimes we get used to things being the way they are, as they just accumulate cobwebs over the years. Sometimes it does just take someone bringing attention to an issue to get it fixed.

I'm basically neutral on whether signup threads go into the main or not. If there's a consensus, I'll enforce it. I do like the theory of interest check thread becomes signup becomes OOC discussion, but as things stand, it's not active enough that we really need to compress threads as much as possible.

Yeah, I'd been wondering about a ruleset as well. Unless some more established community figure wants to write one up for pinning, I'll probably hack one out this week.

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So long as you include clauses for what sort of threads & requests are permissible (e.g., no 1-on-1 RP requests), & keeping games primarily on-site (ergo, you can have Discords, but at least the main thread is required), I think I'll be satisfied.

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