Forums » Suggestions & Development Discussion » Multiple characters in post as

I put up my "3 stooges" and was going to make a trick or treat topic, but I can only select one of them. I feel that this feature will be useful all over the site, if somebody is writing for more than one in a post. Maybe up to 4?

I'll still make a trick or treat for them with the current system though.

Unfortunately, this is not something I will be adding. It creates so many fringe cases with notifications, the mind staggers.

Oh, I like this suggestion and can't help but be curious - are the difficulties with this something you can go into more Kim? I'd be cool to brainstorm potential alternatives to the concept if feasible, 'cause this is a feature that would seriously be useful to me and almost something I need these days.

I find it an increasingly frequent occasion for more than one of my characters to show up in the same scene together. It's awkward to post for them separately, however - so I do tend to blend their dialogues and actions into more concise posts, but can technically only post for one of the characters doing this as far as notifications are concerned.

It's not possible to maybe attach another character to a post like a 'ping' in other forums without notification chaos? I think the only current option to give people notifications on character activities properly right now is to post an empty 'ghost' post from the secondary character(s).

Maybe make it so only the first character creates a notification?

Perhaps if the additional characters were in there as like...quote boxes with display pictures and names.

Maybe you can add up to X characters into a post, but with one main character as the default poster - the rest are linked to their profiles at the top of the post, so that other participants can check out the profiles easily without the poster having to link over and over?

Kind of like putting a quote at the top like
Panne's post goes here. She's the only character who generates notifications because she's the lead in the RP.

But what if someone had friended or "followed" the second character? They wouldn't see a notification that they wanted.

True.

How big of a problem is having multiple notifications though? Is it like, it would be hard to program in, or what? You might be able to combine them into a single notification. Like:

"Bob, Susie, and Jimmy(all played by SuperDuperPerson) posted in the topic Zombie Apocalypse RP."

I tried my best to make it the format of the notifications used here xD

Implementing this feature would involve redesigning the database for at least the forums, and refactoring huge amounts of code all throughout the site that uses that information. We're talking months of work to make it happen.

Okay, I understand. But if enough people show interest, it sounds doable. I can manage until it happens, if at all.

I think Kim means months of full time work (she works on RPR in her free time next to her full time job!). It's the equivalent of tearing down a whole block in a city and then rebuilding not only the buildings, but also redoing the utility infrastructure for the entire city (think of electricty, water, sewage etc.) to make the new buildings up to standard and usable. It's not so much if enough people want it, but more that it's too much work for a single programmer when there are more requested features to be made.

I don't necessarily mean 8 hour work days, but I do mean "full" as in "all the time that I'm able to devote to the RPR", so there wouldn't be anything else being worked on for the RPR for those months.

That cost for the benefit just doesn't make sense to me right now.

What if the player just embedded the icons of the replying character at the top of the post..? That would indicate which characters were involved in the reply, without having to add a really complex hard to program feature that only some people would really use. You could either embed an icon, then have what that character said, then another icon, and what the second character said.. Or just have a little row of icons at the top of your post and write for everyone in one reply.

If you regularly have two or three characters in the same rp, just save their combined icons in imgur or some other similar thing.

Maybe something like this:

Pearl - Your post goes here. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.

Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

Sed ut perspiciatis unde omnis iste natus error sit voluptatem accusantium doloremque laudantium, totam rem aperiam, eaque ipsa quae ab illo inventore veritatis et quasi architecto beatae vitae dicta sunt explicabo.

---

If you have a blank copy of the code it's easy to insert, and you can just quote your own posts for quick fetching.

Easy and clean, yes? It's relatively little effort to accomplish something very nice and neat, if you don't want to post as a new character in a separate post. People will not be notified of those involved characters, but they'll just have to live with it (or follow the main character you RP with).

It's all well and good to post what characters are involved in a solitary post or at the top of the thread, I already do this for posting logs that came outside of RPR, but it doesn't do anything regarding notifications - which I believe was the main concern...? I might have someone watching me and reading through threads enough to realize who is involved in what, but for someone who perhaps just has a character connection they're watching or who might be looking out for a specific character in their feeds, it really solves nothing.

Thanks for the insight though Kim! A shame it'd take so much work, but very good to know.

If the major modifications were done to the forums, sending out the multiple notifications and combining them would be a much lesser issue in comparison to it. Which is not to say it's a small project either, but all things are relative.

I've been lurking off and on this thread. And while I had no input at the time I had been keeping up, I thought did just occur to me.

I remember signing up on LiveJournal back when that felt relevant. I thought one of the really cool features of it that appealed to a lot of people that role played on the platform was the fact that you could have up to... I think it was twenty different icons that could convey different emotions (since I also think LiveJournal let you create multiple pennames so that you could RP as different characters more efficiently).

Now... one of the things I was thinking was that perhaps what could instead be implemented was an icon system that allowed switching between the ones you get uploaded. Since RPR allows for multiple characters to be uploaded to one profile page, it could also work for that.

I would suggest, perhaps, a ten icon upload limit per profile -- maybe the opportunity to purchase more like character slots or profile pages.

With this, people with multiple characters to a profile could choose the most relevant character portrait that they have, or if their character feels a particular way in the RP, they can choose the icon that feels most relevant. I feel that it would also be down there with the whole "Include a dice roll with this post", except it would just be "Choose character portrait for this post".

Addendum edit: I also realised that this could potentially eliminate the want or desire to create separate pages for characters that aren't typically seen without one another played by a particular person. If they can bundle up the characters and simply change the character portrait to portray who is in it (perhaps even throwing in an animated switching icon to for those that are replying with two characters or three, etc.), then it seems like a decent enough alternative to this particular conundrum.

Just throwing this out here as a coder.

The database could append some sort of code piece on the end of the body of the post that tells the GUI that the next post should be grouped together. Ergo, making it less a database problem and more of a GUI problem.

The GUI would still need to add an interface for quickly and easily breaking up multiple posts (Such as a small "Add another character" button or something) and then when rendering the forums check the very end for that code bit that says "Group the next post with mine". When doing tasks such as adding/deleting/etc, you'd need to also "group" which could pose some logistical problems depending on how the database is setup, but the end result would possibly be some performance hits when editing large batch/multi-character posts.

I think this wouldn't be trivial from a coding perspective, but it's not a massive change to the database. With that approach, it may be a more worthwhile endeavor.

EDIT: Another logistics problem I just considered depends on how you handle pages of data. The grouping would affect the traditional "post count" and may be an issue, but nothing that couldn't be worked around with some clever data processing techniques that would double as faster loading between pages for the end user.

Obviously, this would cause a small performance hit client-side, since the scripts could all be handled in JavaScript. I think this hit would be negligible (within the amount of time that users simply would not notice) if the number of characters was restricted to less than ten.

Though, it could be an incentive to adopt a more flexible and robust database system as well. For things like forum posts, I tend to prefer a Firebase approach since parameters can be added or dismissed as needed without wildly impacting performance.

EDIT2: After further consideration, some modifications to the forum's body field placed in the database could be useful. You could make one post that groups them together in a special JSON blob. Then parse them out GUI side (with negligible end-user impact). It wouldn't disrupt the paging issues I was speaking of before, either. Then, when you're sending notifications, turn them into fake notifications that are sparked. Further, you could treat the author area as a JSON array and parse those entities as well.

Anyway, there's a lost of interesting approaches to this issue that I don't think would be impossible or necessarily not worth the time/effort. Just some food for thought!