Forums » RP Discussion » Character Transfer Pros & Cons

Good afternoon, everyone.

Currently, I am in a bit of a conundrum as to whether to transfer my characters here to leave everything on my Freewebs/Webs site. I have an entire site dedicated to one character, a page dedicated to the other four characters that I have, and a page dedicated to my preferences for role-playing. Aside from that, I have a personal (about the player) website.

I just do not want to transfer everything just for the sake od doing so if it is perfectly good where it is. However, I also do not want to just give everyone a general summary on a page here only to just put a bunch of links on said page linking to my Freewebs/Webs pages...that just seems almost...inconsiderate.

Can anyone provide me with a pro or con to transferring vs. keeping everything where it is?

Maybe if I know some of the unique features of RPR's website builder or just having a page here, that would help me make a more informed decision.

Thank you in advance for your time and consideration.

Respectfully,
Kawmra

As far as the website builder goes, you drag and drop widgets, which give you different options for displaying your character information. For example, there's the basic info widget, which gets you started with the character name, the player and their gender. You can easily add your own fields, race, alignment, favourite flavour of ice cream, whatever you like. There's text, which gives you just that, a gallery, stats, friends, enemies and more. They really let you customise your profile to display the information you want, however you want.

You can use BBcode to help format the pages, insert links, pictures and videos if you so desire. I suggest you create a character and experiment with the widgets to see for yourself.

But it doesn't end with that. You can choose from 61 templates, each one designed to give your profile a different colour scheme, layout and background. Again, you'd have to take a look to see which one takes your fancy but Kim has provided many different styles to suit all sorts of settings and characters.

And if you were to upgrade to an epic account, you can even design your own using CSS.

Take a look at some of the character profiles that already exist, it will help you see what you can do with your own.

We aim to be easier to use than freewebs in as many ways as possible -- but since you've already built your sites, that might not actually be a pro to you, since transferring would mean redoing some work you've already done.

The most glaring difference between the two sites is that freewebs is for building any kind of site, and the RPR is aimed specifically at the needs of RPers.

As such, it has a lot of features a regular website isn't going to have, like being able to make friends or enemies of other characters. And once your character has made some connections (or you as a player have), then the notifications system will strive to keep you and your friends up to date on what each other is doing. The aim is to keep you in touch with other players, and be constantly suggesting ways to get involved and interact. Freewebs will never notify your friends of when you've just received a great new picture of your character, or let them know that you've joined a new RP group they could get involved in too. Unless people are checking your sites for new content every day.

But if your RP character sites are basically complete, and you don't add new images or the like very often, that may not be for you either.

I think the thing that will most endear you to the people here is just participating in the community. Come chat with us and play with us. Then maybe after you've been around awhile, knowing the pros and cons will seem so natural you won't have any trouble deciding.

In my opinion, while the actual process of transferring the information over might take a while, RPR is far faster than Freewebs is and far less likely to 'glitch' with walls of text - RPR can handle pages worth, and in my experience, Freewebs usually tends to start breaking or slowing down after about four block paragraphs.

RPR also has all of the friend, enemy, stats and so on widgits that mean that not everything has to be typped out manually - add, click and then expand if you want to.

Plus there is the ability to roleplay on the forum itself, as the character via a drop-down menu rather than using images and a name to denote what one is using.

For me, the biggest 'pro' of all, is being able to have all your characters under one account. I suppose you could do that with freewebs... but this is considerably more user friendly, more interactive, not to mention a friendly forum full of friendly faces you can talk to. Freewebs, compared to RPR, seems to be sloppier and not as well designed... plus, I prefer all the templates they have here over any free ones freewebs may offer.

Thank you all for your input; it has helped a great deal *smiles*.

With respect to the custom websites that Epic members are permitted to create and share, can anyone offer me an example of such? I have began to play around with the website-building system here, and I do like it being more tailored to role-playing, but I also am the type that enjoys knowing all options available, hence my question regarding custom site examples.

It may take a bit of time to get things transferred and updated, but I definitely plan on doing so as soon as possible...if for no other reason than I would rather not give you all a bunch of links to have to go through *laughs*.

Thank you all for taking the time to give consideration to my question.

Respectfully,
Kawmra

If it helps, I created a custom template for my Star Trek Online character, Galek Dor. I wanted his profile to look like the LCARS computer displays you see in the show.

Glad to help and it's good to see you trying out the features

Epic Members have no ads on their pages, more character slots to work with, and they are given full control of the CSS of their character's pages. If they want it. The site still does the "heavy lifting" of generating the HTML for the pages, and you still use the same easy editing tools. You can just change the look of it drastically to nearly anything you want.

Galek Dor is indeed a great example, he wanted to have a Star Trek layout, and that's what he made. And I believe that he wanted other Star Trek characters to be able to use the layout as well, so he has set the template to public, and it will appear in the template library of any other Epic members to select, just as easily as they would one of the regular templates.

Smile has made herself an Alien themed template, but I believe that she considers it her own personal style and has chosen not to share it.

So you can go either way, if you want a unique look just for yourself, or you want to make something you don't mind sharing.

That was indeed the plan. You never know when someone else might want to post their Star Trek character, so I wanted to make the template available for them.

It took a few days to get it right but admittedly my CSS was a bit rusty at the time. When you create a template, Kim has prepared an excellent guide to all the various sections of the profile, so it's easy to find out what you need to put into your stylesheet.

*nods* In that case, I think that I am going to try at least 1 month of the Epic membership. I like the free templates, but they do not offer the look that I am going for for at least the characters that I have in mind. I am one of those that prefer the "look" of the profile to fit the character in some way, so paying $5 to try out the customization for a month is well worth it for me.

Thank you, Kim and Darth, for posting examples of custom sites for me to view. I greatly appreciate the help.

Respectfully,
Kawmra

You're most welcome!

I just thought of two questions regarding website customization with the Epic membership.

1. Can music clips be added?
2. What are limitations on images in terms of copyright?

In reference to the second question, I have read the Rules and Policies section of RPR, but I am admittedly not certain what would be considered appropriate provided that I give credit to the person who has done the picture.

I will post a few pictures to demonstrate my point. I would appreciate if someone could tell me if I would be permitted to post these here as representations of a character if I gave due credit to the artist.

Link 1
Link 2
Link 3

Thank you for your consideration.

Respectfully,
Kawmra

In answer to your questions:

Music clips are specifically disallowed for two reasons. One, we consider it rude to play sound at someone who only wanted to read RP information and didn't realize they were going to potentially get their eardrums blasted out by music they didn't request, maybe don't like, and probably conflicts with whatever else they are already playing because these days computers are nonstop media stations. And two, because most music that people choose is generally copyrighted, and we don't want to deal with the copyright issues of the rabid music industry.

As a compromise, we added Youtube tags. That lets Youtube handle all the copyright concerns, and makes it so that if someone wants to hear your character's theme song, they can click the play button when they have had a chance to turn off their own copy of iTunes and adjust their speakers and are ready. Hopefully that makes sense. Information on how to embed a youtube song here


As to pictures, it is impossible for us to really monitor whether the pictures people have up are legal or not unless the artist finds you using their images and complains. If you know the artist of the pictures and want to be your best internet self, I would encourage you to find some contact info for them and drop them a note explaining that you want to use their imagery for a RP character. Many artists will be happy to give you permission so long as you give them credit. Especially if it was just a generic pretty picture and not a character design of something they consider their own unique RP character.

There's a pervasive belief on the internet that just linking back to where an image was taken from is enough to make it legal to use it. In fact, really all it accomplishes is informing people of where the image was stolen from.

Because we really can't check every image uploaded, we have to leave it up to your conscience how thoroughly you want to fact-check your own images and seek permission where appropriate. Let me know if any of this is unclear.

*smiles* Good morning, Kim.

Thank you for your reply. What information you have given makes perfect sense and needs no clarification.

With respect to the music, I am glad that you all deal with that aspect utilizing YouTube...it makes things easier for the reasons that you have stated as I am one of those people that would rather read and not be bothered with music in the process, unless it is my own. When I did have music on my Freewebs/Webs site, it was always lower-key music and I let me people know that there would be music. I will not even bother with the music situation here to avoid the hassle.

That said, I hope that you have a good weekend. Again, thank you, Kim.

Please be well and stay safe.

Respectfully,
Kawmra