Posted by Kim on May 20, 2022, 10:30am
Missed this month's office hours? Never fear, here's the Qs and As you missed!do we have a date for Summer Soiree yet?
The summer event will most likely kick off on June 25th, the first weekend after the official start of summer
Awhile ago we had some posts regarding a decrease in activity on the forum. Has RPR had slowdowns in the past?
Yes, although often it doesn't correspond with a decrease in activity on the site overall, just a motion toward people being more active in groups rather than the public forums. I'm seeing something similar right now.
So it's sort of a cycle. Activity on the forums goes up, then goes down, then goes up? While sitewide activity remains more or less the same?
Yeah, generally! Though some years I notice a slow down in overall rate of growth for active site members, wherever they are. Last year was a particularly low one, and this one seems to be going back to more normal levels so far.
Has RPR ever experienced crashes or malfunctions?
Yes, definitely. Some have been hiccups that lasted all of ten seconds and then the server rebooted and carried on normally. We had one single horrific event that wiped out about a week's worth of new characters.
If we credit the source, is it okay to play cannon characters here?
This depends hugely on the cannon. Some IP holders are totally okay with people RPing with their stuff, and others aren't. Most of the time it's fine though.
How has your recovery from this year's Epic Week been going?
Haaaa thank you for asking. I uh. I think I'm mostly back to normal again? I had a good week of being mostly a husk though. My partner and I actually went and got a massage together yesterday, it was the first "bodywork" I'd had done in three years or so. So that was nice.
Are you still mostly in catching up mode, or getting to working on bigger things like your map plans again?
This week was almost entirely catching up on work for clients that were feeling sad and neglected after Epic Week, but this afternoon I started being able to transition back to working on new stuff for my own projects again. I'm really excited to have that trend continue.
I have a question on groups. is there a setting to make a section of a group's forum hidden and invite only?
There's ways to make (epic) group forums be only for certain types of group members, like moderators or gms, but not a way to make a specific list of people who don't share any roles.
And of course you can make group forums be hidden except for members, and then the "invite only" bit is invitation to join the group. But I don't think that's what you're asking about here.
Are there many epic groups? I get that it's something being applied to a whole group, but it's always struck me as being more expensive than the bonuses would be worth, especially to try to maintain on an ongoing basis.
More than you might think!
There are even a few groups out there turning down gifts of epicness because their treasuries are overwhelmed with donations. Blows my mind every time I see it. It's apparently okay with the market, but I do sometimes think it would be nice to have some kind of discount program for groups that need helps out there. Not sure what makes sense. As Milkshake mentions, groups are largely pretty useable without Epicness thoughIs there any updates planned for character widgets?
I do have on my list some QOL updates regarding placing and sizing widgets, but I'm not sure that's what you're asking about?
What are RPR's policies on art, design, or character theft? Do we have any protections for it?
It's not allowed and you can report it!
See Your creative stuff and Other people's creative stuff in the rules: https://www.rprepository.com/help/site-rules#37
And also: https://www.rprepository.com/help/art-theft
what made you want to make this site in the first place? Was it your own desire to find partners in roleplay? Did you just find yourself unhappy with other sites...?
My first push to create the RPR was people using sites like Wix to create super duper slow, non-mobile responsive character websites that they'd link in their Furcadian descriptions. They often featured heavy music players that crashed my laptop. After freezing for the third time and having to reboot because someone made an Old Timey Trying To Be Too Fancy But The Tech Wasn't There Yet character site, in the infomercial version of this story I turned to the camera and cried out, "There's got to be a better way!"
So I started experimenting with making a site that was focused on character profiles and the things RP characters would need.
(Wix has come a long long way since then and no longer crashes any of my devices, but it's still not at all focused on RP characters and RPing!)
If this place isn't your main focus currently and you have comfortable answers, what do the admins all do outside of RPR?
Unfortunately RPR has never made enough money to support me or to hire anyone else, so it's always been sort of a side project (a very very beloved one.) I build websites or online software for clients during the day.
I'm the only admin, but the moderators do a wide range of other things for their day jobs or studies. I won't share for them though. Are there any sites other than RPR you still use for roleplay?
Hmmnn... Almost all of my online RP these days is on the RPR, but I also do a weekly tabletop sessions (Usually D&D but sometimes Star Trek adventures or other systems.) Occasionally I'm in more than one weekly tabletop game, but I try to keep it to just the one these day for my sanity. I used to also go to weekly LARP games pre-pandemic, but haven't felt comfortable going back.
Not even remotely important, but on the Community > Browse Characters page, if you go all the way to the back and work your way forward it's dozens of pages of wasteland of plaintext character pages on the default template, any idea how they all wound up like that?
Default sorting for characters on that page is most recently worked on to least recently worked on; a lot of those characters were created and then literally *never* worked on, so they end up at the bottom of the bin, so to speak.
And back in the day - not even that long ago - we didn't have any such thing as "draft mode," so all those created and then immediately abandoned characters were just instantly public and still are.