Posted by Kim on August 27, 2010, 9:06pm
Today is the dawn of a new and glorious era of featured characters. A time in history when you need only to click the "Nominate" link on the toolbar of a character's profile to nominate it for review by a wise and wonderful panel of experienced players.To be eligible for being featured, a character must:
- Have an original icon. It can't be taken from some copyrighted source you don't have permission to use.
- Have a tagline. Oh yeah, everyone gets a tag line now! These are short, 200-characters-or-less blurbs that summarize your character, and will show up on browse and search pages even if your character isn't featured. You can add yours through the new character settings page.
- Be original. It's okay if your character has some similarities to existing characters from movies, books or other media, but they can't be an exact clone.
- Be appropriate for teen and up audiences.
- Have a "complete" profile that demonstrates effort Check your spelling, make sure you don't have blank sections, organize your information well.
The link to nominate a character will not appear until the character has both an icon and a tagline. I recommend everyone go and set their taglines right away. It will help other players to find your characters.
Why was time spent on writing a whole new featured character system?
In the past, all featured characters were "hard coded" into the site, meaning every time we wanted to add one a site update was required with a whole new batch of code. It was slow and annoying and it made puppies cry.
But the real bottleneck was yours truly. As previously mentioned, I spend a lot of time working on the site, and every minute I was reviewing character profiles was time I couldn't spend building new features and vice versa. The new system should remove both problems, making adding featured characters faster and easier.
I also believe it will be more fair, since there are now more judges with a more diverse range of opinions and RP backgrounds reviewing the nominations.
Remember: Not all characters that are nominated can be featured, even though all of your characters are 100% certified fan-freaking-tastic.
Comments
Chocolate cupcakes? 
*drool*
*drool*
Delicious, delicious taglines, and excellent, excellent updates! Thank you so much for these changes. They are splendiferous and made of chocolate cupcakes.
Oh hey, I thought about suggesting a tagline type thing a while back, but I forgot. xD Yay that they snuck up on me.
*submits two characters* I hope they get picked sometime 
Yay for taglines!
I'm sure the Featured system will soon be home to a neat new pile of characters, too.
I'm sure the Featured system will soon be home to a neat new pile of characters, too.
Pyrroglaux
August 31, 2010
7:53am
I'm looking forward to seeing more featured characters! 8D