Posted by Kim on November 14, 2015, 2:10pm
This month was packed with thoughtful, interesting and adorable questions. Here are the answers for those of you who couldn't make it to office hours, but still thirst for knowledge!The new tag system for characters... I was wondering if there is or could be a way to search these specific tags and even custom ones to help find people and characters that share similar if not the same interest.
Yes! That is very much a planned feature. I wanted to launch it in stages, with the first one being just the ability to use tags personally, so that when site-wide search of tags rolls out, there will actually be results to be found.
Since the update, I've noticed people with only some of their characters displaying on their profile. For example, they might have 2 characters showing, then a note saying "Click to see all 8 characters" How do I do this?
You can control which characters appear on your profile by adding them to the Looking For RP category. This is a site-wide category that everyone gets by default -- I figured that if you had some characters you particularly wanted to play with, I should help focus attention on them.
Some of the site-wide tags such as LFRP may gain wider usage in the future, such as searching through everyone's characters instead of one person's. I'm sure there will be opt-out settings for those who don't want to get more invites to games, but yeah, this was sort of a first run at something I hope will gain wider usage!
With the new character sorting feature, is there a way to remove a character from a category?
Sure, you can absolutely remove a character from a category. Click the pencil next to their name, and then go to "Settings". All of their categories are listed there and can be checked/unchecked at your leisure.
Your work on categories will be saved automatically, so all you have to do is tick the relevant boxes.
Will there be a way to change a post from 'Don't subscribe', 'No emails' or 'Email me' when editing?
SINDragon, it's not on my list right now, but those controls are available when replying or when viewing a topic, as well as through your settings.
What are community discussions?
I guess community discussions would be any group of members getting together to talk about a topic, but I can think of a few times we've hosted some "official" community discussions around here.
A good example would be about two years ago, we hosted a series of six(?) discussion topics in which we crowded 20+ interested members into this chat and talked about topics such as how to deal with God Moding, how to run an effective RP Group, and whether or not length should be counted as a criterion for quality in writing RP posts.
At other times, we've had less real-time community discussions in which I'd put forth potential decisions and ask for feedback, such as how we should handle requests for adult RP on the site.
What does 'FOBETEO' mean?
The Festival of Being Excellent To Each Other. It's our non-denominational winter "holiday," in which we reflect on how IC fun is only possible with healthy OOC relationships and communities. We usually mark it with events like kudos drives, or series of articles about how to prevent drama, strengthen friendships, and work on interpersonal skills useful to holding a group together long term.
Do we still host those writing workshops we used to have here in the chat? I remember that the people who attended them always said they enjoyed them.
If you're talking about the community discussions on various aspects of RP, we haven't since the original set two years ago, though we've gotten an insane amount of mileage out of the articles those discussions generated. But! Like I was just saying, we've been discussing holding another round of discussions in early 2016. If you have suggestions for topics you'd like to see discussed, I'm all ears. Tell your friends to submit suggestions as well!
Here's some of the write-ups of those discussions, if you want to reminisce!
The responsibility of all RPers
Writing For RP
Godmoding
Running a rp group
Kickbutt character profiles
Taglines. Sometimes the tip of the day says they show up in character searches, but on RPR all I see of them is on the Most/Least Popular/A-Z menus of the browsers. Am I doing something wrong?
Thank you for reminding me -- you're not doing anything wrong, the taglines used to show up in searches, but that design has changed for the time being. It may go back to including them in future. It IS still on browse pages.
Are the new character categories gonna be added as filter in the Browse Characters page?
Yes! That is definitely coming down the pike!
Oh yeah, Kim, what about the Multi-headed dragon? Haven't heard 'bout them in awhile.
I haven't received any reports about the Many Headed Cyborg Dragon in awhile, myself! I'll have to write to the ranch and ask for an update.
Can someone clue me in on this dragon business?
As background, you have to know that during Epic Week, there was a mini browser-based RPG combat system on site that required tactical coordination of multiple members to repel an invading army of goblins. The boss battle was a many headed cyborg dragon.
However, I received a number of really concerned PMs from members during the boss battle (which lasted two days!) from people who felt the dragon had been mistreated by the goblins, and wanted me to promise that it would be given proper medical and psychological care after the battle was over. So, I gave my word and the dragon was taken away to a dragon ranch for care after the war.
We got some updates about it as the months passed:
Dragon update #1
Dragon update #2
In a rare moment of seriousness from me: Kim, do you feel that RPR has been a source of joy for you over the years? If you could go back in time when you first started it, for any reason, would you tell yourself to do anything different? Or let it all play out the same. Just wondering.
Oh boy! What a question. I would definitely say that the RPR is a source of joy for me. Are there things I would do differently? I need to think about that a minute.
I think anything I might have told myself to do differently, I only know to do differently because of the RPR. It's taught me SO MUCH.
Pushing the capabilities of the site has made me a better programmer.
Dealing with the complexities - and occasional complications - of the community has made me a better moderator and sometimes I think a better person in general.
I mean, the theme of the year was modernization, and I've been going back and rebuilding existing features to be more robust, modern and convenient. Maybe if I went back in time I'd tell myself all those lessons so I could do it that way from the get-go.
But I suspect in another five years I'll find myself updating and modernizing again with all new lessons learned.I am rambling now. I'm not sure if I am answering the question. But yes, the RPR is a constant source of joy and pride. It's really what I wish I could spend all my time on, more than anything else. ONE DAY it'll be my "day job".
Did you always want to be a programmer?
No. Goodness no. My father started trying to teach me to program when I was 3, and really got serious about teaching me when I was 8. I was a little interested in making games (my visual basic masterpiece "stick figure jumps to pick up floating key" will one day be recognized for the genius that it is!), but mostly loathed the tedium and felt that it was incompatible with my desire to be an artist/animator, which is what I thought my ultimate career destiny would be all the way up through most of college.
As a young adult, something clicked, and I just started programming. I could not even tell you why. I mostly built little toy websites until I got a serious bee in my bonnet about how awful Wix/Facebook character profiles were and decided to do better for everyone.
All the concepts I learned at a super young age turned out to make it really smooth sailing to wrap my head around programming when I finally decided I wanted to, and at this point I'm a professional programmer.
Has RPR reached the level of being self-sufficient yet? Or are we getting there?
RPR has been self-sufficient for the last several years, and even makes enough extra for me to occasionally commission artists or designers for news post images, new character template designs, etc. It's not yet to the point where it can pay me anything (to say nothing of our other tireless team members, who definitely deserve something for the many hours they put in every week), but I remain hopeful that day is on the horizon.
And it's a good thing, too, because RPR now requires a big expensive server. We have LONG since outgrown cheap shared hosting!
Why doesn't backslash work on the site?
Backslashes are used to "escape" special characters that might have actual programmatical meaning when information is sent from place to place to prevent accidental errors and certain kinds of malicious hacking. When transmitting information from your computer to ours, backslashes are added in front of any other character that might have other meanings to a computer, such as quotation marks.
When we receive the information, we then strip backslashes back out, otherwise your posts would constantly be littered with them. As such, if you type your own backslash, it ends up stripped out with all the rest because there's no way for us to tell what you added and what was added in transit.
It never used to matter before emoticons, because people never used backslashes when writing anything for human consumption. But now when using browser-based communications, it becomes obvious.
There's a neat trick inherent in it, though. Since the meaning of a backslash is "The character that comes after me is JUST THAT, a character, not a symbol with special meaning," you can steal the backslashes' special meaning and prevent it from being stripped by putting a backslash in front of a backslash. The first backslash will be stripped as a "special" character, and the second will remain as merely a backslash with no other special meaning.
Comments
\o/
I wasn't there for the bulk of it (or maybe I was, I dunno haha) but I had a pretty rad time. This office hour stuff was a good idea, Kim. Also, another big thanks for answering all my questions. You go, girl.
Derglet
November 20, 2015
3:13am
And that makes this the best Office Hour Highlight yet.