Posted by Kim on June 19, 2016, 1:30pm
Here's a roundup of questions that were asked during this month's office hours.
I'm going to kick off office hours with a question that is burning in many people's minds: how is the progress on the 2016 jumble going?
Haha, I KNEW that would be the first question. I work on it daily -- it is SHOCKINGLY challenging this year. I keep thinking I have the final jumble, and then I try to squeeze in *just one more character* that is so good I don't want to leave out, and then I have to move everything around to try and make it work, and then I try to add just ONE MORE, and then suddenly I realize all the entries are back in and it's just pure chaos, have to make a ton of cuts, and then it all starts over again.
The entries this year were top notch. It is the best problem to have: an overwhelm of excellence.
That said, I am going to promise to have it completed by Sunday. If Monday comes and you don't have a new homepage genre jumble, you have my permission to blow up my PM inbox with reminders.
Let me stipulate: Monday in the UTC -8 timezone. If you live in the future compared to me, please wait until I catch up with you.
I know epic members get to completely customize their stuff, will there ever be something like that for free members? Not super customization but something as simple as changing the background or something?
Great questions! There are no plans at present to offer specific customizations of character templates to free members, though we are continuing to slowly and steadily expand our library of fully designed templates that are available to everyone.
That said, a "simple" customizer for character templates IS in the work for Epic members who want to customize their character profiles but don't want to have to learn CSS. It will function in a similar fashion to the custom color/texture picker already available for groups of every kind.
Also are there more rpr fonts? Like the ability to change what sit your personal rpr renders in?
Yes indeedy! You can use BBCode like so:
Code:
[font=Arial]Here is some text[/font]
Now, whether a font will appear for other people reading it will depend on whether that font is installed on the other person's computer, so it is best to put a coma separated list of fonts in there. Starting with the best font, the one you most truly want, and then followed by some acceptable replacements. The viewer's computer will use the first one on the list that it's able to.
So if I really want comic sans but I don't know if you have it, and there are other fonts I like to, I might write..
Code:
[font=comics sans, impact, times new roman, arial]Here is some text[/font]
Hmmm would it be complicated to add a drop down menu of supported fonts?
It would actually be impossible, because we don't personally support any fonts. Support is 100% up to whether the viewer has it installed on their computer or not. Since I have no way of knowing whether someone has a 10,000 font design library, or two fonts installed on their mobile phone, I can't promise that any font will render for anyone. In fact, the site itself uses a comma separated list of fonts for the main body font (Cambria), in case some viewers don't have the font I wanted.
The way around this limitation is with in-browser fonts like Google Fonts. We only load one of these on the main site (Redressed), because making people load temporary in-browser fonts can slow down the loading of a page.
We do allow epic members to load in a couple of google fonts on their custom templates for designy typographic control, though!
So when it's somebody's birthday, there's that little alert, right? And then you can choose to send back birthday wishes or give a gift. Except wouldn't giving a gift be giving it out of your inventory? I mean - and I know this sounds silly but after having sent so many birthday hats it's hilarious how useful this would be - couldn't the give a gift option go to a page where you chose to either give a gift from the store or your inventory?
I'll be totally up front with you. That link was put there before the RPR had an inventory system. Now that we do have an inventory system, I still don't have much interest in changing the birthday link, both because not many people have extra gifties laying around in their inventory anyway, but also because the site just straight up needs cash.
As a group owner advertising and recruiting is difficult with a small window of actually being seen. Have you thought of a ticker advertising different groups on the home page?
Not on the home page, no, but certainly on the community page. Increasing the methods available to group owners to effectively publicize their active (or soon to be active!) groups has definitely been on my mind a lot.
Okay so I write a paragraph about what my character does say ending in an attack. I can roll the d20 in that same paragraph when i send it. Before the other character can react they have to roll a dice to see what happens. I was wondering if there was a way it could do one person rolls and then it rolls for the other person automatically, to kinda clean it up.
Not automatically, no, but you could certainly roll for each other if you know one another's stats.
rolled 1d20 and got a natural 5. After the modifier of +2, got 7
Kim rolls to attack Danny
rolled 1d20 and got a natural 20. After the modifier of +3, got 23
Danny attempts to dodge
You can include up to ten die rolls per post, and each one can have its very own modifiers. Just press the "add a dice roll" button again to add another roll.
what are your dreams/ projections on the rpr looking forward, Kim?
That is a great question. The thing that always, always tops my list is being able to work on the RPR full time (right now, I and all the mods are unpaid volunteers, regardless of how many hours we work or what features I put out.) Pretty much everything else I dream about for the RPR would benefit from my being able to give it my full attention, all day.
But within the RPR, one of the things that really has my interest of late is finding ways to connect people with more RP that suits *their* tastes, faster and more reliably.
This could be everything from simple stuff like looking at what categories a person has placed a particular character into (sci fi, adventure and looking for RP, for example,) then finding posts on the Looking for RP forums that have their genre sliders set up in a way that reflects those interests and showing those suggestions right on that character's management page.
It also extends to more data-miney type behaviors, such as comparing the average length of IC posts, or the average speed of posting, or the style of posting used between members, and attempting to pair people who seem to have similar styles or interests.
I may not be aware of this but is there any way to save a forum topic as a text document for those of us who like to document/ rewrite stories in narrative form?
Not at present! Just good ol' copy & paste. I can certainly see the usefulness of such a feature, though.
Do you feel there will ever be a point where rpr is too big to handle, as in too many members? I think the current member count is somewhere around 13,500 give or take 100.
As of this writing, there's 13,363 registered user accounts on the site. I can easily envision a time when the membership becomes too large to be handled by the current team size. These last few months have seen a marked increase in the demands for moderator intervention.
At the moment, my method of coping has been to aggressively upgrade the tools that are available to the mods. Everything from better tools for automatically monitoring the site for words or phrases that often appear right before a storm, making user reporting easier for situations that are too complex for a simple filter to catch, and simpler tools to quickly correct the most common problems. Better tools certainly helps a small team to handle more, but if the site continues to grow, there will come a day when the team needs to expand also.
I've noticed the mod team here is usually pretty down to earth and rarely bring the hammer down unless absolutely necessary - which is good, it promotes an aura of friendship compared to one of an authoritarian nature and promotes kinship with 'normal' members. What qualities do you look at in a potential mod prospect/replacement? Alternatively, if [mod here] left the team for [reason], and you deemed no current community member capable of dealing with an increased load of responsibility, how would you handle it? Would you bring in outside help? This question isn't meant to ruffle feathers (if it does), I'm just genuinely curious. If you do not feel comfortable responding to this, that's fine as well.
This is a fantastic question. In the past, I largely looked at past moderator experience, community involvement (here and elsewhere), and, if they were available, sought out examples of the nominated person interacting with demanding or prickly members to see if they were able to keep their cool and be polite in the face of not so niceness. In the future, we might come up with a more definitive set of interview questions, asking people to judge disputes between fictional members who might both have a point. Tagging an image for nudity is pretty easy; It's the abstract interpersonal issues that demand the most from a mod. Being 18+ is also a solid requirement, given aforementioned constant interactions with nudity and beyond, swearing, and normally lovely people showing their worst sides under stress.
There are a lot of members out there who exhibit the qualities that I would look for, so I'd be less worried about finding such a person and more worried that their organizational and emotional talents have placed them in such high demand that they would be too busy to accept a position with the RPR. It's an ongoing challenge even with existing mods leading busy lives!
How's your favorite squishy piggy doing? I haven't heard about the Truffle in a while.
He is getting rather fat! His hutch has grass-access and he doesn't just eat the grass, he strips the lawn to the dirt. He is very pleased with himself.
Comments
Since I work nights (especially now doing 6 nights a week for a bit), and can't ever make it to these things, I had some minor questions for you, Kim. Answer at your leisure.
Do you feel there will ever be a point where rpr is too big to handle, as in too many members? I think the current member count is somewhere around 13,500 give or take 100.
I've noticed the mod team here is usually pretty down to earth and rarely bring the hammer down unless absolutely necessary - which is good, it promotes an aura of friendship compared to one of an authoritarian nature and promotes kinship with 'normal' members. What qualities do you look at in a potential mod prospect/replacement? Alternatively, if [mod here] left the team for [reason], and you deemed no current community member capable of dealing with an increased load of responsibility, how would you handle it? Would you bring in outside help? This question isn't meant to ruffle feathers (if it does), I'm just genuinely curious. If you do not feel comfortable responding to this, that's fine as well.
Finally, how's your favorite squishy piggy doing? I haven't heard about the Truffle in a while. He r doin gud i hop.
Do you feel there will ever be a point where rpr is too big to handle, as in too many members? I think the current member count is somewhere around 13,500 give or take 100.
I've noticed the mod team here is usually pretty down to earth and rarely bring the hammer down unless absolutely necessary - which is good, it promotes an aura of friendship compared to one of an authoritarian nature and promotes kinship with 'normal' members. What qualities do you look at in a potential mod prospect/replacement? Alternatively, if [mod here] left the team for [reason], and you deemed no current community member capable of dealing with an increased load of responsibility, how would you handle it? Would you bring in outside help? This question isn't meant to ruffle feathers (if it does), I'm just genuinely curious. If you do not feel comfortable responding to this, that's fine as well.
Finally, how's your favorite squishy piggy doing? I haven't heard about the Truffle in a while. He r doin gud i hop.
Kim
June 20, 2016
10:32am