A look back at 2014 - RP Repository

Posted by Kim on December 31, 2014, 12:46pm

This has been a wild year! My one main, driving goal (as it was the year before, too) was to finally "finish" groups and get them out of the alpha stage. And as you'll see, we did it!

The year started with a mad frenzy of programming, resulting in a major update finally released in February...

February

The private message system was completely revamped! Message threads are now organized into related conversations, instead of just being stand-alone messages every time one was sent.

Although this alone was a major leap forward in terms of modern conveniences and things not looking such a mess, this update was also very important because it laid groundwork for other important features like searching, dice rolling in private messages, and yes, even private chat.

Infact, just days later, I was able to implement dice rolling, searching and dragging conversations into folders.

On February 14th, we released a series of gorgeous Valentine's day templates designed by Lachey, and a day later, a bonus anti-valentine's day template!

April

April saw the RP Repository turning four with a celebration like no other!

The week before the feasting was scheduled to start, prophets started seeing omens in the sky of some wild adventure to come...

On the morning of our fourth anniversary, a strange portal appeared, bringing with it an evil miasma. Each of the symbols around its edges required that a special word of power be whispered to them to open their seal. Our wonderful, adventurous users set to work to unlock their secrets!

When our adventurers unlocked the portal just a day later, they discovered a handful of new templates... And another portal behind the first! This one was strangely mechanical.

A few days later, the second portal was opened as well, releasing a flood of new templates and making every user on the site epic for an entire week!

This event was a special joy to watch unfold, because the various riddles required users from a huge range of diversity to work together.

But portal quests weren't the only game that was played during our Epic anniversary celebration. We had a series of exciting contests, with some seriously kick-butt prizes.

May

May saw me back at work on updates, including a complete re-write of the code that handles adding/editing widgets, a new interface for editing group sidebars, the addition of the "universal" group sidebar, and much more.

Plus, there was a new template: Hacker

And my favorite time of year, the announcement of a new genre jumble, completely made up of genre-mascots designed and drawn by our users!

July

July opened with Moderator Appreciation Day and a new template: DNA, designed by Contingency!

There was also a long list of updates, especially to groups, including the recruitment widget, the launch chat widget, the search widget and the gallery widget.

Plus, the group directory itself got a great deal of love, completely redesigned and newly searchable.

We closed the month with yet another template, this one by Lachey: Abstract colors!

August

In August, more updates to groups, including GM-only tags.

October

By this time, I was like a greyhound chasing a rabbit. Nothing was going to stop me from finishing groups! I launched even more updates to groups in October, including mobile-friendly groups, sorting of group members, and better group notification controls.

But I had a lot of fun too, joining you all in trick-or-treating the forums.

We closed the month with one more template by Lachey.

November

It happened! It finally happened! Groups were finally launched!

We ran contests to celebrate, like the super simple (but super fun) Dice Roll tombola and a haiku contest with a RP theme.

This amazing triplicate haiku by Hell was our winner of the haiku contest:

I made a man of
Pen and Page; each word, a chunk
of his vertebrae.

no Friends to be born
from his rib, so I searched from
Dream to Dream for them;

and, in finding, found
(all across the universe)
friends -- immersed in Verse.

But it wasn't just groups that were launched in November! The site got an entirely new system: Items, inventories and treasuries! Purchasing stuff from the store no longer resulted in a benefit being applied directly to your account. Instead, an item is placed into your inventory. You may activate that item at your leisure, or give it to someone else. Maybe in wrapping paper!

Or, if you don't want to use your item, you can display it on your profile much like you would an accolade.

To help you find your way around all these delicious new updates, I massively expanded and updated the help section, and made the help search work better so that it's easier to find what you're looking for.

Finally, we held a bug bounty hunt in November to help eliminate any issues with the new group/item features ASAP! For those two weeks, every bug report that led to something being fixed was rewarded with a special event-only accolade to display proudly on your user profile.

December

The community took time out to express their gratitude for one another in December. During the Festival of Being Excellent to Each Other, those who wrote kudos for their friends were rewarded with candy cane accolades to wear as badges of honor on their profiles. Roughly 700 kudos were given during this event!

And one final major update to the site: Mobile-friendly re-sizing for the main site (plus the ability to disable it in your settings!)

Thank you all for a wonderful year!

Next: Winter Art Trade! » « Previous: Last call for great deals on epicness and character slots!

Comments

DragonStallion

January 1, 2015
7:42am

Time for chocolate ._.

mk_97

January 1, 2015
12:19am

2015, wooooooo

Zelphyr

January 1, 2015
12:11am

Happy new year from the US west coast! I hope this one can be at least half as good as the past one was for me. And I'm looking forward to my second year on RPR!