Posted by Kim on August 29, 2016, 8:00am
Upcoming features, the future of the RPR, new templates and more! See the questions that the Site Admin answered during this month's office hours.What features are top priority right now?
So in all seriousness my process right now is a little scattered. There's so much that I want to get done and all of them are such long processes that I'm finding I'm having trouble focusing in on one and have been skipping around a bit; that's slowing down all of them, but it'll also mean at some point there is likely to be a sudden New Things flood. So I'm about to talk about a number of things that are all competing to be at the top of my list:
I am midway through revamping the new player orientation process. You may have already noticed the Character Wizard is new and shiney, but there's plenty of other things that older members won't ever notice. For example, the process of registering a new account is different in terms of how you validate your email address and log in the first time (it's much more streamlined now), the new player tutorial has been expanded and updated, and I'm working on adding Joyride style elements to some of those tutorials.
I've been doing some heavy debugging on Push Notifications and why they sometimes just randomly come unregistered from Google and Mozilla's server, requiring people to constantly re-subscribe to them. This is annoying and I want to solve it if we can.
I've been designing some updates to kudos that would perhaps make them more useful to help match players with other players that like to play in the same ways.
I'm working on setting up the new advertising system that would let any member publish their own ads through RPR, instead of us just showing ads for Epic Membership and then Google ads.
Also high on my list, but not started: Redesigning the forum and private message chat windows to work on a wider variety of screen sizes and incorporate much wanted features like the text formatting bar, updating the interfaces for Epic Members to redesign their user profiles, and creating an "easy mode" method of creating custom character templates that would not require knowing any CSS, and making editing groups easier on mobile.
Any plans in the foreseeable future for template changes or additions? That big overhaul to update old templates is done, now, and we got a huge number of them in our last anniversary, but we always need moar!
Yes, definitely! There's several new ones under way right now. Don't worry, I'm not the one designing them, so they are not stuck behind all those other features I just talked about. Ultimately, I'd like us to get back to having a regular release schedule for new templates. We're a little out of the habit these days, but habits can be rebuilt.
What is the state of the thread where you vote for templates? It hasn't seen a lot of action lately, but I assume it's still being followed?
It is definitely still being followed and I even very recently consulted it when deciding what templates to request of designers. And for those of you reading the news post in the future (hi future people!) who aren't sure what we're talking about, I'm going to share the link and encourage you to go vote. Just keep in mind before you click through: The rule is, we ask that you only vote for templates you would actually use on a specific character of your own, not just templates you think would be "nice for the site to have." Otherwise, we end up building templates everyone agrees are cool and pretty, but hardly anyone actually uses. http://www.rprepository.com/community/forumthread.php?t=1
Damn, am I reading that right? "t=1", that means it's the very first thread o:
You are reading that right! The literal first thing I did the day the site got forums was to ask people to suggest new templates.
We published templates much more often in those days, but to be fair, we also had very few of them.
Any word yet on what you're doing with those RPR tote bags?
Dice roll tombola is overwhelmingly the winner in the contest voting, so it's looking like that's what we'll be doing with the tote bags. I may run a few other of the cool contest ideas that people suggested in subsequent months though, with RPR-based prizes.
What are your plans for Facebook live chats in the future?
I absolutely enjoyed it when you tried it out and want more.That is a great question, and I wish I had a really clear answer for you. I really enjoyed it as well and I definitely want to do more. I think it will most likely be its own thing in the future, not connected to a chat on the RPR itself -- it was impossible to type and talk at the same time, and for those who couldn't get the live stream to work, the chat here was very boring I think. I have been considering doing short chats on specific topics, ranging from RP styles to planned features for the RPR that people maybe have specific questions or concerns about. For example, one of the things that always gets a reaction is when I mention that for the first four years of my RP life, I played in a place where it was a bannable offense to discuss IC interactions OOC *at all,* and how that's colored my personal view of RP etiquette and norms on down the years. I bet people would be interested in hearing the details of that and why that philosophy worked there.
Whatever the topics, most likely I'll summarize the main points that were covered and post them somewhere on the RPR still, for those that can't make it.
How did you come up with the idea to create RPR? And what tools/websites did you use?
I saw people using all kinds of platforms to try and create profiles for RP characters. Maybe they were Furcadian players and they wanted more than the paragraph that they were allowed for a character description, maybe they were on a MUD and wanted to be able to include photo references for their character, but almost everywhere I RPed people were using external websites to complete their RPs. All of these options have major drawbacks. Wix crashed my laptop of the time, and I know I wasn't alone. Facebook will delete RP profiles on sight, with no warning. And it seemed like if we were going to try and bend social networks to our needs, we should actually have social features that were more relevant to RP characters than just "friend". Like, "enemy" immediately leapt to mind as an important staple of RP relationships for me.
At the time I was a baby coder, but I still felt like I could offer something better, and so I started programming like crazy and about two months later launched the basic profile building tools. We didn't have forums or anything back then. But the site was so popular so immediately that I quickly worked to add the features that we've come to know and love, like private messaging, forums, and RP searching.
I didn't really use any other websites, though I have used some open source code libraries to handle certain aspects of the site like BBCode. The main language I wrote it in was PHP, with some javascript on the user side.
What aspects of the RPR are you going to try to focus on developing in the upcoming months? (Like the last of this month carrying into Sept. and Oct.)
My biggest focus right now is on finishing upgrades to the new player orientation/tutorial system. Beyond that, my process has been scattered, with work going on in multiple different areas as I have trouble deciding which one to do first.
The new advertising system is under way, as is a number of upgrades for Epic members.Are you going to add an edit feature to PM?
Maybe. The mental model for PMs was more like email or letters, where once you send it, it's sent and now "belongs" to the person who received it, to throw out or treasure as they please. However, I've been toying with the idea of adding a 5 to 15 minute window in which a PM can be edited, so typos can be caught and corrected.
Would you be able to change the sent-from character in that case? (Sometimes people send from their user account when they meant to send from an anonymous character!)
I don't see why not! That is a very common problem. It wouldn't fix your issue entirely, though. If an email or push notification is sent out when you send the message, the original sender name will still get seen.
When are notifications sent out?
Push notifications are sent instantly on our part; if you experience delays, it's from Google/Mozilla and then your internet/wireless carrier.
Email notifications are sent on a timer. It's basically every ten minutes the server checks to see if it needs to tell anyone anything, then groups up the notifications per person, and sends off a batch list of all the stuff you might want to know about having happened since it last contacted you. So if you sent someone a PM at 10:49:59, the email might go out a second later at 10:50.
Are you planning to bring back the "Your Posts" section of the RPR, or will it be permanently deleted?
Oh no, that section is definitely coming back! It needs some major renovations to make it play nicely and not cause so much lag. Plus, it needs a bunch more filters to make it possible to find what you're looking for without digging through hundreds of pages. But it will return.
Kim, are you ever going to enable kudos from anonymous characters?
No. Kudos will never be able to be sent by characters, anonymous or otherwise. People already forget constantly that kudos are meant to be used as recommendations and make use of them as guestbooks or places to carry out practical jokes. Letting characters get into the mix will encourage ultra-personal IC posting in kudos. And kudos are meant to be OOC.
Most of the planned changes to kudos are meant to make them more useful as tools to find compatible RP partners. However, leaving anonymous kudos (not from a character, just generally anonymous) may be given a trial run at some point in the future.
There's been some concern in the past that the ability to post anonymous kudos would encourage people to use them for harassment, but I suspect that's a minimal risk. If true, we'd see a lot more PM harassment conducted using anonymous characters, and that is fairly rare here. Most people realize that if they send something via the site, I can find out what account sent it, or even look up the account IP and track down the person's "real" account if they tried to make a new one to do the harassing with.
Is there a reason that the eyes on the "your inventory" mushroom are different sizes?
I thought it was kind of cute.
Is RPR your all time favorite website?
Absolutely. No question at all in my mind! I
this place and want to spend all of my time on it.How far do you think RPR will be progressed 10 years from now?
Considering that I had never imagined some of the features and achievements we've had today, when I first started the thing 6 years ago, I feel confident saying that the differences will defy imagination.
No but in all seriousness, one of the things I would really like to see in the coming years is the site getting really smart about picking up on people's preferences and RP habits and learning to suggest new RP partner matches with a much higher rate of success. Like Netflix, but more fun and you get to write your own stories.
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Comments
Trickster
August 29, 2016
8:17am
" No but in all seriousness, one of the things I would really like to see in the coming years is the site getting really smart about picking up on people's preferences and RP habits and learning to suggest new RP partner matches with a much higher rate of success. Like Netflix, but more fun and you get to write your own stories. "
Netflix, Tindr, tomato, tomato.
"Netflix, Tindr, tomato, tomato.
What about all the CRUCIAL Star Trek banter!? 
Kim
August 29, 2016
9:46am
@Trickster - Tomato indeed!