Office hour highlight recap

Posted by Kim on August 22, 2015, 3:09pm

I got approached with a number of questions during this weekend's office hours! For those of you who weren't able to attend, here's a quick recap of some of the questions that were covered:

Can you make pressing enter "Send" chat messages?
Yes, absolutely! When you have the chat open, click the teal gear icon that's located at the top right corner of the text box. This will bring up the chat options, where you can adjust the chat volume, layout, and yes -- make pressing enter send your chat messages.

Who has the most characters on RPR of them all?
At present, the person with the most (public) characters is everyone's favorite boxed fox: http://www.rprepository.com/search.php?search=f0x1nth3b0x

How many users break 100 characters?
7. The runners up don't come close. It goes from 100+ characters to 50ish characters. Very odd!

When you post in a forum like this, or an ic forum, will all of your friends be alerted? I don't particularly want to spam people if I choose to take an rp to the forum.
Notifications are pretty complicated and there's a ton of settings that control what people do and don't see. Most people by default don't see IC forum posts that don't pertain to them. If they really want to, they can, but that RP has to be occurring in a place they could see to begin with. So, for example, if you are RPing in a group, none of your friends who aren't in that group can get notified about updates in that RP even if they wanted to.

By default, people do get notices about OOC posts their friends make in spaces they can see, such as groups they are in with you, or on the public forums. But they can shush that as well if feel overwhelmed.

Please don't hold back from RPing for fear of causing "spam!" De-spamming notifications is partially my responsibility, and partially the responsibility of your friends to adjust their notification settings to show them the stuff they wanna know.

Since fears of "creeping" were also mentioned relating to this, keep in mind that notifications only really syndicate stuff to people that they could find out on their own without notifications (public actions or actions in spaces you share with that person). It turns out that actual friends are typically lazier than creepers, and need the help to keep up.

Will there ever be such a thing as status updates (Ã la facebook or twitter), or do journals serve a similar purpose? I love sharing ideas and facts about my characters to the world.
That's not currently on my planned development list. Although it's a fun idea, it puts a LOT of pressure on some already over stressed systems (namely, notifications and the moderators) and in a lot of ways competes with the forums. For IC updates, journals are there, though!

Is it possible to add another recipient to a message that was already sent?
Sadly, no. After Monday's update, it will be possible to permanently remove yourself from a PM conversation, but I'm still deciding on the best way to do adding. My concern can basically be illustrated by this scenario: You tell your best friend a deep dark secret because they are your friend. You chat for awhile longer. They forget that you said something private and add someone else to the conversation, who reads back and learns something you would never have shared on your own.

You can probably also imagine scenarios involving RP with intimate themes that someone might not want a new person added to!

Basically, if this were to be added, I'd need to create a system that would allow ALL participants of the conversation to vote "yea" before that person could join. Most of my early drafts of this have been pretty clunky.

Adding people to PM conversations is definitely on my radar as something that's wanted and could be useful. I just like to solve all the weird fringe disaster scenarios before going ahead with something, whenever I have the foresight to see some in advance! Privacy is one of those things I spend a lot of time worrying about.

Kim, is there any chance you could add a feature to where you could add 'tags' of sorts to your own self? You can do it with your characters as "Game Tags", but if we have them for ourselves we can show if there are any games or things we like to roleplay, so people find us better when searching?
The game tags on characters are actually there for exactly that reason, to help people who play on the same game or in the same fandom find one another.

You can search for characters tagged with specific games right now. There's no current plans to add them directly to users, though.

Thank you to everyone who joined me for my office hours. It was great seeing all of you this weekend!

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