Posted by Kim on April 5, 2013, 1:15pm
Dear community,I'm writing to ask your help in making the RP Repository a better place to find quality RP.
You don't have to do very much. Just check the kudos that you've written, and make sure that they explain why someone might like to get to know the person you gave it to. It won't just help the site out -- it will help your friends find and get better RP, too.
If you're not sure what qualifies as a kudos, check out these kudos guidelines.
Roughly a year ago, I introduced kudos as a way to of allowing members to recommend characters and players to the rest of the community. They replaced the "featured character" system directly, with kudos taking the place of the characters that had been picked by jury on the community page. They were intended to help you find other players that had similar values and styles, and make our social network more social.
But darn it, it just feels so good to get a kudos that we've slowly begun using them more and more like guestbooks. Your friends calling you cool or awesome in public is better than a triple fudge banana split. But kudos aren't just for being nice to each other, they're also, at their core, recommendations. If a stranger couldn't understand them, or they're so generic they aren't compelling, they really aren't helping beyond that one moment of pleasure when they are first received.
Even the staff has at times been overzealous about writing nice-but-useless kudos, and for a long while, we didn't want to throw a wet blanket on any form of positivity in kudos, so anything went. But we need to turn that around.
Very soon you will be seeing new, never before seen systems added to the site that aim at finding you more RP, faster. And quality kudos is going to be a major part of making that work successfully.
In about a week, the mod team and I are going to crawl over all the kudos, and try to remove those that read more like inside jokes or guestbook entries rather than recommendations. You can help lighten our work, and do your friends a huge favor, if you take a peek at the kudos that you have written and edit them to include an answer to this simple question:
Tell us what you love about
It's not hard! If you've written, "I love Mary!" just add "Because" and see what follows. Then we'll know why we'll love Mary too, and RP with Mary oodles.
Thank you for your help in making kudos work as they were intended. I think you'll be enormously excited about the new features coming down the pipeline, too.
With many <3s,
Kim
P.S. Again, the kudos guidelines are here, and a link for editing the kudos you've given is here.
Comments
@Trickster I love you because clever.
@Muddy91 The funniest thing is that more of those than you'd think we're high quality... Because so many were given to strangers, no attempts at continuing a conversation through kudos were made, and people had to scour profiles and find something they were impressed by to compliment instead of typing in "ILU." The very lack of familiarity in many cases caused a more thorough thought process for compliments than people often give to friends! I fully believe the kudopocalypse was a great thing, and we can still do them in the future even when sticking to the guidelines.
@Muddy91 The funniest thing is that more of those than you'd think we're high quality... Because so many were given to strangers, no attempts at continuing a conversation through kudos were made, and people had to scour profiles and find something they were impressed by to compliment instead of typing in "ILU." The very lack of familiarity in many cases caused a more thorough thought process for compliments than people often give to friends! I fully believe the kudopocalypse was a great thing, and we can still do them in the future even when sticking to the guidelines.
@Muddy91: A lot of the earlier kudos will probably be cleaned up unless the members edit them. However, the past half a year or so, the quality of kudos have gone up drastically, so it won't be that bad. 
Cleaning out Kudos? There goes 65% of the Kudo-acalypse. 
Trickster
April 5, 2013
11:30pm
I love Kim because muffins.
Thanks guys. It means oodles to me.
It's going to be a huge help to have everyone look their kudos over and adjust the ones that need to be enhanced. The new system that's coming up will blow you all away, but it's so super important that your kudos are recommendations!
I cleaned mine out, and realized I need to give more kudos.
For your information, the first Kudo I gave was for *drumroll*, you KIM.
For your information, the first Kudo I gave was for *drumroll*, you KIM.
TheLily
April 5, 2013
1:28pm
This is going to take a while, but I'm on the case!
Wooby
April 7, 2013
12:47pm