you’ve hereby been ordered to MOVE OUT of your current abodes and take shelter in our new SAFEHOUSE!
nah, just kidding, but we are moving primary residences! due to several…unfortunate tumblr updates, we’ve decided that roleplaying on this site isn’t suitable for our current style of both organization and writing. we have scoured the internet for a newer, better place to call home, and just when we thought all hope was lost…we found this.
what is this madness? you may ask, but worry not! we have decided to go a traditional route and create a forum for the community to now thrive in. if you are unfamiliar with forums, keep reading, as we have written a quick summary of what they are and how to use them below.
so what does this mean for our current blogs? we’ve put so much work into them! you may also say. honestly though, tumblr was our starting point and we won’t be abandoning the site altogether. members are more than welcome to continue using their blogs in ways that abide by our rules. aesthetic posts, artwork, clothing/outfits your character would wear, ask memes, etc are all still welcomed and encouraged if it is something you enjoy updating. it is no longer required though, whereas activity on the forum will be.
what about current roleplays???? X is about to confess to Y and A is about to kill B! hey, we understand. finish any current roleplays on tumblr if you don’t wish to transfer them to a forum thread (detailed below) but be sure to start any new roleplays on the board! this is a transition period, and we hope to have all roleplays either tied up or transferred off of tumblr in the next week or so.
okay so what even is this forum thing you keep talking about?
a forum, by definition, is “a place, meeting, or medium where ideas and views on a particular issue can be exchanged.” online forums provide a space for people to discuss various topics at length (or not) in an organized format (or not). within forums, there are branches of organization for which people use to figure out where to post their topic. generally, forums are organized in a format similar to this:
a section/category is a group of boards grouped together by some common factor (i.e. roleplay section, ooc section, rules and info section). all of the public sections are visible from the front page of the forum website regardless of if you are logged in or not. some sections are only visible once logged on, some are only visible to the staff, etc etc. boards are where threads/topics are posted. they’re essentially the most important subsections of the forum in terms of organization. they have broad titles that encompass many topics that can be found within them. sometimes, when the board encompasses enough topics, it will be further separated into sub-boards. these function as folders within the board to make sure people can find the topics they’re looking for with ease (i.e. within the locations board, you’ll find sub-boards like the academy, the apartment complex, the park, etc). within both boards and sub-boards, you will find threads/topics. these are the tiny sections that contain posts. once you’re within the area that you want to be posting, you create a new thread/topic and make the first post. if you’re on a roleplaying board, the first post will usually contain details of either the general plot/characters involved (if it’s a closed rp) or a premise/quick explanation (if it’s an open rp). the other usual first post you’ll see, especially if the roleplay was pre-mediated on the forum, is just the starting IC post. the title of the topic would be the name of that specific rp, just like if you were titling a roleplay post on tumblr, and would include open/closed in the title for quick reference. sometimes people will also include their starter in that first post, but sometimes people prefer to separate the ooc information from the ic post, and therefore make two posts before their partner(s) post(s). posts are the responses to the thread and function essentially as reblogs, but instead of having to go back through the notes of a post as you would have to on tumblr, you can instead just scroll up through the thread history. forums also include a variety of other features, such as polls, BBCode capabilities, and in the case of our forum, a master account that you can control all your characters from. once you connect the accounts of your characters to your master account, you can simply select who you’re replying as from a dropdown window when you go to reply to a thread or post. forums and their predecessors have been around since the dawn of the internet and therefore are quite intuitive once you start using them.
i’m interested in transferring my current rp off tumblr because we just got started/it’s a long one/i wanna start using the new site/whatever reason! how? glad you asked! in the case of ongoing roleplays, you have a few options.
- you can use the first post of the new thread to link back to the last response posted on tumblr, summarize what has happened so far, and state outright the current characters in the rp (good for rps with a fair amount to a lot of posts)
- you and your partner can just copy and paste existing posts back and forth until you’re up to where you left off (good for people who want everything in one place and/or if you’ve only just started the rp)
- with permission from your partner, you can copy and paste all the responses to the rp so far in chronological order into the first post. between each response should be some sort of separation mark of your choosing at the very least. if you want to go above and beyond, color coding each character’s response would be an awesome thing to do (good for people who want everything in one place AND don’t want to wait for their partner to get online and go back and forth with them)
we hope that you’re just as excited as we are about this move, and hope to see you start posting on our new site soon!
jacobvanloon
2087
yousharknotpass
turnnoffyourmind
theartofmadeline
germansingergirl
jbbartram-illu
