I think part of the reason why I've lost so much motivation/interest when it comes to things on Cherp is because of how turbulent it is, both in site development/coding and community/"rule"-wise. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate that the Cherp team is more active in responding to questions from their users. But, the community has proven itself in the past and quite recently to be a veritable dumpster fire, where the impulsive and usually unjust/uncalled for actions of a single higher-up has almost permanently instilled an underlying atmosphere of toxicity and fear, where people are so scared of messing up that they'd rather watch everything from a distance, too filled with fear to potentially bring the wrath of mods/developers upon them.
Rather than accept the help of the original Cherubplay developer, the site has been basically rebuilt from the ground up, with more changes planned that I think will hurt the site in the long run, i.e. the front page getting axed in favor for a strictly Directory-based site. (Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong here, these are just my interpretations of the information I've gathered over both Tumblr and Discord.) Speaking of Directory, that leads me to my next concern, the constant changing and amending of the site's tagging rules. I get wanting to have a universal system for labeling things, it always sounds nice in theory. But for something as complex and, more times than not, situational as roleplaying, a one-size-fits-all system isn't always going to work. ESPECIALLY if the rules were initially designed with personal biases against certain fandoms in mind.
Part of what made Cherubplay so popular/successful, in my humble opinion, WAS the fact that it was just a site for people to roleplay anonymously with others from pretty much any fandom you could think of. There were no strict, vice-tight, ever changing tagging rules present like there are on Cherp currently. Looking over the current rules on the offical Cherp Tumblr, I can VERY QUICKLY see how easy it would be for someone migrating from such a loosely guided site like Cherubplay to get overwhelmed by the sheer volume and specificity of Cherp's Rules, possibly leading to them deciding that Cherp just isn't worth the effort of constantly having to refer to the rules over and over and over again just to post a single prompt in the Directory...
-sigh- I dunno... Maybe things will be different after the rewrite, but for now, I think I may just abandon the hope of being able to relive the simple, stable glory days of Cherubplay, a platform that gave so many creative writers like myself the freedom to roleplay whatever they wanted, without of the constant need to look over their shoulders out of fear for what a single wrong tag on a prompt might bring them...
