Where is everyone?

[Kaiverta]

Yikes, I was attempting to make a comeback to the game and then got SUPER busy. Now I've finally returned and the chat is empty! :o Are you all adulting?

[Unnamed Mercenary]

I think most people have probably made the transition to discord servers for the majority of their chatting needs. And potentially as forum/tumblr companion/replacements as well, although my personal opinions is that a forum's still much better suited for threads and posts, but perhaps I'm getting old and outdated?

 

The RPC still remains the most populated FFXIV RP related website though. I've seen a few clones come and go, and there've been a couple more recently for select servers, etc. 

[Kaiverta]

1 hour ago, Unnamed Mercenary said:

I think most people have probably made the transition to discord servers for the majority of their chatting needs. And potentially as forum/tumblr companion/replacements as well, although my personal opinions is that a forum's still much better suited for threads and posts, but perhaps I'm getting old and outdated?

 

The RPC still remains the most populated FFXIV RP related website though. I've seen a few clones come and go, and there've been a couple more recently for select servers, etc. 

 

Hi Merc!   Good to still see you. So is there an official Discord server that I can join, or are you talking just fan-made things and they're kinda sticking to themselves?

[Unnamed Mercenary]

7 hours ago, Kaiverta said:

 

Hi Merc!   Good to still see you. So is there an official Discord server that I can join, or are you talking just fan-made things and they're kinda sticking to themselves?

 

No official discords for the RPC! [At this time. And currently no plans to]. 

 

Mostly sun groups here and there. Or stuff I see on tumblr. 

 

People are still social, but the venues for being social have changed a bit. 

[Kaiverta]

Just now, Unnamed Mercenary said:

 

No official discords for the RPC! [At this time. And currently no plans to]. 

 

Mostly sun groups here and there. Or stuff I see on tumblr. 

 

People are still social, but the venues for being social have changed a bit. 

Oh I see.  What is 'sun groups' ?

[Unnamed Mercenary]

11 hours ago, Kaiverta said:

Oh I see.  What is 'sun groups' ?

A typo!

 

Some* groups. 

[Kaiverta]

On 11/15/2018 at 2:04 PM, Unnamed Mercenary said:

A typo!

 

Some* groups. 

Oh, HUWAHA. That's very funny.

 

Ahem.

 

Sorry again for the delay. D: The holiday season was wild. I am glad it's over. Happy new year!

[Branson Thorne]

Yeah, I think Discord has taken over a lot of the chats, and I do know the Tumblr community is still growing at a fairly rapid pace.

[Locke]

How DOES one get into the Tumblr side of things? For anyone watching this thread that can help a Tumblr newbie out *Cough*

[Unnamed Mercenary]

As a social network built off curating one's own "community" as some may call it, your best shots with tumblr are basically following people you find agreeable. And then following people based on the posts and reblogs made from those you follow.

 

Finding new things is basically... not part of how tumblr works. But it's incredibly good at creating a unique and curated experience, which is something it does quite well! (The same could be said about discord groups as well, as you aren't really going to find an invite unless someone puts one out there. Or you get invited in.) 

 

Some may call it clique-ish, and I guess it can be seen that way, but it's also something people in consistent groups would form anyways. You could try the FFXIV tag for some starters, or just check if the people here who have content you like have a link either in their profile/signature or posted in the probably very dated tumblr thread.

[Kaiverta]

On 1/8/2019 at 12:26 AM, SicketySix said:

Yeah, I think Discord has taken over a lot of the chats, and I do know the Tumblr community is still growing at a fairly rapid pace.

 

Hey, Six!

 

Discorrrd. Evil Discord. Even the MuD I RP on (when I have time, these days e.e ) has slowed down dramatically because people are on Discord chatting now.

[Branson Thorne]

On 1/10/2019 at 4:19 AM, Kaiverta said:

 

Hey, Six!

 

Discorrrd. Evil Discord. Even the MuD I RP on (when I have time, these days e.e ) has slowed down dramatically because people are on Discord chatting now.

Well, you know what they say, if you can't beat em' join em'!

[Kaiverta]

14 hours ago, SicketySix said:

Well, you know what they say, if you can't beat em' join em'!

 

Troo... Though I wouldn't have anything meaningful to add. I haven't played the game in years. I've forgotten all that I did know, and I know nothing about the new stuff.

[Branson Thorne]

On 1/11/2019 at 11:41 PM, Kaiverta said:

 

Troo... Though I wouldn't have anything meaningful to add. I haven't played the game in years. I've forgotten all that I did know, and I know nothing about the new stuff.

Well, can always fix that! The last two expansions have been pretty good.

[Unnamed Mercenary]

The reality is that most of the forum is pretty quiet because a lot of users have moved to Discord servers instead. This isn't really unique to the RPC as it is to nearly all online communities that saw forum members migrate to newer pastures. The RPC wiki itself has also largely fallen aside as well, given that may people swapped to using Tumblr (back in the day) or then moved to making Carrd sites. Again, not a bad thing, but just another tool to get what they wanted, and usually with less hassle as a carrd comes with a nice visual editor instead of relying on wikicode and/or html.

 

Most of the RPC's traffic has largely slowed as the site became less of "the place to be" and more of a hub to find other places. And while that's definitely helped in making moderation less of a concern, it does give off the impression of a ghost town, which is something I'd love to see change, but I'm also not particularly active in the general RP community anymore so much as a site maintainer myself. At the same time, many of the people who did formerly bring in a lot of activity have also moved elsewhere, whether that's making their own private Discord servers or being active in new "community hub" servers. And that can certainly be appealing when those members can then decide on their own rules and staff instead of having to trust the ones where, which they may or may not get along with for any reason.

 

It also doesn't help that Discord servers aren't really easy to find via google and Discord makes for a lackluster storage medium. (I'd love to see if others share my opinions about having channels to replace Making Connections, FC/LS adverts, and character sheets, as the endless flow of content on a realtime chat server does not make for an ideal search experience). But that is what people currently like to use, and I don't think there's much we could offer on the RPC right now that would tempt people to use the site in addition to Discord or other services. Or perhaps I'm just getting old, because I don't have the time or energy to keep up with the latest trends.

[Faye]

So on topic, @Unnamed Mercenary I think the only thing that could really help integrate the RPC more with the current RP community would be some sort of Discord integration, but I have absolutely no idea how that would function and I'm sure that would be an immense amount of work if it is even possible.





*Mod edit 2nd of august as per thread cleanup.

[Maril]

Thread has been reopened. 

Please be civil & remember our rules. 

In addition, we do not recommend necro'ing old topics, if you have new feelings for an old topic, please start a new topic. 

 

/mod 

[Iranda]

What a shame, I wasn't even here to see it before the cleanup. Interesting how quickly some people reply here for it being a "ghost town".

Do you just vigorously refresh this forum to get as many posts in as possible? Genuine question, because I just kinda decided to let it rest for a few days.

 

Edit: Also odd that I didn't get any warning points despite the mod action. How am I gonna have my confrontation now ?!

Might as well go and clean up that other topic I referred to @mods

Just make sure to treat us all fairly and not based on apparent popularity, Maril, or I'd instantly lose, being an absolute nobody compared to the fairest of them all.

 

Is there a list of members ordered by post count? I was curious who the real biggest poster on here is.

Edited August 3, 2021 by Iranda

[Unnamed Mercenary]

On 7/31/2021 at 2:05 PM, Faye said:

So on topic, @Unnamed Mercenary I think the only thing that could really help integrate the RPC more with the current RP community would be some sort of Discord integration, but I have absolutely no idea how that would function and I'm sure that would be an immense amount of work if it is even possible.
 

 

This is tricky. Most of the Discord-related plugins I've seen for the website software are either like "login with discord" or "embed a discord into a sidebar" kinds of things. Back in the day, the staff largely agreed that we didn't run to run some sort of "official RPC forums" Discord as that would have been a pretty large moderation task given the nature of realtime chat and how quickly things can get heated. While I do still feel like that was the right decision, we didn't foresee users largely moving away from forums and going to Discord almost exclusively, which is what really picked up around 2017-2018.

 

I'd definitely be interested in gathering some updated feedback on what we could do to be more Discord-friendly, since that's now the dominant platform as far as I know.

 

We could totally add optional profile stuff like to list out a Discord username, but I'd be worried about spambots getting in and abusing that. (Especially with all the weird "I'm quitting <steam game>" ones that have been popping up all over the place.

 

I could probably look into some sort of webhook integration so that people could get posts in certain forums relayed into discord channels. And while the same could technically be done for Discord -> Forums, that would be a bit more iffy. (And likely require a bot that has permission to read message content, which is something Discord wants to largely disable for the average bot. See: https://support-dev.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/4404772028055

Semi-related, we've been working to integrate with the community calendars a bit more. The front page should properly pull things from Erah'sae's calendars without having to try to sync it to the forums first, which both helps cut down on load time and weird quirks like "the forum software can only import the first 1000 events in an ical feed" issues. 

 

but truth be told, most of my time/interest has moved on from RP. I've been dabbling a lot more in the "ffxiv community dev" Discord servers myself, especially for certain third party launchers that include addon support that I cannot officially endorse using on the RPC. And there, I am working on some things that are RP-friendly.

 

Quote

What a shame, I wasn't even here to see it before the cleanup. Interesting how quickly some people reply here for it being a "ghost town".

Do you just vigorously refresh this forum to get as many posts in as possible? Genuine question, because I just kinda decided to let it rest for a few days.

 

I typically keep the RPC as a pinned tab and tend to refresh it multiple times a day. Even prior to becoming staff. (Although it was much more of a bustling and highly active forum between 2014-2015 before stuff like Discord got big). Back then, we kindasorta would have needed to have post limits in certain threads because they could have several replies a minute. ...sometimes by the same user. And when those were heated threads at 3am, they weren't typically going to be seen/handled until things got pretty bad. (I don't miss waking up to like 20 reports lol)

 

But typically, I'll skim recent posts and reply when/where I can.

 

Quote

Edit: Also odd that I didn't get any warning points despite the mod action. How am I gonna have my confrontation now ?!

 

I uhh...I can fix that if you really want them. The site moved on from "warning is the new rep" quite a while ago and I'd like to keep it that way.

 

Quote

Might as well go and clean up that other topic I referred to @mods

Just make sure to treat us all fairly and not based on apparent popularity, Maril, or I'd instantly lose, being an absolute nobody compared to the fairest of them all.

 

Is there a list of members ordered by post count? I was curious who the real biggest poster on here is.

 

it's completely ridiculous to judge a person by their rep (given by other users) or post count (has no bearing on the content of their posts). I'm not quite sure why you're so hung up on Big Numbers™. People who have been active members on the site longer that most are going to naturally have some numbers to back that up. If I had the same time that I did in previous years, I'd be writing personalized welcome messages to each user like I used to.

 

When we migrated the RPC from MyBB to IPS, one of the things I selected to not enable was easily found forum statistics and the "who's reading this thread" modules. They were often abused in the past and it led to a lot of negativity and gawking in such a way that encouraged bad behavior by certain no longer active members. 

[Iranda]

32 minutes ago, Unnamed Mercenary said:

 

but truth be told, most of my time/interest has moved on from RP. I've been dabbling a lot more in the "ffxiv community dev" Discord servers myself, especially for certain third party launchers that include addon support that I cannot officially endorse using on the RPC. And there, I am working on some things that are RP-friendly

 

I heard of a thing called Gobchat for that, it would be real nice if someone, without endorsing it, made it an option in the big list.

 

1 hour ago, Unnamed Mercenary said:

it's completely ridiculous to judge a person by their rep (given by other users) or post count (has no bearing on the content of their posts). I'm not quite sure why you're so hung up on Big Numbers™. People who have been active members on the site longer that most are going to naturally have some numbers to back that up. If I had the same time that I did in previous years, I'd be writing personalized welcome messages to each user like I used to.

 

When we migrated the RPC from MyBB to IPS, one of the things I selected to not enable was easily found forum statistics and the "who's reading this thread" modules. They were often abused in the past and it led to a lot of negativity and gawking in such a way that encouraged bad behavior by certain no longer active members. 

May just have to do with where I've 'escaped' from, and to do with I guess exposure. If you see someone with big posts as a newbie swoop in, you're naturally going to be a bit intimidated or quickly jump to the conclusion that they think they're better.

I sure don't miss "upvote/downvote" functions, that's a reciepe for disaster, and I'm not surprised. Don't take a look at the Argent Dawn EU WoW forums, they'll ... change you.

[Faye]

3 hours ago, Unnamed Mercenary said:

 

This is tricky. Most of the Discord-related plugins I've seen for the website software are either like "login with discord" or "embed a discord into a sidebar" kinds of things. Back in the day, the staff largely agreed that we didn't run to run some sort of "official RPC forums" Discord as that would have been a pretty large moderation task given the nature of realtime chat and how quickly things can get heated. While I do still feel like that was the right decision, we didn't foresee users largely moving away from forums and going to Discord almost exclusively, which is what really picked up around 2017-2018.

 

I'd definitely be interested in gathering some updated feedback on what we could do to be more Discord-friendly, since that's now the dominant platform as far as I know.

 

We could totally add optional profile stuff like to list out a Discord username, but I'd be worried about spambots getting in and abusing that. (Especially with all the weird "I'm quitting <steam game>" ones that have been popping up all over the place.

 

I could probably look into some sort of webhook integration so that people could get posts in certain forums relayed into discord channels. And while the same could technically be done for Discord -> Forums, that would be a bit more iffy. (And likely require a bot that has permission to read message content, which is something Discord wants to largely disable for the average bot. See: https://support-dev.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/4404772028055

Semi-related, we've been working to integrate with the community calendars a bit more. The front page should properly pull things from Erah'sae's calendars without having to try to sync it to the forums first, which both helps cut down on load time and weird quirks like "the forum software can only import the first 1000 events in an ical feed" issues. 

 

but truth be told, most of my time/interest has moved on from RP. I've been dabbling a lot more in the "ffxiv community dev" Discord servers myself, especially for certain third party launchers that include addon support that I cannot officially endorse using on the RPC. And there, I am working on some things that are RP-friendly.

 

 

I typically keep the RPC as a pinned tab and tend to refresh it multiple times a day. Even prior to becoming staff. (Although it was much more of a bustling and highly active forum between 2014-2015 before stuff like Discord got big). Back then, we kindasorta would have needed to have post limits in certain threads because they could have several replies a minute. ...sometimes by the same user. And when those were heated threads at 3am, they weren't typically going to be seen/handled until things got pretty bad. (I don't miss waking up to like 20 reports lol)

 

But typically, I'll skim recent posts and reply when/where I can.

 

 

I uhh...I can fix that if you really want them. The site moved on from "warning is the new rep" quite a while ago and I'd like to keep it that way.

 

 

it's completely ridiculous to judge a person by their rep (given by other users) or post count (has no bearing on the content of their posts). I'm not quite sure why you're so hung up on Big Numbers™. People who have been active members on the site longer that most are going to naturally have some numbers to back that up. If I had the same time that I did in previous years, I'd be writing personalized welcome messages to each user like I used to.

 

When we migrated the RPC from MyBB to IPS, one of the things I selected to not enable was easily found forum statistics and the "who's reading this thread" modules. They were often abused in the past and it led to a lot of negativity and gawking in such a way that encouraged bad behavior by certain no longer active members. 

 

I think it was the right call not to make an official RPC Discord. That would have been a lot to juggle when both were active, and enough community Discords have popped up in its place in the meantime. I think the ability to log in via Discord could be a nice QoL update for some people, but ultimately probably wouldn't increase activity on the site much. I can also see the worry of listing Discord handles on profiles leading to spam.

 

While it could be nice to pull content from Discord, I suppose that would beg the question of which channels from which servers, which would also be dependent on the management of those servers to moderate and streamline those channels. It would be neat, though, to have a Discord bot that could broadcast certain topics from the RPC, the way I have seen others do with topics from the ffxiv reddit and the official site. It could be a good way to boost visibility of people's threads here and the RPC in general. I agree forums are better suited for LFRP posts, FC listings, etc. and I think it's a shame everyone has taken to Discords for those.

 

The front page event feed has been working much better! I'm glad you've got some other RP stuff cooking tho and eager to see what comes of that!

[Unnamed Mercenary]

3 hours ago, Iranda said:

I heard of a thing called Gobchat for that, it would be real nice if someone, without endorsing it, made it an option in the big list.

 

 

That's another project, but a lot of the research tends to flow to/from its creator too. I'm happy to discuss some of the tools in DMs, but as a front-facing staff member, I can't officially endorse any third party tools that would go against SE's Terms of Service, if you catch my drift.

 

3 hours ago, Iranda said:

May just have to do with where I've 'escaped' from, and to do with I guess exposure. If you see someone with big posts as a newbie swoop in, you're naturally going to be a bit intimidated or quickly jump to the conclusion that they think they're better.

I sure don't miss "upvote/downvote" functions, that's a reciepe for disaster, and I'm not surprised. Don't take a look at the Argent Dawn EU WoW forums, they'll ... change you.

 

We've had a fair number of people come and go to/from WoW throughout the years. MMO players tend to jump around quite a bit and it's been pretty nice to see that FFXIV's got a nice mix of players from various games and communities. My advice here would be to treat it as its own thing though. This isn't an EU WoW space and we're not going to witch-hunt you for committing thought crime if you come across an ERPer or want to partake in it yourself. (Keep the forums PG-13. What you do in game with other consenting adults isn't our concern). I'd say FFXIV is generally a bit more relaxed than WoW and for the most part, it's more a case of finding other RPers with similar interests, as FFXIV RP isn't super homogenous when it comes to things like low/high fantasy, power levels, being the WoL vs a normal person, etc. 

 

1 hour ago, Faye said:

It would be neat, though, to have a Discord bot that could broadcast certain topics from the RPC, the way I have seen others do with topics from the ffxiv reddit and the official site. It could be a good way to boost visibility of people's threads here and the RPC in general. I agree forums are better suited for LFRP posts, FC listings, etc. and I think it's a shame everyone has taken to Discords for those.

 

This is the sorta stuff I've been considering! Since it shouldn't be too involved to have the forums push content onto a discord. I've got a few ideas on how it might be done, but it'll likely turn into a relay of sorts so we can appropriately queue things without overloading RPC's forum software or thrashing Discord's rate limits. (Similar to how people can subscribe to lodestone updates. Ideally, I'd make it so people can subscribe to get messages for new threads in events, halls, making connections, and character workshop.

[Faye]

4 hours ago, Unnamed Mercenary said:

This is the sorta stuff I've been considering! Since it shouldn't be too involved to have the forums push content onto a discord. I've got a few ideas on how it might be done, but it'll likely turn into a relay of sorts so we can appropriately queue things without overloading RPC's forum software or thrashing Discord's rate limits. (Similar to how people can subscribe to lodestone updates. Ideally, I'd make it so people can subscribe to get messages for new threads in events, halls, making connections, and character workshop.

 I dig it! I'd definitely make use of something like that for my FC's Discord server.