Posted by Kim on April 22, 2013, 11:48pm
It's been a crazy day. I'm late in putting this summary out, and I owe you one more. Apologies, community! There's too much awesome for me to keep up with.
What's in store for the RPR?
Let's take a look into our crystal ball and see what's in store for the near-future of the RP Repository:Most of you no doubt remember my proclamation from earlier in the year about this being the year of the group. There have already been some updates in that vein this year, and groups continue to take top priority going forward.
I think that being able to create established settings, maintain world-building information in one place, and community hubs for like-minded people are a massively important part of the RP experience. It's high time we had a proper system in place for supporting that aspect!
A lot of things are in the works for groups, a few of which are already being actively worked on. This includes a revamp of all of the group editing interfaces -- in the past, I was mostly focused on getting groups working, but they've reached a point of complexity where they are very confusing. By moving the various settings and controls around into more sensible categories, labeling them better, and in some cases, changing the form that they take entirely, we can tame that complexity and make groups more intuitive and fun to use.
Hand in hand with that initiative, I'm also working on an improved Group Starter Wizard, that will better walk people through setting up their first group.
Once things are a bit easier to use, I'll return to adding features to groups. The first new features that are planned are all related to better moderation tools. These range from the simple, such as the ability for moderators to delete comments on events and announcements, moving threads, banning members from forums for set periods of time, and a moderation center for keeping track of past and open moderation issues. I'm modeling the group moderation center on the one that I built for the RPR's public mods, which has been serving us really well for the past few months. So that was sort of a live play-test that helped ensure that what I was building for the rest of you would actually be useful and effective at helping you run your communities!
Groups will also be getting better privacy settings, so you can create moderator of GM only forums for planning and behind-the-scenes discussions.
On the opposite side of the token, groups are also slated to get more options for publicizing themselves, so you can more easily promote your group to potential members.
And of course, the much-anticipated Epic Features for groups should be going in sometime this year!! This will allow people to expand their groups beyond the currently allowed 5-pages, change their group's look and feel in ways that just aren't possible now, promote their groups in novel ways, and more.
But I don't want to restrict Epic Groups to only people with money. Even penniless souls should have the opportunity to create truly amazing RP groups. That's why I'm planning on implementing a system wherein groups can earn their loot by going on quests together to "give back" to the community at large, such as by volunteering to make sure every single person in the intro forums get properly welcomed and have their questions answered over a certain period of time. We still need financial support from power-users to survive as a site, but trying to connect people with a great RP experience is kind of The Point, so I've been looking for ways to offer alternatives where possible. There are many other ways in which we need support to survive, other than financial!
There's so much more planned for groups, I could go on pretty much forever. But I'll finish this ramble on group features by saying there's a whole list of planned group features in the development log you can take a peek at if you're curious!
But it's not just going to be groups that get some polish.
I also have my eye on the new user experience for a major overhaul. I know this is less likely to excite the current userbase, because not being new users, you guys won't see as many of these changes -- but as the site grows and grows, introducing people to what we're about here and keeping that "small site" feeling gets to be more challenging. Moreover, as more options open up on the site, there are more systems for new players to learn. So I very much want to put some time and effort into making the new-user prompts more comprehensive, better timed, and friendlier. I'll be adding more tutorials and video walk throughts for the more complicated aspects of the site, and offer more help at more stages.
I also have an eye to totally redo the private message system so that it can better support sorting, search, private chats and conversation threading.
Hand in hand with that, I'm working on new interfaces for managing user and character friends, so that it's not such a complicated pain in the butt to change your characters from being friends to enemies.
During the chat, we also talked about making custom templates for Epic members easier to create. I offered CSS originally because it is truly endlessly flexible, and I wanted to offer unlimited possibilities to Epic Members. Unfortuantely, what it has done in practice is offered NO options to the majority of users, because the learning curve is too high. Therefore, I'd like to create an "easy mode" solution for epic members that would allow them to choose sections of their character profile and simply apply colors, textures and fonts, similar to the way that groups are currently customized.
To read more of Sunday's Q&A session about the future of the RPR, check out the full chat log.
The offer to answer your questions and address your concerns hasn't closed. I'm always happy to talk with the RPR community. Go ahead and leave a comment on this post with your question, and I'll answer for all to see!
Today's Template
We've had a lot of beautiful, light templates this week. Here's something for our grittier characters: Dark steps
Comments
Yuka
April 23, 2013
8:08am
Wonderfully eerie new template
Kim this is fantastic! I love the new features and the future of the RPR looks as bright as ever. I can't wait to see how it takes shape and changes over the course of the year!
Also kudos to whoever these template designers are, they have all been amazing!
I love the new features and the future of the RPR looks as bright as ever. I can't wait to see how it takes shape and changes over the course of the year!Also kudos to whoever these template designers are, they have all been amazing!
It all sounds very exciting and the template is fantabulous!
and the template is fantabulous!
Iokua
April 23, 2013
8:12am