RolePlayGateway: WeBlog!

RPGChat is one of the other large roleplaying forums out there, and they’ve been around since about May, 2001. Since then, RPGChat has gone through many evolutions, and has expanded rapidly - they started with a forum, grew into a decent sized roleplaying chat, and finally removed the chat and went back to forums.

You’ll immediately notice the large number of forums, which for most boards isn’t an issue. In today’s roleplaying world, RPGChat’s index fits right in.

They’ve got four basic navigation options at the top of the page, which are images instead of text, which isn’t very good for SEO. The four menu options are Home, Forums, Chat, and Rules. I gave each of them a shot, but it looks like only the “Home” and “Rules” link work.

I’m going to take a look at their code, because using images for links isn’t horrible if you specify the right attributes. Let’s have a glance:

Yikes! Not only does the anchor not have a title attribute, but the image doesn’t have an alt attribute! Search engines won’t be able to understand the context of these links, and the flow of link juice to the two working links won’t be very beneficial.

I participated on these forums for a few months as the username Alighieri, for that period, I became the single most active user in their welcome forum. I posted in several other topics, but got pretty frustrated with the limitation on the length of a post (20,000 characters).

When attempting to post a profile for one of my characters, I was immediately snubbed by the limitation. This makes well-researched posts difficult to make, specifically with the citations that must be put in place for accurate references. Ultimately, I was forced to cut out portions of my character’s history to fit it into the post.

After posting for a few weeks nonstop in the Welcome Forum, I headed off to the The Arena area, where turn-based fighting is largely popular. I opened a topic with a list of the top turn based fighters, placed into a neat little image and posted right into the topic. It took a few days to get any response at all, (save for a few people who contacted me over AIM) and when I did get a response, I logged in to RPGChat to find that I had been banned for “advertising on multiple occasions”, much to my surprise.

However, while my visit was cut short, I met some good friends, and had some great discussions. Unfortunately, the forum does not allow any links to external sites of any kind, and also does not allow signatures, which makes it very difficult to spread the word about the topics you start there. This isn’t very good for encouraging member interaction, and makes it very difficult for momentum of any sort to be gained within the community.

After speaking with someone who had messaged me on AIM prior to my banning, I confirmed my worst fears - RPGChat is a closed community, and is not very open to outside communities or positive interaction with those communities. This is the number one concern mentioned to me about RPGChat and their future, and there is ongoing fear of the community continuing to stagnate without any growth other than direct referral.

I sent a request via the site’s contact form, as listed at the bottom every page, which merely opened a new email to their support address, forums@rpgchat.com - I sent a couple questions in my email, and I identified who I was, but I haven’t yet received a response. It’d be great if we could get an interview with an admin from RPGChat on the history of the site!

In terms of organic visitors, a search for pages on RPGChat has about 16,200 results. When digging through the pages, I noticed that only 477 pages were in the primary index, with the remainder in the supplemental index. That’s scary!

Let’s take a look at their search results:

As you can see from the above search, we can confirm that there is some duplicate content problems. However, from what we’ve seen - most of RPGChat’s traffic is a result of direct referral. We can identify with the importance of defensible traffic, but organic traffic is also a high-quality method of driving laser-targeted traffic to your site, and it looks like RPGChat is seriously missing out on this.

RPGChat has a relatively active forum; 63,708 threads, 1,925,709 posts, and 59,352 “active” members. While that’s only an average of about 30 posts per thread and only about 32 posts per user, they do have some great quality and style elements in their posts that you simply don’t see in many other places in roleplaying forums these days. I think it would be a great move for them to deactivate a lot of their older and inactive members, and send out reminders to these users to come back and join in on the fun.

It also seemed like a consensus that the single best area on RPGChat was the Clans & Guilds forum, which most users simply called “C/G” for short. It looks like most other forums’ version of a multiverse, where roleplay is freeform, and most action is player-driven with rules being defined by the status quo.

Lack of availability aside, RPGChat leaves a pretty strong impression, and if you’re careful to follow their 500 word list of rules, you can likely make some friends and enjoy some great high-quality roleplay. The administration needs to do some overhauling if they’re going to keep the community healthy, but for the time being - RPGChat makes for a great roleplaying destination.

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We had about 10 hours of downtime today; we’re really sorry about that! We went down at about 9am (EST) this morning, with an estimated downtime of three hours. However, due to some unforeseen problems with DNS propagation, we were down later in the evening. We’re again, really sorry about separating you from your roleplay!

So to compensate, we provide you with our new server. That’s right, a brand new server. Everything should be running noticeably faster now. If you notice any new problems or issues, let us know! (Because there’s a chance that we missed some things. Maybe.)

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AnimeMetro.com, the successor to our parent site GundamWing.com, was hacked at some point during the past 48 hours. Despite any recent uproars between AnimeMetro and RolePlayGateway staff, we sincerely condemn the attack on AnimeMetro as an act of unwarranted hatred and malice.

RolePlayGateway has not, and never will, encourage malicious hacking with the intent to deface or destroy a website or the user data within. This is perhaps one of the primary reasons we started GWing and RolePlayGateway - to create an environment where a member’s writing is safe from deletion. Supporting any behavior that involves destroying such data goes against our founding principles.

In short, we had nothing to do with AnimeMetro’s hacking.

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So I’ve been speaking recently with my Programming Structures professor at the University of Minnesota, Dr. Terveen, on the matter of community interaction and evolution, namely on those communities formed with very direct special interests in mind and the deviation from such interests as time progresses. Professor Terveen, a noted figurehead in the area of Human-Computer Interaction (Specializing in collaborative filtering), has spent most of his time monitoring specifically quantifiable components in communities - namely things that involve ratings, recommendations, and such. However there’s also a recognizable qualitative side, mostly related directly to community content itself, that is an interesting subject to look into.

I personally conjectured that pigeonholing online interest groups into those particular interests around which they are formed and making the assumption that such communities rely on the content inherent in those subjects to thrive was somewhat misleading. In my own personal studies on the matter, I’ve carefully monitored the progression and subject matter of two forum communities in particular, one an anime site (Anime-Forums.com, where I once moderated) and the other RoleplayGateway. Taken into account during the examination of each was the movement of interests and subject matter over time, despite the constant funneling inwards of new members constantly while older ones fall away.

A few interesting things came out of it - don’t worry, I won’t be boring anybody with the full details of most of this. But I took careful notice of the fact that both communities would drift towards and away their primary subject matter at relatively even intervals, this also being independent of the overall popularity of that given subject online as a whole at the time. Pretty natural patterns existed for RPGateway, such as the increased focus on subject matter (Namely roleplaying) during number surges. Particularly the RPGateway surges in April-May (I say ’surges’ based on Alexa rankings) were quite noteworthy, the former even more so. Activity was at a peak in the roleplaying section of the forums while the other sections saw decreases in activity, to the point that visiting them was rather misleading as far as gaining a grasp on the level of activity on the site goes. Meanwhile, the anime forum was the complete opposite. Number increases drove focus away from anime towards other unrelated things, although this can be somewhat attributed to the rather stale state of anime popularity during their bigger months, which could be explained through a few phenomena. Gateway also saw a September surge and then consistently higher numbers than normal since, which is expected with most websites that strike at our demographic.

So what exactly useful can be drawn from it? Well, there’s still a matter of cause-and-effect. Are increased numbers tending towards more focus on roleplaying? Or is increased focus on roleplaying producing more traffic? I’d personally like to be of the belief that the former is the more so important relationship here. Member retention and community involvement are absolute keys to success, and it’s pretty evident that interest groups can thrive even as they drift further from those core interests.

For the time being, suffice it to say that we’re heading in a good direction with the idea of expanding community involvement beyond the realm of writing clever posts and playing characters well.
Establish your base first, that’s the way. We all know that we enjoy roleplaying, otherwise we wouldn’t even be on the site in the first place. So let’s see what else brings us together.

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Due to some issue we’re having with our server, we were forced to take down our chat for the time being. The same links will all work - but will redirect everyone to a Java client for our IRC room on SurrealChat.

Please hang tight while we work to resolve these problems.

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Yax was very generous, placing RolePlayGateway in the Top 50 RPG websites. Yax runs a great dungeon mastering blog, with a ton of great tips, resources, and links - we recommend that you check out his blog, and don’t hesitate to subscribe to his RSS feed. Thanks again to Yax, and special thanks to our community for making us so great.

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Like Martin Reed writes on CommunitySpark, it’s important to make your community stand out from the competition. We recently announced over $300 in prizes for the winners of our forum posting contest, which puts a unique spin on forum contests.

Rather than counting posts, we’ve decided to use an algorithm to give each post a score, and take a total of each users’ scores over the contest as it runs for the 30 day period, from November 30th to December 30th. This is going to be perfect if you want to get some last minute Christmas shopping done!

If you watch the current standings of the contest, you’ll see the scores go up in almost real-time, they’ll be adjusted and recalculated every 10 minutes or so. Share this with your friends, too - we have no objection to people working together and posting back and forth in forum games, then sharing the prize if one of you wins.

Also, we’d like to announce that account merges are now made available. If you have any duplicate accounts that are not for specific characters, send me a PM and I can get your accounts merged for you (and even keep the one that has the earlier registration date ;] ).

There’s only one day left in the short story writing contest! Be sure to submit your story before the deadline!

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We recently added some new features to our forum that should make using our site an even easier experience.

Now, when you’re viewing topics, you can type and send a reply on the same page. This makes posting from school or work a lot easier!

New to the site as of today is a “Current Activity” section of sorts, which you can find at the top of every page. It displays the latest announcements from the staff, as well as the most recently popular topics and the most recently posted topics.

Just in time for the upcoming $300 posting contest, isn’t it?

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At about 2 AM this morning, autumn finally arrived on RolePlayGateway. We added a new fall theme for the forums, and included an additional style that you can select in the user control panel. All visitors to the site will see the full blown fall theme, while registered users who have selected a specific style will only see our leafy background.

I started a discussion on DigitalPoint about seasonal website themes, so if you’re into seeing other people’s designs, go there.

What does everyone think of the new style?

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