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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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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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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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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We just shuffled our main page a little, moving our introduction closer to the top of the page, and adding a beautiful anime-lady. We adjusted our introduction (but it might need a bit of tweaking, so please, comment!), and added a large section about what role playing games are. We also shifted the “News” section down, but it’s still there.

Do you think people who are coming here already know what RPGs are? Was it a good idea to add the section? Do you like the anime girl? Please, give us your feedback!

Oh, yes. Suggestions are welcome too.

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Running a role playing game online presents a large of amount of flexibility in the way you run the game. You no longer need individual sessions where all players are present, and there are a plethora of options as to where you are going to run it - if you want to run it in any one place.

One of the number one questions I receive relates to the medium for online RPGs. There are tons of different ways of communicating online, mainly grouped into a few categories. We have instant messenger, chats, message boards, and emails. There are a few custom services out there, but I’m going to touch on the four that I’ve mentioned.

On RolePlayGateway, we have a set of roleplaying forums as well as a roleplaying chat. When you’re running an RPG, there are a few items you should consider when deciding where you’re going to keep everything.

Forums have the benefit of being static and always available - users can post to forums at any time during the day and be sure that other users (and roleplayers) can see their message. Forums are also very flexible, they allow you to embed images and other multimedia within your posts, allowing you to share any experience with your players. However, it is post based - forums are often not the quickest way to communicate, as it is not a live feed of information like a chat.

Chats, on the other hand, have the benefit of being real time. Games can be run in chat (and instant messenger) on a moment’s notice, and work best when all of the players can be available at the same time. Because it is real time, short blip-based sessions such as character conversations and interactions work extraordinarily well with chats. Players can get the chance to interject into other player’s actions and statements without the worry of too much time going by. It is for this reason that the longer posts, such as those that exceed a paragraph, are often too large and unwieldy for chats - players end up waiting too long for each post, and will get bored.

Longer posts do very well on forums, where writing an individual post can take half an hour or longer to refine and perfect - just enough time for the players to go look at other games and other topics before they come back and begin formulating their response.

If you’re running a game with a detailed and/or complicated storyline or characters, it is always good to post something on a forum for player reference. This lets the players have a place to communicate out of character (OOC) - such as when they won’t be able to make a chat session, or when they want to discuss plans for character interaction, growth, or development. Even if your game is already on a forum - it is a good idea to create a place for OOC discussion. For chat-based games - this gives a perfect opportunity for players to jump in at the middle of a game with little trouble, as they simply need to read over the history of the game on the forum, which they can do at any point in time, and less time is needed explaining the game to the player.

Instant messenger works well when dealing with one on one sessions, such as when two characters are the only ones in an interaction or a meeting needs to be private. These interactions can be summarized or written into a cinematic format and then posted to the forum, for other players to enjoy as well. Instant messenger (as well as Private Messages) does very well at asking questions of the other players, which is convenient when you have a question about how they’re playing a role or a reference they made in character.

There are also emails - many games aren’t run by email anymore, but email is still a very valuable tool. RolePlayGateway like many forums offers you the ability to subscribe to topics. Subscriptions will let you receive an immediate email update whenever someone replies to the thread. This is extraordinarily helpful when there’s an RPG with only a few players that can only reply every once in a while, but it requires that people, y’know, actually check their email. RolePlayGateway also has the special ability to instant message you when there’s an update to a subscribed thread. All you need is a Jabber account (GMail accounts work, too) and to set up the notifications. We’ll send you a message as soon as there’s an update.

What methods have you used to manage your online roleplaying games? Are you a fan of forum or chat? Both? What helps you determine where you’re going to hold your game? Discuss!

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We’re making preparations to deploy our official Role Playing Chat. It’s going to be exciting - there will be some awesome features that’ll be rolled out around the same time, among which might be included the legendary reputation addon (formerly known as Karma, for you GWing veterans).

Feel free to test the current version of our chat, or you can catch us on our official RolePlayGateway IRC channel.

Look for everything to be deployed sometime in mid-October. We look forward to role playing with you!

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The author of the particularly famous Wheel of Time series passed away yesterday due to cardiac amyloidosis. Diagnosed with the disease in March of 2006, Jordan, born James Oliver Rigney Jr., vowed to fight the disease and continue his legendary writing career for many years to come. It is a great loss to the fantasy community, and on behalf of RolePlayGateway, we send our condolences to his family and friends, who will no doubt be the most affected by his passing.

You can catch more on Robert Jordan’s Official Blog, but due to the high traffic, here’s a mirror of his post:

It is with great sadness that I tell you that the Dragon is gone. RJ left us today at 2:45 PM. He fought a valiant fight against this most horrid disease. In the end, he left peacefully and in no pain. In the years he had fought this, he taught me much about living and about facing death. He never waivered in his faith, nor questioned our God’s timing. I could not possibly be more proud of anyone. I am eternally grateful for the time that I had with him on this earth and look forward to our reunion, though as I told him this afternoon, not yet. I love you bubba.

Our beloved Harriet was at his side through the entire fight and to the end. The last words from his mouth were to tell her that he loved her.

Thank each and everyone of you for your prayers and support through this ordeal. He knew you were there. Harriet reminded him today that she was very proud of the many lives he had touched through his work. We’ve all felt the love that you’ve been sending my brother/cousin. Please keep it coming as our Harriet could use the support.

Jason will be posting funeral arrangements.

My sincerest thanks.

Peace and Light be with each of you,

Wilson
Brother/Cousin
4th of 3

To Catalyst: Never, never loose faith. RJ did not. Harriet hasn’t. I haven’t. Going through what we have, our faith is only strengthened. Besides, if God didn’t exist, we would have never had Jim. We did. God does. Remember my Brother/Cousin, my friend, think of him fondly and glorify God’s name.

Editor’s Note:
The entire staff of Dragonmount.com would like to extend its most deepest sympathies to Robert Jordan’s family. He touched all of our lives in some way and we wish him the rest and peace he deserves. We will be posting information in the near future about where you can send condolences. Please check the News Section for these updates.

May you rest in peace.

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