RPG's New Design Team

Smokescreen · **Tips:** 0.00 INK by **Smokescreen** on Sat Feb 11, 2017 11:06 am

Please make an easy to find spot for new role plays. It used to be right at top, one could peep them and move on, now I can't find them at all with out navigating menus upon sub menus like a tech manual to a couch that came in a bag from Ikea. Ain't no body got time for that smh.

maccotango · **Tips:** 0.00 INK by **maccotango** on Wed Feb 15, 2017 4:00 am

@Smokescreen
I've been seeing a general demand for it, and we'll add it to our list of things to discuss. c: I personally also enjoyed seeing the new roleplays with just a glance, but I feel that it could've been presented in a better way.

LawOfTheLand · **Tips:** 0.00 INK by **LawOfTheLand** on Wed Feb 15, 2017 11:32 pm

bethelit wrote:
LawOfTheLand wrote:Non-design person here. I always focused on the quality of the text itself and left making it look pretty to the Designer folk.

Couldn't a relationship status be reflected in a character's activity/history instead of being maintained in an OOC list? Just a thought.

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Hey @LawOfTheLand! Relationship tracking can be essential to certain plays, and it's great that you're suggesting a more convenient option. Interesting idea, thank you for sharing your thoughts. Several players have expressed to me that keeping the relationship section in their character's activity/history often feels like clutter. However, I'd love to hear your side of things.

What specifically do you feel could be improved upon in terms of tracking relationship statuses? Are there other options you'd recommend as well if not migrating relationships to character activity/history?

Thanks again for voicing your input, and I look forward to hearing your $0.02. (:

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If you want to reflect a character's current beau (or if you're in a web), then yes, the best way to reflect their current state is in the OOC thread. Heck, if you do it right, someone can be your friend AND your enemy! I don't see a better way to do it, as tagging characters to show up in the profile as being specific things the way locations are shown in relation to one another would be very clunky. Character activity logs would be an existing tool to show someone's past relationships, though it'd be hard to go through and say WHY Xavier broke up with Yvonne without some digging.

I'm reminded of how F-List shows someone's other characters on that same account, but then you'd have to list the nature of each person's relationship to the character. In roleplays where this sort of thing is important, as I said before, you could easily have someone that's both a friend and a rival. Heck, the latest Pokemon games have bent over backwards to give you characters that are both, and that have their own motivations. So for Xavier, you could have "Tiesto - Friend, Rival. Wants to make the ultimate dance team." This works for RPs with a relatively small number of characters, as relationship-focused RPs tend to have. And yes, I know his real name is Calem.

In the end, it all depends on what the GM wants to do...do they want the players to track relationships themselves as activity happens? Do they want to make and maintain such a list? Both to aid in record keeping? And most importantly, would such a list be healthy for the roleplay?

There's your 2 cents--with interest.

Captain Kidd · **Tips:** 0.00 INK by **Captain Kidd** on Fri Feb 17, 2017 8:33 pm

Great to see volunteers so dedicated to making the site better, can't wait to see what you lot cook up!

Miserable · **Tips:** 0.00 INK by **Miserable** on Fri Feb 17, 2017 8:54 pm

Just here to chime in with my thanks, as well. Been on this site for a while, and I've always appreciated the effort that people put in, getting nothing back in return. Way back when, when this site was only forum based and the tab system wasn't in place, I appreciated how the roleplays were organized via genre, so it was easier to know where to look, when looking for a roleplay to fit your interests. I understand that that is probably what the tag system is for, so you can add your genre to that list and people can search through it, but different people list different things in their tags, so even if a roleplay fits "fantasy" or "realistic" or so on, people aren't necessarily always tagging their roleplays as that. I don't have any solutions in mind, and it's only a minor inconvenience, but figured I would throw it out there, in case someone has an idea on search/categorization of roleplays.

Captain Kidd · **Tips:** 0.00 INK by **Captain Kidd** on Fri Feb 17, 2017 9:42 pm

Also, I'd like to formally submit my application for the design team. Instead of the reasonable requirement of application that you posted, I've gone ahead and designed a great mascot for the site: Smilo Yiannopoulos. Smilo is a positive and (mostly) copyright-free mascot I've poured countless seconds into designing, and he'll be sure to pull tons of new users onto the site. Like literally grab them. Synergy. E-commerce. Bitcoin.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental

maccotango · **Tips:** 0.00 INK by **maccotango** on Sun Feb 19, 2017 9:48 am

@LawOfTheLand
Many thanks for you input! c: I never saw it quite that way, so it's nice to see the thought process behind your feedback.

@Miserable
The tagging/search system is actually one of our current priority discussions. I've got some ideas cooking and I'll be sharing them with the team in the hopes it'll improve that aspect of the website. It's nice that you brought it up though, as it's a major part of roleplaying.

@Captain Kidd
gud ur hired.
kidding aside, many thanks for the well wishes!

Ylanne · **Tips:** 0.00 INK by **Ylanne** on Sat Feb 25, 2017 9:57 pm

Hey maccotango! Thanks for taking on this important responsibility. Looking forward to seeing you and more design team members around the site!

VindicatedPurpose · **Tips:** 1.00 INK by **VindicatedPurpose** on Thu Mar 02, 2017 11:07 pm

Hey.

Design team.

Go make some stars explode. k?

rpgwriter · **Tips:** 0.00 INK by **rpgwriter** on Sun Sep 10, 2017 12:22 pm

Does someone make custom codes for here or are you reliant on third party scripts?

Chuckles · **Tips:** 0.00 INK by **Chuckles** on Mon Dec 11, 2017 11:16 pm

So, does the design team also cover the way the site is presented on different formats (ie: the way the site looks on desktop vs mobile)? Or is that a different code area?

The reason I ask is because there are quite a few issues on the mobile version for me. It's not a huge deal since I generally just force desktop, but if this team is involved with those types of fixes I'd be happy to forward bug reports and readability issues. I'm not very good with coding and the like (I've wanted to learn but simply have too many plates to juggle as it is) but I have a pretty good eye for what something should look like and I'm a pretty good typesetter. (I think that's the word?)

maccotango · **Tips:** 0.00 INK by **maccotango** on Fri Jan 05, 2018 8:12 am

@rpgwriter
we'll eventually be using rem's maki to build the new site!

@Chuckles
I'll PM you! c:

LordSaladin · **Tips:** 0.00 INK by **LordSaladin** on Sat Mar 03, 2018 1:43 am

I've been away from the site for a considerable while, and there are definitely a few things that need fixing from a design perspective; mostly in the realms of usability and consistency. A few examples I've come across:

Fonts:

The serif font is pretty awful and not particularly easy to read when in blocks of text. Maybe it's the weighting in certain places, or the letter spacing, I'm not sure. I mentioned this to Martindale and he said the serif font was a conscious choice over sans-serif, so maybe it just needs a different font.

Font usage isn't consistent, so it doesn't make much sense. Some places have serif all over the place, other have sans-serif. It should definitely be standardised. I think a usual web standard is serif for titles, sans for body text.

Responsiveness:

The total lack thereof, really. I know forums aren't the most easily-transferable thing to make responsive, but it feels like a little bit of work could go a long way.

Layout issues:

I was making a roleplay, and a lot of the form pages just seem to have really broken layouts; things overlapping in weird ways, horizonal rules not really reflecting the page's layout, etc. I don't have any screenshots but can provide some if needed.

Site Width:

The site feels far too narrow. At only 960px wide, it's ideal for a tablet, but could definitely do with being wider on desktop machines. Maybe this is more linked in to responsiveness, but long gone are the days where people generally have a 1024px wide monitor on a desktop or laptop.

Search:

There's no visible way to search the forums. You need to click 'View my posts' then 'back to advanced search' to get to an actual search page. I'm sure there used to be a search box right there in the header, but it's not there any more. Bring it back please!

Luckily, I'm also a web developer, and am more than willing to help with some of these things. So I guess I'm saying if you want me on the design team, I can be.

ChaoticMarin · **Tips:** 0.25 INK by **ChaoticMarin** on Tue Mar 06, 2018 2:06 pm

Personally, I think streamlining players to roleplays is the most important part of the site. I believe I saw it mentioned earlier by others, but I'd just like to elaborate on my own vision. I'm just gonna try to split it up into four ideas to help facilitate a better streamlining process.

#1
I think that roleplays should not be considered open to join by default.

If we added a new setting / flag for roleplays that determined whether they were open for people to join and that setting defaulted to off, the problem of storage roleplays would disappear very quickly. All we'd have to do is then not promote roleplays that are not open.

As someone who really got on board with locations, and groups and all the other advanced features of the site I also hit a rather disturbing problem when I tried to make my own roleplay. Namely, it took me a long time to go from creating the RP to being ready to accept members. I needed to flesh out the world and the lore first. By the time I was done, people told me they didn't want to join because it had been too long since its creation without posts. It was a dead RP to them, even though I was right there ready to run things for them.

If it had been closed during the development process and then later added to say, a newly opened roleplays list when I finally got to finishing it I can't help but feel that maybe it would've been viewed differently.

#2
If I go to the homepage right now, and I travel down past the featured writers, I'll find "Recently Active Settings (Excluding The Mutliverse)". 6 out of the 10 locations listed there are from Sambea's roleplay Veritas Isle. Now, it seems to me that The Multiverse was excluded because it would flood the list and be most of the locations on it. But... that happened anyway, just with another RP! That seems to imply to me that there's an underlying problem with the list itself causing the flooding.

It makes sense, if we're only talking about The Multiverse, to split the RP up into a bunch of locations. The Multiverse is a huge RP with its own cliques and isolated scenes. However! I don't think this really holds true for a lot of other roleplays. I think that a lot of roleplays are a bit more of a cohesive, single unit. To me, it'd make a lot more sense to change the list to a list of recently active roleplays and then let someone go to the roleplay's page if they want to find out which specific locations were recently active.

#3
Likewise, "Newest Worlds" below that does not imply that those worlds are open to join. If we replaced that with "Recently Opened Roleplays" from the idea I described in #1 and gave it a bit more space on the home page, I feel like it would be a much more helpful for both GMs trying to communicate that they want attention and people looking for RPs to join. With the changes in #2, I feel like it wouldn't be unreasonable to shorten that list slightly to give it more room.

#4
Perhaps a way for struggling GMs to advertise roleplays that simply aren't getting much attention would be something to look into. Right now, I believe our optons are mostly "Go into the chat or forums and start giving sales pitches", which is... I mean it works if you aren't uncomfortable trying to sell things to strangers, but other options might be nice. What if we had an "Ads" section where GMs could write up an ad, press a button and have that ad appear on the ads section for others to read. This ad could then stay there for... X amount of time before it goes down, meaning a GM has to be active enough to check in once every day? week? However long to keep it up there. It could be sorted by how recently they checked in and refreshed their ad. Sort of like a forum board, where your thread (ad) is automatically bumped whenever you as the creator view your thread. Though it would probably be more intuitive to have your ads presented to you separately from the main list and have a button to start advertising / refresh them. Like say if they were listed on a little sidebar labeled "Your Ads" or something.

This would offer a 3rd distinct way to help active GMs get their RPs some attention. If they've already opened their RP but don't have the activity yet to be on the other list, this offers them something to fall back on.

Anyway those are just a few ideas I had in mind, some based on my own personal experiences and others based on features I really liked from other sites adapted for our own. Hope some of them are useful!

ChaoticMarin · **Tips:** 0.00 INK by **ChaoticMarin** on Sun May 06, 2018 7:02 pm

Oh! As an addition, the [img-crisp-right] and [img-crisp-left] tags could be very useful, but they're formatted in a very ugly way that almost defeats the purpose of using them.

Here is the way they look now.

Y'see how there's an enormous amount of whitespace around the images and a black border distracting from the image itself?

Now here's a minor edit I did to the inline CSS.

So basically, I switched from em to px. Em is arbitrary and hard to work with. 1em translates to like, 16 pixels but that's huge, so if I wanted to make a more reaqsonable margin I'd have to go do math and put in a fraction of an em. 6px is usually a nice, safe detault for image margins in my experience.

I then simply set the border-width to 0, disabling the border. A border is not something I ever want to use when I'm working with images. It often doesn't add anything and, at worst, is extremely ugly like the screenshot above. Since the purpose of image-crisp is to lay down some simply, default css styling on images, I feel like simply removing the border is the best option.

This looks so much better, imho. The [img-crisp] tag itself also has a border that I'd like to see removed, perhaps having the margins also changed to 6px instead of 1em.

Cloud · **Tips:** 0.00 INK by **Cloud** on Mon May 28, 2018 4:52 am

Hello design team!

First off, I'd like to say thank you for taking on the job of giving RPG an update. It's definitely not an easy job, especially taking into account everyone's differing opinions. I appreciate the effort that goes into the decisions being made and the work to see those choices realised.

I'm not entirely sure if this is the right thread to post this, so apologies if it's not. My concern is the very recent introduction of the 'view source' function that has appeared on character sheets. As I'm sure you're aware, this function allows anyone to view the code used to create a sheet. I have spoken with other members of roleplaygateway and know that I am not the only one who finds this addition less than ideal.

My concerns/questions relating to this are:
- That code developed by specific users can now be copied with ease and reused without permission by others. To those who spend a significant amount of time developing their own, unique code, having your original content stolen and plagiarised is incredibly disheartening. I know of several cases of this happening before this update. Myself and a number of roleplayers see this update as a way in which more theft can take place with greater access to others' code.

- Creates a blank column in the character sheets. This has caused previously made sheets to suddenly have text and images out of line [An example], due to the character sheet essentially becoming narrower/messing with the width. For those of us who value the aesthetic components of our CSs, it's a considerable issue to suddenly have all our sheets with this issue.

- What use does this function actually have? I fail to actually see the use for this feature. How does my ability to see other's coding help me in a roleplay? What was the justification for making this addition?

If this is part of a larger roll-out which will eventually correct the issues I stated above, please let me and others concerned know. At the moment I feel as if every new update doesn't actually address many of the actual RPG issues (many of which have been pointed out above), but rather either serve no purpose, or cause problems such as this.

Again, I do appreciate the work being done to maintain and update the site.

Regards,
Cloud

Layla · **Tips:** 0.25 INK by **Layla** on Mon May 28, 2018 5:30 am

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Warmest regards,
xxxxxxxxxxLayla

aipsylon · **Tips:** 0.00 INK by **aipsylon** on Mon May 28, 2018 10:02 am

Thank you for all the work you do. I really appreciate all the work you put in so I can have a place to play and write.

As an active member and supporter of the open source community the visibility of it should be opt in. Coders put work into their code and should have the option to choose when and how to share their work. There are fairly well defined guidelines for this that can be found with not much work.

Furthermore the way the button squishes the entire thing narrow. This is not desirable and something that seems easily fixed.

༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ · **Tips:** 0.00 INK by **༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ** on Fri Jun 01, 2018 11:44 pm

Chiming in as a non-coder I have to agree that addition of the "view source" button seems...unnecessary to say the least. Generally, GMs will provide a source code for profiles in a separate thread so there isn't much of a reason to view another person's character sheet to skim the code.

What I do see is a way to copy an existing code that you might not know how to make, which is why I agree with the concerns Bethelit, Cloud, and Layla brought up. It seems like it would be really easy to go into someone's profile, copy the source code, and then pass it off as your own versus having to figure out how to create your own sheet. I'm not trying to accuse anyone of that necessarily but I have had a character of mine stolen in the past (different website) and hurt pretty badly seeing them on another website. It's never a good feeling having your hard work plagiarized, even if roleplaying itself is just for fun.

While this little feature does not directly affect roleplaying, I do care about our creatives, our writers, our content creators, and our players. It has been my new home for ~4 years and I would hate to see this go the way of other websites, introducing needless changes that slowly alienate the community until nobody is left.

At the very least, the view source button should have the ability to be disabled, like aipsylon suggested.

EDIT: Another point brought up is that there was no announcement and some people can't even see it. I was able to see the "view source" button a few days ago but now it doesn't show up for me so you might want to look into that as well, Rem.

Bluwolf · **Tips:** 0.00 INK by **Bluwolf** on Thu Jan 17, 2019 10:50 am

Look I'm not suggesting anything, I would love to join the design team, but I have literally no skill. The most iI free possibly offer is creative design descriptions (describing how said place looks)

RPG's New Design Team

a topic in The Artist's Cafe, a part of the RPG forum.

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