I don't really have a good place to post this, or in any way be cohesive, but you're all getting my reactions to things as I encounter them because some of them are so good I need to share.
So today I was hanging out in one of the RP Discords, and they were talking about themes they liked - a common enough occurrence - and so I thought I'd take a look.
It's completely typical for its genre, the copyright in the footer suggested it was custom made for that site, and it probably was, but it looked like so many of the others in the genre it could easily have been one off the shelf and tweaked and I'm sure no-one would have noticed the difference.
But the bit that got me was how slow it was loading - and then it dawned on me that it was loading a whopping 95MB of images on the board index. And since half of them were from files.jcink.net, the browser's only going to load probably 2 at a time, so they're going to crawl into appearance.
Optimise your images, people, ffs.
Note that I am not sharing which site, no name and shame here.
That’s the really funny thing. Almost all the pretty designs are desktop centric - obviously - and most are utterly unusable on phones but yet there is a healthy demographic who do post from phone even on these really aesthetic sites.
The main drama is that there is a lack of knowledge on how to make these designs mobile friendly (but even if there were more knowledge I deeply question whether they *would*).
You see, there is a healthy non-trivial segment of the universe that uses “post templates”, namely swathes of markup not always codified into a bbcode (but using raw HTML) that will be inserted into a post, which inevitably are not mobile friendly. For practical example, there is the “comms” phenomenon, which is to style individual posts as if they were communications over a messenger service. You get a mobile screen’s worth of post layout for three lines of text… inside the post body.
This reflects one of the huge banes I perceive in forum RP as an entire format: there is a huge desire to be aesthetic in the boards and in posts, but I find this hugely at odds with the reading and posting part of engagement. I strongly feel it would do everyone significant benefit to provide more features for authors in shaping their creation to their aesthetic, while at the same time giving readers more control over how they consume.
My favourite example is dialogue. It is common to see dialogue stylised in prose. Some choose to colour their dialogue in a colour that suits their character, others in bold. The perception is that this is for readability (this is not an argument I entirely believe but for the sake of the people I write with who also do this, I’m willing to accommodate them), even though it’s a PITA for me to do as an author *and* it’s a PITA for me to read - so I’d like it if it were easier to add this in (ideally zero/near zero effort to me), and that I could also remove it without having to worry about it.
That way, those who care about the aesthetic and/or ”accessibility” in that respect can create to their heart‘s content, those who don’t want to have to care can still participate, and everyone gets a reading experience to suit them. But apparently I’m weird for thinking like this…
When I had a RWBY roleplay forum, which was on SMF, we created different post stylings based on the four main girls (red, white, black, yellow) and that was the extent of the "post template" for us. All it did was add a bit of color, styling, and a small header to the regular post area, it didn't do that thing most post templates do, where they shrink the post down and make it all narrow and annoying to read.
For the record, I am not a "bold the dialogue type of RPer and never have been. I tend to write my RP posts similar to a book, in which dialogue goes on its own line, occasionally with a tag (e.g: "You got dead bodies in these?" he asked while he lifted boxes onto the truck.)
See, a little flair like that is neat and I’m on board with that. My criteria is that templates shouldn’t get in the way of reading or writing. It’s something that still baffles me in a hobby based around communication and shared storytelling that you wouldn’t make that absolutely front and centre.
As someone remarked to me about forum design, forums are for facilitating humans talking, everything else is fluff. In RP land this is more diverse but probably *more* important because RP works in different contexts, with the in-character and out-of-character stuff where expectations of content and speed of response will be potentially different.
The bolding is a pet peeve of mine but it’s one of those things that others seen to like so I’d love to find a solid way of accommodating everyone.
On that note I’ve been debating the concept of trying to move some workloads off Discord and back to the forum - I get how the chat is good for 1x1 plotting but I often wonder if it would be healthier to actually do that on the forum, but reworking the classic PM system into a more real-time DM format, and also perhaps facilitating rapid fire as a “board” of “topics” that are really like DMs in something more real time where you can treat it like private (or public) chat. I just think this might help not only focus activity and help folk set boundaries better, but also it means that reporting questionable activity can go to the curator of the space rather than a big organisation.
I understand the opening concern completely though it also ranges into (invariably, desktop-oriented) tech hobby spaces and nostalgic web designs as well. It's a certain type of style over design attitude that comes from having little to no pressure to actually create something that is responsive in nature because it works for you/the immediate audience. Some of the fansites for certain older desktop games are... wild.
I do look forward to any development that is RP-friendly, author's vision vs reader sanity can be quite the beast to reconcile. Your weird-think is niche but if realized would probably find a rather determined following. I certainly share and support those shades of 'weird'.
