A Couple Ideas I've Just Had

[Marcus Lorenzo Trovatelli]

I'm still under the effect of a lot of medicines and hopefully I make sense. Anyway… I've had a few ideas that might help us manage our characters and threads and maybe not let muses die due to lack of use or simply forgetting about it because of new things, which has happened to all of us at least once before.

1) I think it would be amazing for us to either build an all board tag tracker by IC category or make use of personal thread trackers. Some threads can be forgotten simply because there are seven more on top of it in the same board. I'm willing to browse through everything and build either one. It would just be a case for each player to maintain their own TT as they reply after the first work, which I'd PM to each of you after I'm done with it. Just tell me if you want me to do that or not. Example for a personal thread tracker, mine:

James Prewett
Some Say This Can't Be Real (Updated)
Growing Pains (To Be Replied)

Lily Prewett
On The Wings Of The Eagles (Updated)
Hope And Fear (To Be Replied)

Marcus Trovatelli
Nicotine And Caffeine (To Be Replied)

Albion Prewett
None

Planned Characters:
Damien Blake
Ivan Shostakov

It's just a question of deleting threads or characters once they are considered finished or add them as they are created or joined or thought about. It's not a lot of work to maintain and will help everyone a lot, I think, as I believe that would help everyone to know where each of us is and where we have to wait without the chance of forgetting anything.

2) In the custom text for each account, where we place year and special powers, after everything else place a line saying either Played By: X or NPCed By: X. This way everyone knows which character belongs to whom at all times. This would also help immensely as I build the above suggestion if it sails. I know most characters without a bio or played by in their bio are Arye's, but not all of them. So this would be great, I think.

Also characters marked with NPCed By are not meant to be used by their player all the time and can have zero threads under their account from time to time. Though characters marked with Played By should have at least one thread under their account at any moment. This way we will know that certain interactions are to be asked for by PM before a tag is thrown IC and how long we might have to wait for a reply depending if the character is a main or a NPC for that player. I think using this kind of organization together with the above suggestion is better than deleting accounts, which kind of disorganizes old threads due to the deletion, since dwindling muses can return after some time. I say this because it has happened to me several times in the past and this was what I suggested and did then. I think deletions should be done only for disappeared people who will probably never return. Only my opinion, off course. If characters are placed up for grabbers, mainly canons, it's only a question of asking the new player to change the account password if they want and then pass it along without braking anything especially old threads wise.

3) I'm not sure how well this last suggestion would work or not. Actually I don't even know if I am making sense so far. I was thinking yesterday that we could implement a joint posting way of playing. This would eliminate the short post syndrome and help people who are loosing muse or do not have a lot of time to post to keep up with everything.

It would work this way. Someone starts a thread with a couple paragraphs, then the other player adds a paragraph or two to that post with a different color tag, let's say blue, the first adds another, no tag, the second adds blue and so on. This might also produce posts with better flow of speech and action since things would be happening in sequence as in a normal text. After about ten or fifteen paragraphs open another post and switch between the character accounts involved in the thread. The color tags are important for the involved to know if the other players in the thread have all posted their replies. Example: if no tag (thread starter), blue tag and yellow tag have posted, then I know it is time for me, the green tag to post. Looking up the order would be obvious. Once subsequent posts are opened, it is just a question of removing the color tags from the previous finished post.

I don't know if this would be easier or more difficult for you or for me really, but the idea is out there. The only thing that might be a problem is that we'd have to build the posts by PM or have one account per player with minimum moderation rights only in IC boards. I don't know how well that might go really…. Also play by post as we do now would still be valid and possible. This would be just one more way to build our posts. If someone whose brain is working better than mine right now have another idea on how this could work for us, please share.

Hopefully the above makes some sense and is useful to you, guys. I'm taking a couple more days out to cure this cold, which I've caught from my mom. Went there to help her as she was sick and now I am the one who is sick...

[Lily "Lils" Prewett]

OK. I don't know if this has ever happened to you in a Proboards forum, but it did happen to me a few times in the past and here when I was registering this very account.

I first registered my Lily as lily as I had done with James and Albus. For what I have noticed lately most of us do something similar. Use the character's first name as the username for that account.

But that username had been taken by another player before me and my supposedly new account, which should be clean, had 15 posts and a bio in its history. Sure I did not find that weird as it has happened to me on another board. I just deleted that lily account again and created this one lilyprewett, which was clean as it was meant to be.

This happens as a safe guard for accidental account deletions. If I just go there and accidentally delete James, I can just come back and register again with the same username and all my posts as James will go to my new account. I won't be able to edit any of my old posts from before the accidental deletion, only the ones after it. But old posts, for what I remember when I accidentally deleted an account long ago elsewhere, still count for your account statistics of postage.

That is one of the reasons why deleting accounts should be something well thought out before done in my opinion. If someone wants to play a character called James, who is not my James and I have left, he certainly doesn't want to get trash in his supposedly new account. That might scare some more inexperienced players.

So we should either avoid account deletions as much as possible, like in keeping canon accounts and have them just change hands and passwords when grabbed, use a rule to force people to use as username their character's first and last name to avoid conflict or a combination of both. I particularly don't like forcing people to register in a certain way, that may dissuade some players from joining. But something must be thought to minimize this possible effect. Maybe we can come up with a totally new way together?

Or maybe it's not such a big deal in the greater scheme of things, but it can happen and did happen to me. Maybe just place a warning about it somewhere so people with whom this happens don't get scared away might suffice?