It was brought forth on the discord, and this is not a new issue that has been brought up and addressed, that there are members feeling left out of OOC and IC goings on around the site. This is
not okay. It is
not acceptable. It needs to change and in order to do that, every member, whether you are a direct culprit or not needs to evaluate their behaviour and exclusiveness to all members. I do not believe it's intentional but it's a problem regardless.
In light of a recent discussion in the discord that many members participated in about the above concern brought forth, some interventions are being put into place and while they are not going to resolve all the problems, I am hopeful that they will help alleviate some of the discomforts brought to other members of the site.
Most of these interventions are IC, but as mentioned in the discussion, people have a tendency to flock to those they RP with a lot and this develop OOC relationships, and there is nothing wrong with this. By implementing the items below, we are hoping members feeling left out can become more involved IC and that will hopefully translate to developing better OOC relationships and diminishing the feeling of being left out.
It's not a perfect solution, there isn't a solution. This sort of thing is always going to exist no matter how hard we work on keeping it away. Our job is to do our best to recognize our behaviors, discuss it openly and be able to come up with ways to prevent it.
Interventions:
1. We have an IC discord where a lot of members like to RP quick things or 18+ things, and while it has been a part of the site since it's opening, we are going to trial it's use in a different way so those who are not a part of the IC Discord can b involved. The IC Discord now has it's own board on site for rapid fire posting. If you are unfamiliar, it's what we do for Quidditch where we set aside 4 hours and just spam like crazy with short posts usually 1-3 sentences is the minimum requirement. This new board will be for members to use to rapid fire threads or plot ideas that members want to get through quickly. It can be also good for quickly throwing 2 characters together to see how they mesh and for testing out characters. The rapid fire board will not could for overall activity and members will still be required to RP regularly. Anything that can be RPed on site should be RPed on site either in regular threads or rapid fire threads.
3. Re-evaluate criteria for making new characters. It was brought up that it can be frustrating for some member who have few characters to RP with members who have lots of characters and might favor certain characters. We're all guilty of this. With this in mind, the changes in criteria include the following:
Members must now wait 2 weeks between characters if they have more than 10 characters.
The activity check portion of the application will remain but it is expected that members are not posting all their required posts in the same day as this poorly reflects your activity.
Your overall activity will be checked and your application may be denied even if you have passed the activity check because the admins may feel you're overall activity is not efficient for handling another character. We do ask that members be aware of their limits and not bite off more than they can chew.
4. Introduce RP with someone new/someone you haven't for house points. This can be found in the More Ways to Earn House Points. We encourage all members to utilize this to help their house win the cup!
5. The plotting channels in both the IC Discord and the regular Discord have been removed/altered. We encourage members to only use the one in the regular discord for posting open threads, want ads and plot ads and then to direct people to DMs or threads on the site.
6. It was suggested we trial a monthly thread sign up for character roulette where you get assigned a random person to RP with and you guys can plot stuff.
7. Remove channels in all discords that lead to plotting talk. And remove the general chat in IC discord.
8. Wrap up sitewide plot. I will be PMing the infiltration groups shortly with details and then letting everyone know the plan for this. I know it's been both rushed and dragging in aspects and people are anxious to get their characters out of the prison so, I'm working on it.
I think that is all for now so please, please, be aware of your actions and the reactions of others to make this place feel homey for everyone again. Love you all.
PS: If I missed you in the tags, shoot me a DM or message on the site!
It's really important to communicate with each and every member you RP with and transparency is the key so any time you are changing something that might effect others, please give them a head's up!
TAGGED ACCOUNTS:
@riley2021 @christopher
Dionysos Amadori @feemaccafferty @marcarius @cue
Esmeralda Belmonte @jose @corvus
Tae-il Chae @jax @clint @xayah
Gianni Amadori Levi Hilfiger Dean Stewart @gemini @maia
Yŭxuān Sylus Hou @ethan @hyejin
Remington Grebe Rosie Huntington @fluer
Elizabeth Kingston Sally Byrne @callie @bowchuckle @qzhang @raven @lexie @romeo @pandora