- What are the things you love about the current system that you want to KEEP and don't wanna give up?
None of it is sacrosanct to me, honestly. I would be okay with all of the new system being scrapped and going back to what we had before. I'm more or less okay with the current system as well, but nothing it adds is so good that I couldn't give it up.
- What are the things you are having a hard time with or find confusing to deal with?
I don't find any of it confusing or challenging, but there are some things I dislike. See below.
- What are the things you don't like OR don't feel is useful for you as a roleplayer/GM?
The ton of information and buttons off to the right side (or below everything else on mobile because lolsmallscreen) in the overview is messy and bad. This is largely because the big rectangular link buttons look chunky and awful. To make it worse, the buttons come in three separate sizes: one size for the In Character link button is one size, the View Roleplay link button is another size, and the six link buttons under the Creating Additional Threads heading are yet another size. Oh, and those headings look similar to the buttons themselves and contribute to the whole thing looking like a mess. This is just a thing I don't like, because there's definitely useful stuff in there, it's just an aesthetic abomination that could do with an overhaul. Uniform button sizes (that are smaller than the heading boxes ideally) and a more distinct coloration difference between heading and button boxes would do wonders for making the thing look better.
This roleplay system existing for one on one roleplays is strange and doesn't seem useful. It has nice organizational tools to deal with large numbers of people, but they're kind of pointless for one on one roleplays, especially considering how the common standard is for people to lay out their premise and ground rules in their partner search threads thus the overview and rules tabs are kinda redundant at that point. The cast list tab is a toss up between kind of useful (because both participants should know who writes which characters if they're using multiple characters and other people have no need for a cast list) or totally useless (if each person plays only one character). Updates are just completely broken for 1x1 roleplays because they slam an OOC post into the IC thread. It just doesn't mesh well at all.
The list of other roleplays created by that person is odd. It serves very little useful purpose other than to allow people to be creepy stalkers even when someone has their profile set to private, and I feel like that's not something we really want.
- What is MISSING that you really wish was a feature?
As others have rightly said, the biggest missing thing is customizable tabs. I know you can't really do anything to add these right now and can't help the fact that the addons that currently exist to try to make it work are too buggy, but honestly I wish the new roleplay system hadn't been implemented at all in its current state because without this convenient grouping of all relevant things into the tab system it feels broken and incomplete, like a business billed as a one-stop shopping retailer but they keep their food off in a separate building a few blocks away. All the tabs do currently is awkwardly separate all the contents of a traditional OOC thread: what used to be the opening post is now the Overview tab, with the option of further segmenting OP contents by placing rules and a cast list in their own tabs, and then everything else from the traditional OOC thread is in the Thread tab... except for updates, which are just special snowflake versions of the GM posting something in a traditional OOC thread. Without the functionality of making the IC thread (and any other related threads, like a character gallery or whatever) also tied into the tab system then all we have is an awkward break up of the old OOC thread format that worked just fine for years and would have continued to be just fine until the fancy system was actually made to work with custom tabs and such. Everything but the compartmentalization of first OOC post contents works effectively the same as it did before the system was implemented, with nothing really gained but complexity for complexity sake.
The ability to link more than two other threads to the overview would be great, whether or not custom tabs become a thing in the future. Y'know how people are all sorts of upset about the lack of group creation because the groups system is ancient and broken? The ability to link a large number of threads to a roleplay resource would for most purposes replace the functionality of the group system while also giving people better tools for making large roleplays that could reasonably call for multiple IC threads. I recall seeing something about a desire to let people more easily make universe roleplays similar to Ilium, and this would accomplish exactly that with minimal fuss.
Inherent genre sorting in interest checks. The tags system is okay, but it's far more convenient and intuitive to just go "hmmm, I wanna play fantasy, so I'll go check the fantasy interest checks." The tagging system both requires a search and requires the thread creator to accurately tag their roleplay; searching is a bother compared to just clicking the section you want, and GMs who label their things incorrectly or not at all appear to be common from what I've seen in my recent RP searching. Dumping all the group roleplay interest checks into one section and 1x1 interest checks into another makes it horrible to try to find something specific. I would like to see the return of those genre subforums for interest checks, or at the very least the addition of thread prefixes to those sections that match the list of genre sections (fantasy, horror, dice, etc. for group interest checks; romance, drama, combat, etc. for one on one partner searches). Alternatively, if you could make the tag system have like a single mandatory tag from a drop down selection that is a list of genres, meaning a person can't create a roleplay thread without selecting an appropriate genre tag, then it would also alleviate the major issues with tagging systems. I have a feeling that just adding more prefix selections will be the simpler option though. :P
- If you are (or had to) work as a moderator for the roleplay sections, what are things that would be confusing or a problem for you?
To be honest, I've mostly stopped helping out with moderating the roleplay sections ever since the new system came into play. Part of the reason for this is because of how annoying it is to find which threads are inactive and need to be archived. The overviews are basically worthless for this purpose because their date order is based on the use of the update function rather than posting in the auto-created thread. That means we either have to crawl through all the roleplays in a single section and go check all their linked threads manually (which is a pain in the ass process now: open overview, click Thread tab, go to last page, scroll down to check post date on last post to see if it was more than a month ago, go back to overview tab, click In Character link to the right/below the overview info, go to last page, scroll down to check post date on last post; contrast this to the former ease of open the IC and OOC areas of one genre, see if any in either one have had no activity in a month, cross reference to make sure the related thread in the other section is also inactive), or we have to go check the full listing of hundreds of IC and OOC threads in their subforums and just ignore the new system overview stuff until we find a roleplay that needs to be archived. It's just a pain in the ass, and we've got CVs to do the grunt work so I've stopped bothering and have moved to sweeping up the old shit from non-RP sections of the site once a week instead. >_>
So, the takeaways from the above rant paragraph are this: the roleplay overviews being sorted by last use of the update feature makes it a pain in the ass to moderate via the new system and having all the group/1x1 IC and OOC threads shoved into large holding pens rather than being chunked into more manageable numbers by genre separation makes it a pain in the ass to moderate via the old ways. The fact of the pain in the ass status is evident upon a quick cruise through the IC thread area for group roleplays, specifically the two pages worth of inactive threads that are just... still sitting there, with plenty of those threads having a last activity date going back to August or earlier. Same story for the group OOC threads section. It's pretty clear that there's a lot of confusion going on that's causing the janitorial duties to not be performed correctly. Something is fucky there, and I don't know if it's a matter of people just not even trying to moderate the group section because of the complexity or trying it and doing it wrong because of confusions. Hoever, The One on One sections look nice and clean, so kudos to the staff and CVs keeping on top of that. I'd have to guess that is due in large part to how the auto-created thread is the only thread used by most one on one roleplays, thus making it take much less effort to do janitorial work there than group roleplays require (check list of one on one IC threads, go to the end of the list to find any with more than a month of inactivity, confirm that it's not one of the ~dozen with an OOC thread, done).
I probably sound like a naysaying dickhead, which to be fair I am, but I don't exactly loathe the new system. I just don't see any point in lavishing praise on the things I like when I've already made such a TL;DR post of constructive criticism. :P
I do like the subtext underneath the titles as well. It allows you to put a hook there to draw in new players. That's always nice... Kind of like excerpts on the backs of novels, and how their purpose is to draw you in.
