I have lived an interesting life - very much "hello from the other side" - the roleplay life. So I want to talk about that experience, that journey and how I came to build StoryBB and why it mattered the way it did. There were some interpersonal tensions at its genesis that happened, but they're not actually relevant to the journey; I also won't get into my hopes and dreams for trying to modernise SMF along the way, it's not relevant to the roleplay stuff.
Holy mackerel I didn't realise the amount of words I'd eventually write here - but this marks what was, for me, a 9 year journey and a descent into a madness I never envisaged, ever. And I'd do it all again, without changing a line of it, including all the regrets.
A Bit of Background
So the journey began while on holiday with my wife, we were in a hotel in Thailand, and we got talking about roleplay forums. That was the first thing we had in common: she ran a roleplay forum, she left it behind in 2014 when circumstances changed. In the time since, things were in a better place, she wanted to pick the hobby up again, but drawing on everything she'd learned about forums and roleplay to not make the same mistakes again.
So we talked functional requirements. So much to unpack about what users expect, but what got me was how much users got used to things because they always had to make do. Roleplay, it turns out, is a whole set of niche (compared to general forums) use-cases that have a lot of overlap with each other but not with the wider world.
I did at first start by building the new functions as mods on SMF - why not, it was the platform I easily knew by far the best - but as time went on... I realised the scale and depth of changes were sufficiently broad that trying to do it as mods was way more effort, and for all sorts of really interesting-or-stupid-depending-on-perspective reasons.
So what the heck is a roleplay board? Well, there are various subtypes but I'm going to go with the one I cared about, the one I don't really think of as 'roleplay' but collaborative storytelling. In essence: a group of people come together, make characters and tell stories with them in a shared world. Now, when people hear roleplay they often think dice rolling and the classic Dungeons & Dragons thing, but the simple distinction for me was 'am I playing the role myself or am I telling the story of my characters' - I'm the narrator, not an actor inhabiting a role. But I digress.
First big concept: "in character" vs "out of character". Most forum environments that play the RP game start by adding a subaccounts mod. This means they can add their characters, attach them to their account, and switch between them. I have my primary account - Arantor - and then I have the subaccounts as the characters I write as. In a Harry Potter roleplay site, I might have Dumbledore as a character, for example. And with subaccounts I can then post in threads 'as Dumbledore' without having to otherwise state it outright who I'm telling the story of. Things as Arantor are 'out of character' because they're me as the player, and things as Dumbledore as 'in character' because they're me playing the character.
It turns out this brings with it a whole raft of interesting consequences, most of which I didn't like or want. So I looked around at what everyone else did in this situation, and I had questions.
1. Do you log in with your primary account?
Depending on the platform or mod used, the answer may be 'yes', or it may be 'you can log in with any account' which is an immediate security red flag for me.
2. Do you need a new email address for every subaccount?
Depending on the platform or mod used, the answer may be 'yes, sucks to be you' which is another red flag for me.
3. When you get notifications, are they consolidated under one place?
You're kidding, right? (Seriously: most implementations screw this up.)
4. When something gets edited or moderated who is listed as the editor/moderator?
-sigh-
This isn't going to work. This is stupid.
So I went away and did something completely different. I realised that the rules for how people should interact with 'characters' vs 'accounts' are fundamentally different, that trying to combine the two leads to bad places, and that actually what you need are to be able to separate all the things. That boards are 'in character' boards vs 'out of character' boards - where you can't post from one into the other (because for example a news/announcements board doesn't need characters posting, it only needs the people posting under their actual account)
Ditto for groups - the notion that some groups should be permission-bearing and apply across all 'characters' (e.g. I am an admin and I should be an admin regardless of which persona I might be posting as), and some should be visual only (e.g. I might create a bunch of groups to reflect the occupation a character has, and make it joinable). And again these shouldn't cross paths.
Deeper down the rabbit hole (part 1)
The above is the basic functional requirements for making a roleplay forum work: having the ability to create characters, post as them etc. and ideally give them an avatar. (Technically you can make do with less but this is the MVP of meaningful requirements)
But then it gets more interesting and you start looking at a few more things.
So we talked about the idea of what we came to call immersive mode. This was, undoubtedly, the biggest misfire we had feature-wise, so much so that we never actually enabled it. The theory was simple: if you had a suitably set up environment where you had regions where one character could go but not another, we wanted in theory to be able to implement that. But only conditionally.
To follow the Potter example, imagine having the common rooms for the school houses, a character in Gryffindor shouldn't be able to see the Slytherin common room, and vice versa. Conceptually no big deal, just attach permissions to groups, deny board access and you're good to go, but in practice this just ended up confusing things - even though it's conceptually what people with subaccounts in the traditional mold could actually (and sometimes did) do.
It also gets in the way with notifications, but we didn't think about that at the time.
The other big misfire we had was with themes. I'd retooled the theme system from SMF to support Sass natively so it was much easier to reuse code between themes sensibly, and for our debut project - which, if it wasn't already clear, was a Harry Potter site - we'd made light/dark themes plus one for each of the four houses. We thought at the time that this would be mood appropriate. I certainly set it up that my Ravenclaw student had the Ravenclaw theme, Dumbledore (I was admin after all) had the Gryffindor theme, my dark-ish witch character had the dark theme, and it was certainly mood appropriate.
I was not prepared for people actively not using it in favour of 'I like light all the time' or 'I like dark all the time'. In hindsight this should have been obvious, but we were going off assumptions of what was popular back in the day since I was new to the RP scene and my wife's experience was very much of the 'let's have all the themes for mood' which was normal back in the day. (I've seen the evidence from backups of the code of her former site.)
The other rabbit hole things that came up... let's see...
Ah yes, the memberlist. SMF's memberlist isn't pretty at the best of times (I much prefer XF's if you're going to have one of those), but in a roleplay context it's functionally useless. I don't care who the members are. I care who the characters are (and maybe who plays them). I might want to find characters by group, e.g. all the Gryffindor students, all the shopkeepers, all the teachers, so I can plot threads with them. (= writing a topic together)
The other really big thing we experimented with was a profile application system. Various people have implemented this in various ways over the years - option A tends to be 'write a topic in this specific board, we'll move it when it's approved and then give you the right membergroup to post', and option B tends to be 'fill out this list of profile fields and we'll add you to an approved membergroup that gives you permissions to post'
Both are functional, sure, but they're quite manual on the part of the admin and do require a bunch of setup. And at least one of these is quite open and public, which doesn't bode well for feedback and discussion (which is vital if you end up with someone who wants to do a character concept that really, really doesn't work). Sure there's DMs, or off-forum methods but ideally keeping it in context is great.
So I built a solution that allows for character sheets, keeping history, tracking changes, commenting so only admins + the character writer can see it, and eventually even had the bright idea of having a status bar for it in a 'Work in progress > Submitted > Feedback > Approved' fashion to make it clear where you were in the process.
As for the content, what I came up with was that you'd have templates - all bbcode, of course - to fill in that the admin could set. It would be able to pre-fill in the character's name into the template if you used {$character_name} where you wanted it, but that you could otherwise edit it like any other post. I figured this was familiar and suitably clear that if you wanted a character of type x, you select it from the templates and edit it to suit, but it floored me that we got people who thought they could really go off script. (The intent was consistency; so that you could find info about characters in the same place every character, also subtly discouraging the trend of splattering the profile with a large number of GIFs for 'mood')
It's interesting how hit or miss that proved to be, mostly because in practice it was unexpected for people. People were used to having to write a topic in a specific board, or fill in a bunch of profile fields. Though in the last couple of years the mood has shifted away to being more freeform, but we still use the space for recording a character bio even if we don't actively use the approval process stuff.
The things you learn.
This was essentially the first... two years? of our RP experience. Running a Potter site just as the hysteria over JKR's attitude was reaching a peak was exhausting.
There were a number of straightforward things about this: affiliates and directories are still the principal way to advertise a site. Yes, it's still 2008, 88x31 grainy images are absolutely still in vogue for cross-site advertising. Sites like RPG Directory, plus several Tumblrs and Discords, are the primary hub to pimp your site out. The Tumblr one in particular is an exciting journey of making 500x500 images that are simultaneously on trend but not too on trend.
But running a Potter site in particular was problematic. Partly because the JKR hysteria was reaching a fever peak (and now it's mostly in a 'eugh gross' state rather than pitchforks). Partly because 'when are you moving to Jcink'. Partly because most of the folks who were prepared to/happy to write Potter inspired material were already happy where they were, and the people we tended to get through the doors (not all, not all at all, but a non trivial percentage) were... interesting.
I still marvel at the person who submitted a character application for a first year at Hogwarts with just shy of 5000 words of backstory. Because an eleven year old has that much backstory to tell, obviously. And they're already Dumbledore's special favouritest child. (The conversation went something like: Have you asked the player who plays Dumbledore if they're OK with this? No? Who's that? / Me. I'm not OK with this. / Oh.)
It's a fascinating set of dynamics, entirely unlike anything you see on regular forums. Typical RP sites don't get to hundreds of members. Many don't ever get to tens of members. They're much smaller, much more intimate, but the right group of people can easily put down tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of words between them.
In particular I found the 'but when are you moving to Jcink' crowd interesting. It's a single sentence that encapsulates a whole bunch of things at once. Firstly, the social expectation that Jcink is where it's at. The notion that if you're not on Jcink, you can't be as visually interesting (we were far more old-school and not mountains of graphics, unlike what was typical on Jcink at the time, and might still be). But also a subtle 'don't make me learn something new' cue comes out in conversation, even though every site does things so radically different that you can't really take anything for granted but people seem to fear this aspect of it. (I think it is about bbcode?)
The rabbit hole (part 2)
We did get some traction going on, and got some threads written, and we'd long since fallen into the community norms of using Discord for general discussion. So I had the bright idea of one-upping Jcink - with Discord notifications. New topic? New reply? Post it all to Discord in a dedicated channel. Use the character's name and avatar as the poster in the webhook for bonus points. This was an absolute hit with people, but it taught me one interesting thing.
We never quite got around to implementing the 'quick reply gets insta-posted' quality of life improvement, meaning that people would write in the quick reply or the full reply, then it would load the post, and then they'd see they made a mistake and need to fix a typo. Or, worse, they'd post it to the wrong character.
Now, the latter, I long since solved cleanly: I knew people would do this and I deliberately made it possible for people to switch the character that a post was attributed to, and to do it self-serve. There's no need to bug an admin just because you made a mistake. (This way also it would fix post counts and all the stuff like that.)
But with notifications? This brought such mistakes immediately to the fore - especially when they'd notice it almost immediately that it was wrong. So what I did was add a grace period; 90 seconds after you post, the notification goes out. If you delete in that time (because you want to repost), no notification. But if you fix it yourself with the reattribute feature in the grace period, the notification goes out correctly.
Turns out that 90 second grace period saved a lot of weird notifications over time.
It did also teach me that people don't go looking into interfaces for things. We'd get comments on Discord apologising for deleting the post before I'd add a screenshot in reply with 'next time you can fix this yourself'.
The other big features I introduced in this era were the tracker and timelines.
The topic tracker was probably the biggest actual feature I ever introduced beyond the ability to add multiple characters to an account. I had half-heartedly implemented the ability to bookmark threads (which, btw, separated out in-character and out-of-character threads, I did at least do that), but the usual route of 'using unread posts' to find things to reply to is simply not how these things work. People tend to read the post when it's fresh, then reply a day or so later when they have muse.
So I built a page that shows you all your characters, and the threads they're in with filters. The one that's actually important: show you threads your characters are in, where the last person to reply isn't you. (Irrespective of character. It's close enough; though if you have two characters in the same thread it isn't perfect, but this happens rarely enough it's a non-issue)
You can live your RP life from this page. More interestingly you can combine it with the other side feature that I built: topic invites. When making a new topic, you can invite the character (with autocomplete, naturally) to the topic so you don't have to link it, and it'll naturally appear in their tracker since at that point the character hasn't posted in thread, so you can't exactly build a list of 'threads my character is in' until they're in some. But the invite feature takes care of this.
And then there are timelines.
Consider the context: you have two characters that have shared multiple threads - if each topic is a chapter or a scene, the collection of these topics is their story. What if you could get a page that listed for each pairing of characters, their threads together? A collection of all the timelines to browse. There's some side fluff, around being able to rearrange topics (because the order of posting does occasionally not marry up with the order of storytelling), and being able to add individual other topics to the timeline - e.g. if this is a timeline of A & B's posts, it might be that there is a critical side chapter featuring A & C that is pivotal, so you can add that in.
Interesting question here is 'who is this for', and this was something I never quite planned to answer. In my head I was just playing data geek - I have this data and in my head it would just be cool to visualise it. What I didn't envisage is that it actually had a serious use case and one I didn't at any point anticipate.
I never quite envisaged the dynamics of people actively following other characters' timelines. E.g. if you write M, and you have stories with character F that I write, you might also find the other threads with F interesting. It might inspire conversations, plots etc. Even characters you don't write against, might still be appreciated. One of the characters I created for the original Potter site, which still exists in a slightly different form now... easily my most popular character. We eventually even set up a "moments you loved" channel in Discord for people to give shoutouts to quotes they loved from other posts.
The other experiment from this era was trolling the Jcink crowd. I had a cool domain name for the project that was an object from the Potter world, and people were a bit weird about the domain name (and the fact it wasn't Jcink) so what I did was register a Jcink with the same name, go premium to get rid of ads, and make a Jcink version of the theme. I skinned the front page, thread and profile views - more accurately, I skinned the front page, and had the JavaScript code simply redirect anyone who went to the others to the real thing. I then set up a sort of feed so people could post on the real site and the Jcink would look like it had that content. I made the board layout and topics look right.
I wanted to know if the 'but when are you moving to Jcink' was about the visual aesthetic issue (this was the second iteration of the Potter site, we'd gone more visual in this era) or the domain name (the domain in all ads was the fake Jcink) or the functionality (it was, after all, not Jcink) - and literally no-one ever called me on it. I don't have enough control data to confirm it but I'm pretty sure with more data I'd prove the 'it's not Jcink' bias is almost entirely in peoples' heads. (But over here we know that most peoples' bias about forum software and the 'ugh it's that platform' isn't actually real.)
Moving on from Potter
Fast forward a bit. After some interpersonal drama, we closed the Potter site. That's one thing that I wasn't ready for, that the sites tended to be sufficiently small that a single person's toxicity can kill a site. I also wasn't prepared for the level of toxicity that came up, up to and including doctored Discord conversations to drive wedges between people. Remember kids, ban early, ban often!
I didn't appreciate how hard this would hit both of us. What had been intended to be something small, fun and intimate, was really quite a wounding experience. My wife had all of the 'but my instincts were never this wrong before' and she questioned all of the desire to write etc.
Meanwhile I had my own drama around whether I wanted to carry on with StoryBB - lacking a vehicle myself to use it, and with the reaction I'd gotten from the existing community - I sort of gave up on it. I've never really gotten back into that stride in the time since but that's another story for another time. (It's also not relevant.)
Anyway. We went away and reflected. We concluded that we still wanted to write, we still wanted to write with other people, but we radically rethought our expectations. The Potter site had opened with a couple of our friends as early contributors - the subsequent site did also, with the same people. We as a group of 4 get on really well, we bounce ideas and so on and it just hums along nicely. (They were friends of my wife's, and players on her original roleplay site. She'd known them for years before any of this stuff happened.)
So we thought... what next? We concluded that a Potter site has all the weird dynamics of being shunned by the virtue signallers, but also attracting a group of people who wanted to be special without doing any of the work. In particular this is something about writing stories in the Potter world that I hadn't realised: in a world where everyone has magic, everyone is special, so therefore no-one is special, and the people who want to be special have to invent new ways to be extra special.
The new site, then, radical departure. First up, no existing world or writing to base off; it avoids all the dynamics of weird fanbases and the people that can't handle the notion of 'death of the author' properly, let alone separating the art from the artist. Second... a magic system that let people do cool and interesting fantasy things but that implicitly prevented everyone being overpowered so by definition everyone was differently special.
We did it, too. I won't get into detail, it doesn't matter, but suffice to say over a couple of months we fleshed out a magic system that I still think is pretty cool and is the backbone of the current site. We also decided early on that it wouldn't be on Earth, it would be approximately contemporary in terms of technology but it would be tech powered by magic, on a world that wasn't ours, so we got to immediately avoid a lot of the tropes. (Seriously: werewolves and vampires bring a lot of baggage and expectations and tropes we don't want; the real world has too many built in biases for geography, religion, politics, etc. and we wanted none of that.)
The first thing I realised... I needed something more to house this beast.
You see, one of the earliest features I'd dropped into StoryBB was a rudimentary pages function. More like Jcink than XF, incidentally. You could just create arbitrary pages of content, you got a title, a bbcode editor for content, you could put it on the sidebar menu (or the help menu) and you got permissions control. Very basic, but good enough for writing out a couple of pages of lore and whatnot.
You see, here's one of the really big bombshell things about roleplay sites: none of the usual rules about content apply. Sites don't need articles or galleries or whatever, in most cases all they need are a forum and a few pages, and probably a Discord.
But this magic system we'd wrought... it quickly grew out of hand for writing in the pages. So I did what anyone with my skill set would do: go and set up a wiki. It was clear immediately we would need to have something for all the lore we were inevitably going to write in this new world with this new magic system. I first set up DokuWiki but it took me about 2 weeks to decide that it wasn't what I wanted and I grudgingly installed MediaWiki. I still have MediaWiki installed but only because I haven't found something as fluid for content creation but less arse to customise.
MediaWiki does give me a lot of flexibility however, and I was able to set up a number of really cool things with it - not least taking our original world map and splicing it into a zoomable, scrollable Google Maps setup with pins on the map for all the key cities in the world, as well as integrating Pinterest boards for all the mood boards for the different regions to give an idea of culture, architecture etc.
What's interesting is that we're out on the fringe of 'extra content' needs; most sites don't have a wiki, most sites don't have that much lore. (Most people don't seem to want to do reading which in a hobby about reading and writing continues to amuse me.) We certainly still don't need 'articles' in the conventional form, but I have no shortage of articles to add to the wiki!
It's also interesting to note how little extra forum dev I did in this period, vs wiki dev.
There are new forum features, for example I sat down and figured out how all the characters are connected from what I knew of their backstories, e.g. 'character X works with character Y', 'character Z is friends with character A', and integrated it with a service to draw this in a pretty diagram.
There's also the e-book exporter - this was something a newer recruit requested, but that went down pretty well. Take the timelines feature from before (so, a collection of all the stories of a pair of characters), and turn it into an ePub file, with thread being linked with proper titles, etc. - sort of in the 'print thread' manner of old, but in an e-book reader format. I'd never worked with ePub before, it was an interesting journey.
At some point in this mess, I refitted avatar functionality; instead of what I had before which was basically SMF's avatar interface supersized to work on characters and not just accounts, I rewrote the whole interface and much of the underlying guts. First up, characters could have up to 5 avatars each. When you uploaded there was a widget for scaling, panning and cropping - meaning that the image you uploaded would be the right aspect ratio to look nice alongside all the others (we don't have square or circle, we have a portrait rectangle shape), and lastly you can set it up to either rotate through all your avatars on your character's posts, or you can pick the avatar for the post.
Why would you want multiple avatars? Well, avatars in the roleplay sense tend to reflect some inspiration point for the character, and how you imagine them to be. It's common - but not mandatory - to use some famous person's likeness. And having 3-4 different pictures of that actor/musician/whatever is popular. But something I found interesting: people would collect multiple pictures of the same inspiration source, and it was mood related. They'd have a happy face, a thoughtful face, a sad one, an angry one. What if you could put that against a specific post?
In the current site iteration there's another reason. I have a couple of characters who aren't human but nature spirits. These spirits are capable of shapeshifting and appearing more or less human (because MAGIC; this is not a special ability; anyone with a druid character can do this), so I have 'them as a human' and 'them in their nature form' images and post as appropriate.
I also added one of the more interesting refinements to the timelines feature - if you were on topic 3 out of 6 in the collection, why not link to the previous and next topics? Even if a topic was in multiple timelines this isn't a huge drama to reflect.
Another source of work that came out was what is internally the skills system. (Which I built with every intent of making it possible to reuse even though I can't ever imagine anyone else doing so, but I built it that way anyway). Mechanically it's straightforward: you define a skill, the branches under it and the items in those branches.
It sort of looks like this:
So in our case, skill 1 is 'magic', it has 9 branches under it for the kinds of magic in the world, and items under each for the different specific magical abilities. It does also have a bunch of custom styling around this since the branches of magic all have colours attached, and the skills reflect this with the iconography and colour. And since this colour theory runs through the magic in all sorts of ways (e.g. nature magic is green, light magic is pale yellow), I also drew a little gradient bar under peoples' character names, to reflect the balance of magic they have. A character with mostly nature skills will have a mostly green bar for example.
The future ain't what it used to be
Well, it's been one hell of a ride, and the drama attached to it all is fascinating. I mean that: if you've been over at XF and seen the 'xyz drama' threads, that's straight up amateur hour. In RP land we have entire drama blogs. I'm not even kidding. If you are brave - and be warned, you will likely start losing braincells if you spend too long reading - you can try one of the less asinine iterations we've seen: https://rpcburnbook.tumblr.com/
One of the more asinine blogs has since been shut (Tumblr closed it for reasons), but I was actively namedropped at one point because the person anonymously posting wished that they could pay the admins of some of the RP Discord servers to boot me and several other people because whenever we spoke we ruined the mood. (I mean, y'all could have said something in the Discord at the time, but it's easier to be anti-social anonymously. Worth noting, the admin of the servers in question were all very polite and 'you don't have to go if you don't want to' but that was very much the straw on top of the already-broken camel's back, and I just left all the Discords, haven't been back. I loosely maintain a presence on RPG Directory at this point.)
So that's the big journey.
Anyone who ever wondered on TAZ what I meant about 'flavours of forums', this is it. Yes, you can build a forum RP with entirely off the shelf parts. You can recreate maybe 70% of the functionality that StoryBB has, more or less, with off the shelf XenForo plugins. I did a brief look at this while on holiday a couple of months back for giggles and I think I estimated you could replicate that 70% for about $900 in plugins, but it'll never feel as seamless and joined up as what StoryBB does, because I can come at it from a holistic point of view and build out functionality that would be hard or intensive to maintain as plugins.
I think the big reflections for me are the hits, and the swings and misses. People don't really talk about the posting experience or the editor, or any of that stuff, because it's not that interesting. There's a whole raft of RP quality of life improvements in there that just don't matter to regular forum users, and a whole raft of regular forum functionality that doesn't matter to roleplay. Every time I see a new release of XF or IC, I think how little much of it would matter in a roleplay context.
Much of the 'normal' functionality is also a hit and miss affair.
Probably the most interesting quirk I found though is the formatting.
I had in the Potter era expected people to do formatting in posts more than they actually did; I even upgraded the SMF editor to support more fonts in the font dropdown and add a more interesting and pleasant set of colours to it by default. The font thing helped people with character profiles a bit, but the most significant use was the 'I'm going to use a handwriting font for in-universe letters rather than regular text'. Fringe use, didn't expect.
But colours? That was a whole different ball game. One trend that was relatively new (so my wife never encountered it back in the day, and I never encountered it at all) was the notion of highlighting dialogue in prose. It was surprisingly common for people to pick their character's favourite colour and write all the quoted text in that colour. The exact rationale for this is complicated but it sits somewhere between asserting some personality, making it easier to pick out the dialogue later (so in a reply, you can clearly see what your character could have heard to be able to react to it, since they can't react to inner monologue / things that the other character thought but didn't say or otherwise indicate), and for the people who can't be bothered to read so they just reply to the dialogue and not anything the other character does. Some people are more or less bad about this as a habit.
More recent variations on this idea are simply about bolding the dialogue because the colour thing plays hell with having light/dark variants. I can conceivably get behind it as a focusing method, especially for people with ADHD or similar where it's easier for them to find the dialogue after having read it before. But it irks me having to deal with it - like actively remembering to put it in posts I wrote for people who have expressed this desire.
I have thought, many times, about how I might tackle this in a more intelligent fashion, but I haven't got an answer that doesn't actively annoy someone while writing yet. One day. (Part of the problem is that HTML is such a bad vehicle for this. I don't even see how to approach it meaningfully in TipTap, and it's not like I haven't looked). Scrivener has this feature when writing and it's neat (and helps you as a writer balance dialogue with other stuff), but Scrivener is not a web app and I have no idea how to meaningfully fix this.
Also worth noting that only about half of the people who write on our site actually use the editor. It's hyper-common in RP in general to write in another editor and copy/paste which means for formatting I am kinda stuck with either bbcode or Markdown if I ever adopted that. The reasons for this are multiple: either people have been bitten enough in the past with forums eating their posts that they don't trust the editor (even with autosaving drafts!), or they just don't vibe with it and want to use something else. I know people who write in Google Docs, in Word and in one case in Pages specifically configured so that each character they write as gets a different gradient pattern to help them distinguish at a glance which character they're writing. (They're a very visual/colour person.)
So basically, yeah, RP is about as unlike regular forums as it gets. It still kills me after re-reading an old thread that our dear friend Tracy doesn't get this and just how radically different the experience should be.
But enough of the past. What of the future? Well, as I mentioned in passing, at some point along the way I got very disillusioned with the whole 'building the perfect RP forum software' but I still have a wishlist of things I'd love to do sometime if ever I found the motivation. I say wishlist but actually it's two wishlists.
I don't have much in the way of pure forum improvements; most of the ones I really cared about are done, but there's no shortage of RP focused ones.
There are always more things that can be done, more to see than can ever be found in the ciiiiiiircle of... no wait, that's the Lion King. Anyway. More for another time, I rambled enough here.
Holy mackerel I didn't realise the amount of words I'd eventually write here - but this marks what was, for me, a 9 year journey and a descent into a madness I never envisaged, ever. And I'd do it all again, without changing a line of it, including all the regrets.
A Bit of Background
So the journey began while on holiday with my wife, we were in a hotel in Thailand, and we got talking about roleplay forums. That was the first thing we had in common: she ran a roleplay forum, she left it behind in 2014 when circumstances changed. In the time since, things were in a better place, she wanted to pick the hobby up again, but drawing on everything she'd learned about forums and roleplay to not make the same mistakes again.
So we talked functional requirements. So much to unpack about what users expect, but what got me was how much users got used to things because they always had to make do. Roleplay, it turns out, is a whole set of niche (compared to general forums) use-cases that have a lot of overlap with each other but not with the wider world.
I did at first start by building the new functions as mods on SMF - why not, it was the platform I easily knew by far the best - but as time went on... I realised the scale and depth of changes were sufficiently broad that trying to do it as mods was way more effort, and for all sorts of really interesting-or-stupid-depending-on-perspective reasons.
So what the heck is a roleplay board? Well, there are various subtypes but I'm going to go with the one I cared about, the one I don't really think of as 'roleplay' but collaborative storytelling. In essence: a group of people come together, make characters and tell stories with them in a shared world. Now, when people hear roleplay they often think dice rolling and the classic Dungeons & Dragons thing, but the simple distinction for me was 'am I playing the role myself or am I telling the story of my characters' - I'm the narrator, not an actor inhabiting a role. But I digress.
First big concept: "in character" vs "out of character". Most forum environments that play the RP game start by adding a subaccounts mod. This means they can add their characters, attach them to their account, and switch between them. I have my primary account - Arantor - and then I have the subaccounts as the characters I write as. In a Harry Potter roleplay site, I might have Dumbledore as a character, for example. And with subaccounts I can then post in threads 'as Dumbledore' without having to otherwise state it outright who I'm telling the story of. Things as Arantor are 'out of character' because they're me as the player, and things as Dumbledore as 'in character' because they're me playing the character.
It turns out this brings with it a whole raft of interesting consequences, most of which I didn't like or want. So I looked around at what everyone else did in this situation, and I had questions.
1. Do you log in with your primary account?
Depending on the platform or mod used, the answer may be 'yes', or it may be 'you can log in with any account' which is an immediate security red flag for me.
2. Do you need a new email address for every subaccount?
Depending on the platform or mod used, the answer may be 'yes, sucks to be you' which is another red flag for me.
3. When you get notifications, are they consolidated under one place?
You're kidding, right? (Seriously: most implementations screw this up.)
4. When something gets edited or moderated who is listed as the editor/moderator?
-sigh-
This isn't going to work. This is stupid.
So I went away and did something completely different. I realised that the rules for how people should interact with 'characters' vs 'accounts' are fundamentally different, that trying to combine the two leads to bad places, and that actually what you need are to be able to separate all the things. That boards are 'in character' boards vs 'out of character' boards - where you can't post from one into the other (because for example a news/announcements board doesn't need characters posting, it only needs the people posting under their actual account)
Ditto for groups - the notion that some groups should be permission-bearing and apply across all 'characters' (e.g. I am an admin and I should be an admin regardless of which persona I might be posting as), and some should be visual only (e.g. I might create a bunch of groups to reflect the occupation a character has, and make it joinable). And again these shouldn't cross paths.
Deeper down the rabbit hole (part 1)
The above is the basic functional requirements for making a roleplay forum work: having the ability to create characters, post as them etc. and ideally give them an avatar. (Technically you can make do with less but this is the MVP of meaningful requirements)
But then it gets more interesting and you start looking at a few more things.
So we talked about the idea of what we came to call immersive mode. This was, undoubtedly, the biggest misfire we had feature-wise, so much so that we never actually enabled it. The theory was simple: if you had a suitably set up environment where you had regions where one character could go but not another, we wanted in theory to be able to implement that. But only conditionally.
To follow the Potter example, imagine having the common rooms for the school houses, a character in Gryffindor shouldn't be able to see the Slytherin common room, and vice versa. Conceptually no big deal, just attach permissions to groups, deny board access and you're good to go, but in practice this just ended up confusing things - even though it's conceptually what people with subaccounts in the traditional mold could actually (and sometimes did) do.
It also gets in the way with notifications, but we didn't think about that at the time.
The other big misfire we had was with themes. I'd retooled the theme system from SMF to support Sass natively so it was much easier to reuse code between themes sensibly, and for our debut project - which, if it wasn't already clear, was a Harry Potter site - we'd made light/dark themes plus one for each of the four houses. We thought at the time that this would be mood appropriate. I certainly set it up that my Ravenclaw student had the Ravenclaw theme, Dumbledore (I was admin after all) had the Gryffindor theme, my dark-ish witch character had the dark theme, and it was certainly mood appropriate.
I was not prepared for people actively not using it in favour of 'I like light all the time' or 'I like dark all the time'. In hindsight this should have been obvious, but we were going off assumptions of what was popular back in the day since I was new to the RP scene and my wife's experience was very much of the 'let's have all the themes for mood' which was normal back in the day. (I've seen the evidence from backups of the code of her former site.)
The other rabbit hole things that came up... let's see...
Ah yes, the memberlist. SMF's memberlist isn't pretty at the best of times (I much prefer XF's if you're going to have one of those), but in a roleplay context it's functionally useless. I don't care who the members are. I care who the characters are (and maybe who plays them). I might want to find characters by group, e.g. all the Gryffindor students, all the shopkeepers, all the teachers, so I can plot threads with them. (= writing a topic together)
The other really big thing we experimented with was a profile application system. Various people have implemented this in various ways over the years - option A tends to be 'write a topic in this specific board, we'll move it when it's approved and then give you the right membergroup to post', and option B tends to be 'fill out this list of profile fields and we'll add you to an approved membergroup that gives you permissions to post'
Both are functional, sure, but they're quite manual on the part of the admin and do require a bunch of setup. And at least one of these is quite open and public, which doesn't bode well for feedback and discussion (which is vital if you end up with someone who wants to do a character concept that really, really doesn't work). Sure there's DMs, or off-forum methods but ideally keeping it in context is great.
So I built a solution that allows for character sheets, keeping history, tracking changes, commenting so only admins + the character writer can see it, and eventually even had the bright idea of having a status bar for it in a 'Work in progress > Submitted > Feedback > Approved' fashion to make it clear where you were in the process.
As for the content, what I came up with was that you'd have templates - all bbcode, of course - to fill in that the admin could set. It would be able to pre-fill in the character's name into the template if you used {$character_name} where you wanted it, but that you could otherwise edit it like any other post. I figured this was familiar and suitably clear that if you wanted a character of type x, you select it from the templates and edit it to suit, but it floored me that we got people who thought they could really go off script. (The intent was consistency; so that you could find info about characters in the same place every character, also subtly discouraging the trend of splattering the profile with a large number of GIFs for 'mood')
It's interesting how hit or miss that proved to be, mostly because in practice it was unexpected for people. People were used to having to write a topic in a specific board, or fill in a bunch of profile fields. Though in the last couple of years the mood has shifted away to being more freeform, but we still use the space for recording a character bio even if we don't actively use the approval process stuff.
The things you learn.
This was essentially the first... two years? of our RP experience. Running a Potter site just as the hysteria over JKR's attitude was reaching a peak was exhausting.
There were a number of straightforward things about this: affiliates and directories are still the principal way to advertise a site. Yes, it's still 2008, 88x31 grainy images are absolutely still in vogue for cross-site advertising. Sites like RPG Directory, plus several Tumblrs and Discords, are the primary hub to pimp your site out. The Tumblr one in particular is an exciting journey of making 500x500 images that are simultaneously on trend but not too on trend.
But running a Potter site in particular was problematic. Partly because the JKR hysteria was reaching a fever peak (and now it's mostly in a 'eugh gross' state rather than pitchforks). Partly because 'when are you moving to Jcink'. Partly because most of the folks who were prepared to/happy to write Potter inspired material were already happy where they were, and the people we tended to get through the doors (not all, not all at all, but a non trivial percentage) were... interesting.
I still marvel at the person who submitted a character application for a first year at Hogwarts with just shy of 5000 words of backstory. Because an eleven year old has that much backstory to tell, obviously. And they're already Dumbledore's special favouritest child. (The conversation went something like: Have you asked the player who plays Dumbledore if they're OK with this? No? Who's that? / Me. I'm not OK with this. / Oh.)
It's a fascinating set of dynamics, entirely unlike anything you see on regular forums. Typical RP sites don't get to hundreds of members. Many don't ever get to tens of members. They're much smaller, much more intimate, but the right group of people can easily put down tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of words between them.
In particular I found the 'but when are you moving to Jcink' crowd interesting. It's a single sentence that encapsulates a whole bunch of things at once. Firstly, the social expectation that Jcink is where it's at. The notion that if you're not on Jcink, you can't be as visually interesting (we were far more old-school and not mountains of graphics, unlike what was typical on Jcink at the time, and might still be). But also a subtle 'don't make me learn something new' cue comes out in conversation, even though every site does things so radically different that you can't really take anything for granted but people seem to fear this aspect of it. (I think it is about bbcode?)
The rabbit hole (part 2)
We did get some traction going on, and got some threads written, and we'd long since fallen into the community norms of using Discord for general discussion. So I had the bright idea of one-upping Jcink - with Discord notifications. New topic? New reply? Post it all to Discord in a dedicated channel. Use the character's name and avatar as the poster in the webhook for bonus points. This was an absolute hit with people, but it taught me one interesting thing.
We never quite got around to implementing the 'quick reply gets insta-posted' quality of life improvement, meaning that people would write in the quick reply or the full reply, then it would load the post, and then they'd see they made a mistake and need to fix a typo. Or, worse, they'd post it to the wrong character.
Now, the latter, I long since solved cleanly: I knew people would do this and I deliberately made it possible for people to switch the character that a post was attributed to, and to do it self-serve. There's no need to bug an admin just because you made a mistake. (This way also it would fix post counts and all the stuff like that.)
But with notifications? This brought such mistakes immediately to the fore - especially when they'd notice it almost immediately that it was wrong. So what I did was add a grace period; 90 seconds after you post, the notification goes out. If you delete in that time (because you want to repost), no notification. But if you fix it yourself with the reattribute feature in the grace period, the notification goes out correctly.
Turns out that 90 second grace period saved a lot of weird notifications over time.
It did also teach me that people don't go looking into interfaces for things. We'd get comments on Discord apologising for deleting the post before I'd add a screenshot in reply with 'next time you can fix this yourself'.
The other big features I introduced in this era were the tracker and timelines.
The topic tracker was probably the biggest actual feature I ever introduced beyond the ability to add multiple characters to an account. I had half-heartedly implemented the ability to bookmark threads (which, btw, separated out in-character and out-of-character threads, I did at least do that), but the usual route of 'using unread posts' to find things to reply to is simply not how these things work. People tend to read the post when it's fresh, then reply a day or so later when they have muse.
So I built a page that shows you all your characters, and the threads they're in with filters. The one that's actually important: show you threads your characters are in, where the last person to reply isn't you. (Irrespective of character. It's close enough; though if you have two characters in the same thread it isn't perfect, but this happens rarely enough it's a non-issue)
You can live your RP life from this page. More interestingly you can combine it with the other side feature that I built: topic invites. When making a new topic, you can invite the character (with autocomplete, naturally) to the topic so you don't have to link it, and it'll naturally appear in their tracker since at that point the character hasn't posted in thread, so you can't exactly build a list of 'threads my character is in' until they're in some. But the invite feature takes care of this.
And then there are timelines.
Consider the context: you have two characters that have shared multiple threads - if each topic is a chapter or a scene, the collection of these topics is their story. What if you could get a page that listed for each pairing of characters, their threads together? A collection of all the timelines to browse. There's some side fluff, around being able to rearrange topics (because the order of posting does occasionally not marry up with the order of storytelling), and being able to add individual other topics to the timeline - e.g. if this is a timeline of A & B's posts, it might be that there is a critical side chapter featuring A & C that is pivotal, so you can add that in.
Interesting question here is 'who is this for', and this was something I never quite planned to answer. In my head I was just playing data geek - I have this data and in my head it would just be cool to visualise it. What I didn't envisage is that it actually had a serious use case and one I didn't at any point anticipate.
I never quite envisaged the dynamics of people actively following other characters' timelines. E.g. if you write M, and you have stories with character F that I write, you might also find the other threads with F interesting. It might inspire conversations, plots etc. Even characters you don't write against, might still be appreciated. One of the characters I created for the original Potter site, which still exists in a slightly different form now... easily my most popular character. We eventually even set up a "moments you loved" channel in Discord for people to give shoutouts to quotes they loved from other posts.
The other experiment from this era was trolling the Jcink crowd. I had a cool domain name for the project that was an object from the Potter world, and people were a bit weird about the domain name (and the fact it wasn't Jcink) so what I did was register a Jcink with the same name, go premium to get rid of ads, and make a Jcink version of the theme. I skinned the front page, thread and profile views - more accurately, I skinned the front page, and had the JavaScript code simply redirect anyone who went to the others to the real thing. I then set up a sort of feed so people could post on the real site and the Jcink would look like it had that content. I made the board layout and topics look right.
I wanted to know if the 'but when are you moving to Jcink' was about the visual aesthetic issue (this was the second iteration of the Potter site, we'd gone more visual in this era) or the domain name (the domain in all ads was the fake Jcink) or the functionality (it was, after all, not Jcink) - and literally no-one ever called me on it. I don't have enough control data to confirm it but I'm pretty sure with more data I'd prove the 'it's not Jcink' bias is almost entirely in peoples' heads. (But over here we know that most peoples' bias about forum software and the 'ugh it's that platform' isn't actually real.)
Moving on from Potter
Fast forward a bit. After some interpersonal drama, we closed the Potter site. That's one thing that I wasn't ready for, that the sites tended to be sufficiently small that a single person's toxicity can kill a site. I also wasn't prepared for the level of toxicity that came up, up to and including doctored Discord conversations to drive wedges between people. Remember kids, ban early, ban often!
I didn't appreciate how hard this would hit both of us. What had been intended to be something small, fun and intimate, was really quite a wounding experience. My wife had all of the 'but my instincts were never this wrong before' and she questioned all of the desire to write etc.
Meanwhile I had my own drama around whether I wanted to carry on with StoryBB - lacking a vehicle myself to use it, and with the reaction I'd gotten from the existing community - I sort of gave up on it. I've never really gotten back into that stride in the time since but that's another story for another time. (It's also not relevant.)
Anyway. We went away and reflected. We concluded that we still wanted to write, we still wanted to write with other people, but we radically rethought our expectations. The Potter site had opened with a couple of our friends as early contributors - the subsequent site did also, with the same people. We as a group of 4 get on really well, we bounce ideas and so on and it just hums along nicely. (They were friends of my wife's, and players on her original roleplay site. She'd known them for years before any of this stuff happened.)
So we thought... what next? We concluded that a Potter site has all the weird dynamics of being shunned by the virtue signallers, but also attracting a group of people who wanted to be special without doing any of the work. In particular this is something about writing stories in the Potter world that I hadn't realised: in a world where everyone has magic, everyone is special, so therefore no-one is special, and the people who want to be special have to invent new ways to be extra special.
The new site, then, radical departure. First up, no existing world or writing to base off; it avoids all the dynamics of weird fanbases and the people that can't handle the notion of 'death of the author' properly, let alone separating the art from the artist. Second... a magic system that let people do cool and interesting fantasy things but that implicitly prevented everyone being overpowered so by definition everyone was differently special.
We did it, too. I won't get into detail, it doesn't matter, but suffice to say over a couple of months we fleshed out a magic system that I still think is pretty cool and is the backbone of the current site. We also decided early on that it wouldn't be on Earth, it would be approximately contemporary in terms of technology but it would be tech powered by magic, on a world that wasn't ours, so we got to immediately avoid a lot of the tropes. (Seriously: werewolves and vampires bring a lot of baggage and expectations and tropes we don't want; the real world has too many built in biases for geography, religion, politics, etc. and we wanted none of that.)
The first thing I realised... I needed something more to house this beast.
You see, one of the earliest features I'd dropped into StoryBB was a rudimentary pages function. More like Jcink than XF, incidentally. You could just create arbitrary pages of content, you got a title, a bbcode editor for content, you could put it on the sidebar menu (or the help menu) and you got permissions control. Very basic, but good enough for writing out a couple of pages of lore and whatnot.
You see, here's one of the really big bombshell things about roleplay sites: none of the usual rules about content apply. Sites don't need articles or galleries or whatever, in most cases all they need are a forum and a few pages, and probably a Discord.
But this magic system we'd wrought... it quickly grew out of hand for writing in the pages. So I did what anyone with my skill set would do: go and set up a wiki. It was clear immediately we would need to have something for all the lore we were inevitably going to write in this new world with this new magic system. I first set up DokuWiki but it took me about 2 weeks to decide that it wasn't what I wanted and I grudgingly installed MediaWiki. I still have MediaWiki installed but only because I haven't found something as fluid for content creation but less arse to customise.
MediaWiki does give me a lot of flexibility however, and I was able to set up a number of really cool things with it - not least taking our original world map and splicing it into a zoomable, scrollable Google Maps setup with pins on the map for all the key cities in the world, as well as integrating Pinterest boards for all the mood boards for the different regions to give an idea of culture, architecture etc.
What's interesting is that we're out on the fringe of 'extra content' needs; most sites don't have a wiki, most sites don't have that much lore. (Most people don't seem to want to do reading which in a hobby about reading and writing continues to amuse me.) We certainly still don't need 'articles' in the conventional form, but I have no shortage of articles to add to the wiki!
It's also interesting to note how little extra forum dev I did in this period, vs wiki dev.
There are new forum features, for example I sat down and figured out how all the characters are connected from what I knew of their backstories, e.g. 'character X works with character Y', 'character Z is friends with character A', and integrated it with a service to draw this in a pretty diagram.
There's also the e-book exporter - this was something a newer recruit requested, but that went down pretty well. Take the timelines feature from before (so, a collection of all the stories of a pair of characters), and turn it into an ePub file, with thread being linked with proper titles, etc. - sort of in the 'print thread' manner of old, but in an e-book reader format. I'd never worked with ePub before, it was an interesting journey.
At some point in this mess, I refitted avatar functionality; instead of what I had before which was basically SMF's avatar interface supersized to work on characters and not just accounts, I rewrote the whole interface and much of the underlying guts. First up, characters could have up to 5 avatars each. When you uploaded there was a widget for scaling, panning and cropping - meaning that the image you uploaded would be the right aspect ratio to look nice alongside all the others (we don't have square or circle, we have a portrait rectangle shape), and lastly you can set it up to either rotate through all your avatars on your character's posts, or you can pick the avatar for the post.
Why would you want multiple avatars? Well, avatars in the roleplay sense tend to reflect some inspiration point for the character, and how you imagine them to be. It's common - but not mandatory - to use some famous person's likeness. And having 3-4 different pictures of that actor/musician/whatever is popular. But something I found interesting: people would collect multiple pictures of the same inspiration source, and it was mood related. They'd have a happy face, a thoughtful face, a sad one, an angry one. What if you could put that against a specific post?
In the current site iteration there's another reason. I have a couple of characters who aren't human but nature spirits. These spirits are capable of shapeshifting and appearing more or less human (because MAGIC; this is not a special ability; anyone with a druid character can do this), so I have 'them as a human' and 'them in their nature form' images and post as appropriate.
I also added one of the more interesting refinements to the timelines feature - if you were on topic 3 out of 6 in the collection, why not link to the previous and next topics? Even if a topic was in multiple timelines this isn't a huge drama to reflect.
Another source of work that came out was what is internally the skills system. (Which I built with every intent of making it possible to reuse even though I can't ever imagine anyone else doing so, but I built it that way anyway). Mechanically it's straightforward: you define a skill, the branches under it and the items in those branches.
It sort of looks like this:
So in our case, skill 1 is 'magic', it has 9 branches under it for the kinds of magic in the world, and items under each for the different specific magical abilities. It does also have a bunch of custom styling around this since the branches of magic all have colours attached, and the skills reflect this with the iconography and colour. And since this colour theory runs through the magic in all sorts of ways (e.g. nature magic is green, light magic is pale yellow), I also drew a little gradient bar under peoples' character names, to reflect the balance of magic they have. A character with mostly nature skills will have a mostly green bar for example.
The future ain't what it used to be
Well, it's been one hell of a ride, and the drama attached to it all is fascinating. I mean that: if you've been over at XF and seen the 'xyz drama' threads, that's straight up amateur hour. In RP land we have entire drama blogs. I'm not even kidding. If you are brave - and be warned, you will likely start losing braincells if you spend too long reading - you can try one of the less asinine iterations we've seen: https://rpcburnbook.tumblr.com/
One of the more asinine blogs has since been shut (Tumblr closed it for reasons), but I was actively namedropped at one point because the person anonymously posting wished that they could pay the admins of some of the RP Discord servers to boot me and several other people because whenever we spoke we ruined the mood. (I mean, y'all could have said something in the Discord at the time, but it's easier to be anti-social anonymously. Worth noting, the admin of the servers in question were all very polite and 'you don't have to go if you don't want to' but that was very much the straw on top of the already-broken camel's back, and I just left all the Discords, haven't been back. I loosely maintain a presence on RPG Directory at this point.)
So that's the big journey.
Anyone who ever wondered on TAZ what I meant about 'flavours of forums', this is it. Yes, you can build a forum RP with entirely off the shelf parts. You can recreate maybe 70% of the functionality that StoryBB has, more or less, with off the shelf XenForo plugins. I did a brief look at this while on holiday a couple of months back for giggles and I think I estimated you could replicate that 70% for about $900 in plugins, but it'll never feel as seamless and joined up as what StoryBB does, because I can come at it from a holistic point of view and build out functionality that would be hard or intensive to maintain as plugins.
I think the big reflections for me are the hits, and the swings and misses. People don't really talk about the posting experience or the editor, or any of that stuff, because it's not that interesting. There's a whole raft of RP quality of life improvements in there that just don't matter to regular forum users, and a whole raft of regular forum functionality that doesn't matter to roleplay. Every time I see a new release of XF or IC, I think how little much of it would matter in a roleplay context.
Much of the 'normal' functionality is also a hit and miss affair.
- Topic prefixes? Win. Should be default, had to add that myself since SMF base doesn't have it.
- @ tagging of people? I actually redid that at some point to differentiate between accounts and characters, including being able to deal with 'you were tagged in (character)'s thread' vs 'your character x was tagged in (character's thread)' since I have that information but expanding the system to cope with it was... interesting. (And remember, I designed SMF 2.1's alerts core)
- The unread replies feature SMF has is utterly uninteresting; unread posts in general isn't that interesting.
- The lists of topics in a board needs different love between in character and out of character; different information is useful. In particular, the list of topics in character having character avatars is really nice to have and helps people scan the list better.
- Even though there is a warning at the top and bottom of the page saying 'you're in an in-character board, switch to a character to post here', people didn't always get it.
- All the usual 'I want trending content' stuff is basically irrelevant.
- Affiliates are a feature you will need to support if you're advertising with other sites.
- SEO, search engines, none of that matters because no-one's finding you through that (and if they are, it's inevitably NOT helpful)
Probably the most interesting quirk I found though is the formatting.
I had in the Potter era expected people to do formatting in posts more than they actually did; I even upgraded the SMF editor to support more fonts in the font dropdown and add a more interesting and pleasant set of colours to it by default. The font thing helped people with character profiles a bit, but the most significant use was the 'I'm going to use a handwriting font for in-universe letters rather than regular text'. Fringe use, didn't expect.
But colours? That was a whole different ball game. One trend that was relatively new (so my wife never encountered it back in the day, and I never encountered it at all) was the notion of highlighting dialogue in prose. It was surprisingly common for people to pick their character's favourite colour and write all the quoted text in that colour. The exact rationale for this is complicated but it sits somewhere between asserting some personality, making it easier to pick out the dialogue later (so in a reply, you can clearly see what your character could have heard to be able to react to it, since they can't react to inner monologue / things that the other character thought but didn't say or otherwise indicate), and for the people who can't be bothered to read so they just reply to the dialogue and not anything the other character does. Some people are more or less bad about this as a habit.
More recent variations on this idea are simply about bolding the dialogue because the colour thing plays hell with having light/dark variants. I can conceivably get behind it as a focusing method, especially for people with ADHD or similar where it's easier for them to find the dialogue after having read it before. But it irks me having to deal with it - like actively remembering to put it in posts I wrote for people who have expressed this desire.
I have thought, many times, about how I might tackle this in a more intelligent fashion, but I haven't got an answer that doesn't actively annoy someone while writing yet. One day. (Part of the problem is that HTML is such a bad vehicle for this. I don't even see how to approach it meaningfully in TipTap, and it's not like I haven't looked). Scrivener has this feature when writing and it's neat (and helps you as a writer balance dialogue with other stuff), but Scrivener is not a web app and I have no idea how to meaningfully fix this.
Also worth noting that only about half of the people who write on our site actually use the editor. It's hyper-common in RP in general to write in another editor and copy/paste which means for formatting I am kinda stuck with either bbcode or Markdown if I ever adopted that. The reasons for this are multiple: either people have been bitten enough in the past with forums eating their posts that they don't trust the editor (even with autosaving drafts!), or they just don't vibe with it and want to use something else. I know people who write in Google Docs, in Word and in one case in Pages specifically configured so that each character they write as gets a different gradient pattern to help them distinguish at a glance which character they're writing. (They're a very visual/colour person.)
So basically, yeah, RP is about as unlike regular forums as it gets. It still kills me after re-reading an old thread that our dear friend Tracy doesn't get this and just how radically different the experience should be.
But enough of the past. What of the future? Well, as I mentioned in passing, at some point along the way I got very disillusioned with the whole 'building the perfect RP forum software' but I still have a wishlist of things I'd love to do sometime if ever I found the motivation. I say wishlist but actually it's two wishlists.
- At some point I started writing login-with-Discord (because, again, StoryBB started out life as SMF so no OAuth login), but I never finished it, maybe I could. I was also asked at one point about login with Tumblr. Equally doable, but same problem.
- Login with magic link - give it your email address, press a button, get an email with login link. Convenience features rule.
- Styled emails with the colours and general vibe of the forum rather than the bald ones SMF has.
I don't have much in the way of pure forum improvements; most of the ones I really cared about are done, but there's no shortage of RP focused ones.
- Right now you can select topics by location (because boards = locations, or prefixes = locations, as is common), but filtering by character as well would probably be interesting.
- Rewrite how last-read works for in-character stuff; the classic method of 'the last thing I read is the most recent post in topic' works for regular discussions but when looking at a story topic, it's probably more interesting to do it like Kindle does, and track where you were last, regardless if you've seen that before or not.
- Experimental opt-in mode for infinite scrolling topics (esp in character topics that can be very long and easily span multiple pages)
- More accessibility options - we have light/dark, but I think I want to maybe add a greyscale mode, more choices for font sizing, more choices for fonts.
- See if there are interesting possibilities for integrating Pinterest boards as mood boards for characters, in forum. Ditto for Spotify playlists - these are both common for 'these are how I set the mood for my character'.
There are always more things that can be done, more to see than can ever be found in the ciiiiiiircle of... no wait, that's the Lion King. Anyway. More for another time, I rambled enough here.
) since it is dependent upon the user formatting the conversation correctly 100% of the time if you were to even try and consider it for allowing the to set preferences to then act upon, and we both know that will never happen 
Just my humble opinion.
