my werewolf had a buttpuppy

[socksuke_uchiha]

Rundown: rpanons is an anonymous community for role-play related topics. This place serves as a forum for game discussions, canon discussions, RP solicitations (ATP, game ads, open memes), and advice. The occasional off topic comment is inevitable, but please keep heated social and political topics to their respective communities. Posting them here will only get them frozen. Subsequent threads made to bypass a freeze will then be deleted.

Rules:

Do not post pornographic or shocking images.
Do not share private entries, plurks, chat logs, etc.
Do not use this community as your social/political/hatespeech soapbox.
Do not be redundant. One page does not need three or more threads on one topic/theme. Your unfunny, forced memes also fall under this rule.
Do not treat this comm like your personal therapist. Threads about nonfictional suicide, self injury, rape, and abuse will be deleted. There are better resources out there for you.
Do not treat this comm like your personal Plurk or Twitter. Off-topic happens, but it should be open for discussion and not just a play-by-play of your life. No one cares.
Shut up about Tumblr. If it's not a discussion about Tumblr RP it will be deleted.


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Comments

[(Anonymous)]

so, anons, a poll of sorts. most of us agree dwrp has a lot of issues with being unwelcoming, overly judgmental, alarm fatigue, too harsh on mods, and just has a lot of problems in general that are causing it to lose players and become insular in a real bad way.

if you could wave a magic wand and clean the hobby up, what would you do? what would you add or take away to make dwrp more hospitable and fun for all? (i'm thinking both in terms of concrete things like rules and in terms of attitudes overall)

[(Anonymous)]

get rid of rpa and wg. done.

[(Anonymous)]

i lmao that we're saying this on an anoncomm but i don't disagree with you.

perhaps make another place for the General RP Talk side of anon comms or allow confessionals/enabling/memes you want somewhere (perhaps even divide this into separate comms, some logged-in/some not?), but ban namedropping and RPer shit-talking. no dragging people for their fun times or baseless gossip. idk.

[(Anonymous)]

Remove anoncomms. Yes, there would still be other spaces for gossip, but likely nowhere near as open and pervasive.

[(Anonymous)]

um... excuse me? rpa is for more than just gossip. we do ads and psl hunting and questions and all sorts of things here. i've been dragged on anon comms myself, but 'removing them' isn't going to do anything. even when wg went with socks because of spamming, it didn't stop the comm. this is our version of being shitty. i'll take it over tumblr's doxxing.

[(Anonymous)]

rpa is fine, the mods are quick to stop ridiculous threads. agree about wg though, it's mostly trolling and it makes people anxious for some reason.

[(Anonymous)]

1. this would be a HUGE undertaking but i'd make some kind of opt-in registry for rp accounts. it is SO hard to find rp journals for specific characters etc with dreamwidth's setup and usually i end up relying on memes with a lot of toplevels to see who's out there and active. like a dwrp directory but for players, not games

2. separate comm for memes that a substantial portion of dwrp finds upsetting. this isn't some moral debate, this isn't 'every day is now a gen day', the usual gen/smut memes would stay around. i know that what's "too much" is subjective, but at the very least i'd like memes that involve shipping child characters with adults and/or incest to be in a separate comm so that everyone who doesn't participate doesn't have to see those entries.

3. no linking to people's rp posts on wankgate. sometimes these places can be useful for through-the-grapevine warnings, but wankgate also has created a platform for public point-and-laugh culture, which makes people self conscious and afraid to actually, you know, rp. most of the rp posts i've seen linked there have been linked for the purpose of a) jeering or b) going 'wtf' over the content but not actually because the player did something wrong. 'oh this person has weird icons, should we tell them' followed by 30 comments talking about that is just repackaged middle school bullying because someone's not wearing the right clothes.

[(Anonymous)]

I was thinking about how nice it would be if we had an rp yellow pages kind of thing with individual posts for each letter, to be sorted by canon, but I figured nobody would want to have their info listed publicly

[(Anonymous)]

just kill it

[(Anonymous)]

Wave a magic wand and fix everyone's anxiety so they can actually communicate with each other and do their damn tags consistently. I think our lack of communication in general is probably one of the biggest problems.

[(Anonymous)]

getting rid of wg won't actually change the attitudes of these people, because they currently and still will do it in private too. people need to start calling out others for being nasty. they don't because this hobby is so conflict-avoidant that it's become toxic and it enables the to continue.

if i could actually wave a magic wand, i'd get rid of all the people with bad attitudes. i'd make people be kinder to their mods and actually make an effort to be grateful to them, not in a cdc thank you card way but in an ongoing minor way. i'd also tell people to fucking go outside and stop making rp your fucking life, because that's half the reason people get so insane over this shit.

[(Anonymous)]

i don't doubt that people titter about others' rping in private discord chats or private plurks or other secret venues, though i honestly can't say i've seen much of it so i hope this means i just don't know many douchebags, but i do kind of feel like wg sets up for a special flavor of pressed-ness. because honestly i think if someone plurked some of the things i see on there, most folks would shut them down in a hurry, conflict-avoidant or not. some things i also doubt would fly in most one-on-one convos with a lot of people.

[(Anonymous)]

eh. you can call out people for being nasty (i've done it), but unless that person is bad enough to be dragged on anoncomms to a great extent, it's unlikely anyone will drop them based on your word alone unless you are good friends.

so many times i've had people show their incredibly shitty sides to me in private and sharing it with other mutuals really only results in either a) them both disliking you, b) the mutual agreeing with you but refusing to drop that person bc they rp together.

[(Anonymous)]

I wouldn't remove the anon comms, but I'd magically force them to go back to just happening once in a while like the memes of old.

And magically make everyone have at least one other hobby.

[(Anonymous)]

remove rpa, wg, and plurk. possibly discord, but not sure.

actually use our journals to socialize and communicate. and get people to stop acting like high schoolers.

[(Anonymous)]

i'd want to just make people happy again. make them remember how to enjoy this fun game we're supposed to be playing without all the extra nonsense.

[(Anonymous)]

tbh i think rp here was doomed to a slow death once fandom and blogging moved away from livejournal to other platforms. fandom rp can't thrive when it's separated from fandom.

but at this point, i'd kill wankgate and maybe rpanons. i'd get rid of plurk because it seems like a lot of dwrp's problems are just modern social media problems. bakerstreet is a ghost town that makes dwrp look even deader, so i'd go to just 1-2 memes a day to try to concentrate the action. i'd advertise dwrp games outside of rpanons and enablemeplz.

there's already a gradual growth of small sandbox games, murdergames, and private or semiprivate games, which i think will help with some of our intensive modding expectations.

[(Anonymous)]

get rid of wg. it's outlived its usefulness and has become an active detriment to this hobby now.

plurk can stay, it's been a blessing compared to aim and discord for people in different timezones, tbh as far as keeping up with game shit or communicating. it's not weird responding to an rp-related plurk from two days ago, it is weird responding to a rp-related conversation that passed two days ago on discord.

keep bakerstreet/meme communities

rpa gets posted only once every other month

merge dwrp master game list and emp into an expanded directory. each new post serves as a game advertisement (maybe copy-paste whatever blur is in the game's profile/navigation page) and is tagged generously so people can search for whatever games they want (ex: "horror" "au" "slice of life" "duplicates allowed" "rl pb only" "dressing room" "no apps" "psl"). any game closures can be made in comments by savvy players to that post if game mods aren't on top of it themselves. private games could be advertised here too (ex: private game looking for two players, preferred villain and scientist character types). Or maybe games looking for mod help could post here too?

once a month will be the usual anon-enabled emp style post and general discussion? i also feel like a "mod forum" could and should be a thing, especially if current mods can either commiserate and blow off steam or pass on their knowledge to fledgling mods, given the recent venting thread.

but most importantly yeah our attitudes really need to fuckin change. we need to be more open-minded about games that do things "outside of the norm" or experimental stuff. we need to give less fucks if someone uses weird icons and be more welcoming and guiding when someone is obviously new. we need to stop trying to read between the lines of every interaction or lackthereof. we need to stop getting our panties in a twist over stupid shipping shit, player preferences, or other ultimately harmless inconsequential things. we need to stop feeling so entitled to someone else's time and attention. we need to remember there are real human beings with real feelings, thoughts, struggles and rl shit going on behind the screen who just want to have fun. we need to remember we are playing imaginary barbie dolls on the internet and when we die we aren't going to leave anything behind other than what we experienced and what we caused others to experience. we aren't creating high art here. we aren't getting paid. we're doing this because it's supposed to be a fun and creative hobby. and it's a really niche hobby not a lot of other people understand or have the same specific culture we do. do you really want to walk out of here saying "i left someone else with a negative experience and indirectly hurt them, that's what i did with myself in this hobby" or a positive one?

[(Anonymous)]

make people stop seeing mods as The Enemy, honestly

[(Anonymous)]

i'd just make dreamwidth the active fandom hub instead of tumblr/twitter

[(Anonymous)]

I'd obliterate all centralized communities like rpa, wankgate, and bakerstreet, forcing people to invent new ways to interact with each other. If bakerstreet's gone, then instead of trying to 'fix' it by posting 2 memes a day/posting 200 memes a day/having gen only days/whatever new hot shit anons fixate on, they'll hopefully do something entirely different.

[(Anonymous)]

Move fandom back here.

I don't get why people think getting rid of anon comms will fix anything. People seem to think of anon as some great evil force that removes accountability, but in my experience in RP communities without an anon feature? The accountability will fall solely on the less popular person involved, and popular people can get away with murder.

Big popular blogs on Tumblr can smear whoever they like and there's nothing a small or new blog can do about it without getting the wrath of all the popular person's followers, so everyone that popular blog wrongs just sits there quietly thinking they're the only one it's happening to.

TBH, I'm starting to think the scale of the drama (which is smaller here than almost any other site I've played on) matters less to people here than the fact that they don't know who's starting it. Everyone just wants to know who to personally avoid.

[(Anonymous)]

remove the people who complain about wg but still...go to wankgate? for some reason these people who were checking wankgate and participating in it think they're not part of the problem because they're not like Those Dirty Wankgaters.

But they still give the community and complaints power by regularly going there.

[(Anonymous)]

immediate exile of anyone who quits rp but still hangs around wg like dog shit in the treads of dwrp's collective sneaker

[(Anonymous)]

Fix people's attitudes. Icon hate, username hate, hatred of playing characters from popular series, the disdain for crossmedium tagging, the griping about 'animu' characters, the derision when someone new makes mistakes, the whining when a new game isn't like the others and the whining when a game is...

These speak to a problem that goes deeper than just removing the anoncomms - though that's a good idea, tbh - and shows just how determined to be miserable a lot of people here are. We love finding reasons everything sucks and excuses not to tag others and that combination of cynicism and snobbery isn't ever going to be enough to sustain a hobby. I'm contemplating leaving RP and six of my friends have in the past two years. Too often, I find myself opening up a Word document and writing the stories I signed up to write via RP with other people because those people are too busy on Plurk talking about how they hate tumblr or hate idol anime or hate icons with borders.

We need to get rid of people who don't want to RP but seem to be using this as a means of finding others to grouse at/with. I didn't come here to hear about all the things you dislike, I came here to play internet Barbies. And if you won't bring out the Barbies, well, can you really be surprised when people go to other sites where people will?

DWRP isn't dying, but it's never going to thrive with this kind of pessimistic playerbase.