litphoria

Rather I should say it compromises our ability to maintain separation of characters. If we can create multiple writer profiles per account, that remains intact and it ceases to be an account profile.

Otherwise I foresee myself and others creating multiple accounts to protect that separation, and if we can't do that the situation would be untenable. Moderation power would be lost as well.

But in the current site design, separation and anonymity are not compromised and nobody has major reasons to break the one account per person rule. Let's keep it that way.

Multiple per account would change this from a writer profile to a hub. I see zero reason to encourage such behavior.

What is here is what people have told me they wanted. Such "writer profiles" are not for you to hide alts with or anything like that, they're just there for some people to list everything they play with/as. I imagine most people won't even create a list of their characters for exactly the reason you outlined --- as soon as you make one list, someone assumes that everything has to be on it, or you're "hiding" something.

I agree with Velus in that the one per account limitation seems a bit odd. There might be people who want a writer's profile for the dominant and submissive styles, or for their sexual and non-sexual styles. Or all of those. Fitting everything into a single profile could make them unfocused, give off an "Oh, you know, I'm into everything I guess" vibe, and I think that some people definitely wouldn't like to have to explain all of what makes them tick to everyone, but instead share those things slowly with likeminded people.

There might be people who want a writer's profile for the dominant and submissive styles, or for their sexual and non-sexual styles.

The word you want is a hub.

Though to be clear, so long as they are searched for differently, I don't really care too much about the one-account limitation. Just it would definitely cause hub profiles, instead of profiles for writers.

What is here is what people have told me they wanted.

Certainly, and I understand that. Now I'm responding to it by saying what I want, including specifically how this can be made to avoid compromising what I want. I don't mean to put you on the defensive.

Multiple per account would change this from a writer profile to a hub. I see zero reason to encourage such behavior. (...) Such "writer profiles" are (...) just there for some people to list everything they play with/as. [Ed: Also from the feedback, they have trait multiselect.]

Writer profiles already are hubs. That person who plays all those 20-odd mysterious islander characters is going to use this for their hub. Only being able to create one of them makes it no less a hub.

The people who want multiple hubs will either ultra-hub-ify the one hub they get or create new accounts to get more hubs.

Entirely separately, in terms of legitimate usage, I feel I would need two or three writer profiles to decently cover me. I'm a genderfluid individual with interest in a wide variety of traits and roleplay types (nonsexual, sexual, freeform roleplay, system based play, etc) and interests, and for the most part my own writer profile's message will be a "mostly yes, but it depends, and not all at once". It would be more helpful to define what I want out of role-playing games separately from what I want out of this silo of characters separately from what I want from this last silo of characters.

(I'm not that active in the site yet. I haven't had much time in the past few weeks to do much, and my new house still doesn't have an internet connection. But I may use this site more, and if I add new types of characters, restriction to one writer profile only may make the feature something I don't use.

Also as an afterthought, explicitly supporting a mode of hub which gets linked to concrete characters (or character prototypes) sounds like it would be a reasonably healthy way to support and separate off hub type characters without compromising individual character profiles.

Because I don't particularly care about the 1 profile account limit and it is being a very distracting point of conversation, it has been edited out.

yay! I just read posts about something that has been edited out! Clears the confusion! and that would be useful. Hub profiles (sortof) being separated from real profiles, wouldn't lower the quality of the site. You can be looking for characters, OR looking for hubs. That way, we get to satisfy more people without bothering too many people!

P.S. We could probably also add a little tag, something, to specify that a RP idea belongs to a 'writer profile' rather then a 'character profile' so people looking for a RP with a specific character can just ignore those visually.

For writers? Is this suddenly a website for uploading art now? I thought it was for role-play.

What's that, Salem? Nothing about this proposal touches artists.

Discussion has died down so I am unblocking.

I lean to WA's logic. This would turn into "hub" profiles much more then be used as intended.

What on Earth is wrong with hub profiles, though?

I think that it would be good for both those who like Hub profiles and those who want a writer profile. It's win-win.

I'm not sure I see the difference, except one is stigmatised in the furry community for reasons which I don't think I fully understand.

Hubs in theory are great. In practice, however, on other sites they lead to undefined "catch all" profiles. I won't mind if it passes but I can't really support it.

How people use the architecture is up to the users, and it's not really reasonable to discriminate against hub users anymore than it is to discriminate against those that like furry profiles or bdsm profiles or whatever have you.

There is an argument that the available architecture will bias the sort of users that seek to use it, and/or how they use it. But that said, I don't see how letting people go "this is what I like, here are my characters" hurts the site culture. I mean this profile is a hub already, and it's not like the current system precludes lazy profiles.

I'm not discriminating against it, I just don't support hubs in general. I personally prefer a well thought out character. I my experience, which is in no manner indicative of hubs at large, they have gravitated to "well what do you want me to play?" Something about that makes it difficult for me. I tend to try to shapethe potential rp around pleasing my partner and I find it hard to do so with hubs. The writers profile, I assume, would not fall under this catch all mentality. That's sort of shown by some expressing a desire to have more then one per account, which I agree is probably the best way forward, I just don't want to see low effort "I play what I think you want" profiles, if that makes any sense.

There's a subset of people who when asked about what they would like to roleplay with/as, they'll respond something to the effect of "I'm flexible and I can play pretty much everything". Dislike of this idea is, ultimately, where the dislike of hub profiles come from - they are a type of profile which only offers you flexibility and generalities.

The site therefore has something to lose by formally accepting this as part of the site and encouraging its use with systems, as it would inexplicably make the site for a home of such profiles. With the way things are currently, they are pretty much just "discouraged" on sites for reasons like this, but not explicitly disallowed. Litphoria's systems make it absolutely clear that it is looking for specific profiles doing specific things in specific ways, and enforces that with systems like single-select traits. The other limitations I proposed were to help mitigate this, and to encourage use of them as hubs of specific characters.

That is not to say this harm is going to be significant or that it should be weighed heavily, just that there is more of a reason to be against this than just "I don't like hub profiles".

Painfully flexible characters are a problem, but that's a part of profile creation, hub or character. Tackling it from a site architecture perspective might have some possibilities, for teaching people to have a good profile, but I think that there are other ways--I've actually got an essay on just that over here.

Either way, I think that yeah, the consideration of "bad hub profiles" has very little weight compared to the good stuff.

I'm with wa on this. I won't fight it but I can't support it.

Did we decide these would also support character lists, a la what's supported on F-List?

I believe the character lists is another feedback item but I can't remember the name of it off of the top of my head. Character connection tree, maybe

when is this gonna be implemented?? or is this still in discussion?

This is in the accepted state, meaning it's on the roadmap and eligible to be worked on whenever. We'll probably see effort towards this when profiles are rewritten, which may be a month or two away.