litphoria

I... provided reasons after that! You should go re-read that comment.

I didn't call this an overhaul because it is lots of changes, there's only two. I called it an overhaul because the net effect on series's usefulness is tremendous.

With their current state they are pretty troubled in being useful. Apparently by IDs the series created just yesterday is only the 33rd one on the site, so they're not very prolifically used.

When I edit this to drop the thing already suggested, it will be one suggestion.

When I edit this to drop the thing already suggested, it will be one suggestion.

That will be fine.

Okay, now that we've gotten that out of the way, a problem occurs when we talk about adding onto others. First of, users, generally speaking, do not like other users modifying anything about their content. If you had a roleplay series and some stranger added their roleplay to it as a kind of weird way to get you to play with them ... I could see that not going over very well.

Oops, I had some ambiguous wording in there. I'm not asking for editing other people's series. I'm asking for editing my own series to include roleplays that other people created.

Hmmm, that could still be problematic if you added a bunch of RPs you didn't own. Maybe we can limit this so that you have to be participating in the roleplay which you want to add, and the owner of that play has to approve it?

Maybe we can limit this so that you have to be participating in the roleplay which you want to add, and the owner of that play has to approve it?

I would do the second one alone, the owner has to approve. My friends and I have some roleplays going on. We would want to keep them gathered together in a series, but we won't necessarily all be participating in every single one.

(We also want to be able to share that series and have just one of us keep track of it, but that's another matter.)

I would do the second one alone, the owner has to approve. My friends and I have some roleplays going on. We would want to keep them gathered together in a series, but we won't necessarily all be participating in every single one.

This seems like it might be missing the point of a series. Are all of those plays contributing to a central plot of some kind? You shouldn't use a series to just group unrelated plays with different characters because the players are the same. Imagine a reader trying to piece together the series if they were unrelated stuff.

That would be a difficult thing to enforce though, hmm.

Yes, they are all contributing to a central plot.

Since series are totally private (unless/until we get to share them, and even then may not have a central list), you could just let people do whatever they wanted with them.

The roadmap for them is definitely more public. Off of the top of my head:

• Allow contributors to view always
• Allow public toggle
• Add timeline of events
• Add a setting, potentially with embedded images
• If public, use as replacement for roleplay listing on profiles

The questions are more on if they're searchable and have that central list. Some people have said they want series to be searchable, but I'll have to think about it a little bit more. I would rather RPs be the focus.

I don't personally feel it's important to have any central list of series. They're something secondary we get to via other more important things, like trying to find context for a current roleplay. We can just get links to them through those more important things and that's it.

Would really like to see this and the discussed ideas (found in other feedback by searching on 'Series') implemented eventually. I know dev time is limited, but just wanting to add my vote. I could see this being a place to gather a genre, like 'Mind Control' with many contributors, or a tightly-focused series.

It helps organize RP ideas, in-progress RPs, and finished ones, so I'm not sure it takes away focus on RPs, except in the sense that it takes dev time away.

We would not want a series to be used to group plays which are only related by something like a theme. Everything in a series should contribute to a central story in some way. Anything else can be grouped otherwise; with the interests tagged to them (which is how you'd group mind control plays), with traits tagged to them (not yet a thing), and potentially with roleplay themes (litphoria.com) tagged to them.

But yes, series were shipped with a limited feature scope, and have outgrown it.

Just a thought: If you provide all the functionality mentioned, I could certainly see someone collecting up the best RPs of a certain theme into a Series. I mean if you just do a search for pubic in-progress or finished RPs that are marked with the Interest of mind control, you have no guarantee of finding an RP that actually has mind-control elements in the RP. Lots of RPs don't get around to touching on every single Interest with which the RP is tagged.

The way it should work is:

• A roleplay represents a specific scene, or a few very closely-related scences of a roleplay. Every thing tagged to it is utilized
• A series collects those roleplays into one coherent package. Since a story might be told with a lot of characters, it might consume roleplays from different authors, so long as they all contribute to one thing.
• Since not everyone RPs like this, we will have a tool at some point to split up a monster RP into several discrete scenes all collected by one series for presentation and organization

We will have voting at some point to help determine how "accurate" an interest tag is. We need those to be reliable, as they will form the basis of searching for roleplays.

But if series are our own private thing we optionally share with people we choose to, does it really matter if we use them in a way other than that should? It hurts nobody, it doesn't hurt the site, it truly doesn't really matter if I do want to make a series of cool mind control roleplays.

And more than that it isn't like you'd be able to stop me - I don't think anyone will be moderating every series to make sure they're being used correctly - if anyone did I expect they'd be asked to (rude language) off out of private collections and mind their own (more rude language) business.

They're a great powerful way to make private collections of roleplays. You might as well embrace that and that people would use it this way as a feature. We'd like that! We'd enjoy that! And isn't that the important thing?

No, I'm not going to moderate series.

To be clear, I need to know all of the possible use cases for something before we go start adding features, or we will end up with conflicts of interests.

For example, in this very suggestion, we are saying we should probably be able to add plays we don't own. But, because we might do something weird on our own, we might end up putting someone in an icky place in a way they don't want to be shown. There has to be some kind of control about adding these plays you don't own in, because you're showing someone else's content in a way they might not approve of. So now we need permission.

... and if we need permission, we've totally killed the idea of trying to have a private collection of RPs that we can share with friends that happen to do something really well. What are the odds that 10 people and all of the 20 people they played with are going to be cool with all of your stuff being added, even if it's private? Not very high. Oops. Because this feature was designed to be used in another way, we've unintentionally made this other use case much more difficult to do.

Going a bit further, one of the ideas I have at the moment are to expand series with things like timelines. Those only make sense if the plays are related and contributing to a central plot. Otherwise it's totally useless! But series being used as a private collection is not anyone's radar when we're designing and talking about things like that because why would it be? No one has brought it up. There's other suggestions that I'm totally for that also don't make a lick of sense if plays aren't related, like being able to view all posts by a character to follow their progress through it.

So when we don't fully understand what we're doing, and just squint and say hey well this could be used for this too, we really run into an issue where features can conflict. If we had another concept of a curated collection, we could get around this issue, and perhaps explore the idea of presenting unrelated stories differently. And then suddenly, with something like that, we totally scratch the use you want out of series, without harming them, or without them harming you, in their use of series. And then we get those cool new thing that people can use that they might not use otherwise! How awesome is that.

Oops, you're right that permissions would mess that up a bit. I didn't know about any of those other features either! I understand now why there's reason not to do that. Timelines sound pretty powerful...

Unblocked this, since my objections were edited out at some point, and the discussion here has died down.