litphoria

Since you can start a roleplay without filling out any traits, I don't see any reason for that.

Remember, profiles are there to help you find roleplay partners. If you're bringing in someone new to roleplay with them, then that is absolutely not an immediate factor.

This sounds excellent. Joining into the site is a barrier that takes some time, and reducing that to "pick a name for this roleplay, now have fun" removes a major barrier for them entering our site. An email would also be useful, I'll get back to this and it's for reasons more than notifications.

This will take some special handling, as this skips the entire sign-up process. Other sites are beginning to cover ground on handling this kind of situation, including the technicalities of (effectively) unregistered accounts and implementing them, so it's doable.

Mostly it involves creating a new account for them, and logging them in in some fashion that circumvents the usual login process. Later the user signs up for a proper account, which either amends and completes their current ghost account, or creates a new one and merges over all possessions of the ghost account to the new one.

That's why I suggest an email: if they lose their login cookie they get through creation, and switch computer even, they can get back in to their ghost account and character from a complex (not practically brute force-able) email link. Other solutions may be too complex for now or be impractical given our situation: most people may visit us in incognito mode, which destroys our ability to track that user by design.

Progressing to a regular user with a proper account could be prompted when they try to interact with other areas of the site. An email link to log in is a poor security model for the long term. We could make the rest of the site outside that roleplay and character read only, and provide prompts to sign up properly. (We should probably display that prompt on the roleplay page itself eventually, like after a week.)

Creating new characters may also require proper sign up.

If the user has joined more than one roleplay this way, they will probably need to be able to claim ownership of each of those characters under the one account too as another requirement. Probably same email = same ghost account. Not sure about different emails.

Yasu: traits are only important for the site users in general and if you don't know the person. In this scenario, one friend is inviting another friend they already know to play, and nothing beyond the name is important for that. They can work on their profile later, and we can prompt them to fill it in when they sign up properly, or tell them they can come back and do that while they first accept the invitation and create their character.

While I am wholly behind this concept, I have some concerns with allowing utterly blank profiles to play. After all, even if/when they sign up for an account, what will inspire them to complete the character beyond that? They will already have rp, without the effort of actually creating a character. Why should they fill out all the odds and ends on that character or any other? I feel like it will set the wrong precedent for users.

We already have an issue of users not filling out the most basic parts of the profile, having no preferences or interests at all. If we encourage people to 'come on in and play, no profile needed' why should they make a profile at all?

I see your issue: you're visualising a whole bunch of blank profiles entering the site, and other people seeing those blank profiles and going "oh, I'll leave mine blank too".

We can give these guest character profiles a different appearance then: the name and PID in the top block, then none of the other trait/interest/idea/description blocks. Instead, a block that says this profile was used to quick-join a roleplay as an offsite guest, and hasn't actually been properly created yet. (In some better wording than that.) They should also probably not be featured in search until they've properly registered and created their character fully, which we can prompt them to do during registration. ("Welcome to the site! Now, if you're ready, we should finish creating that character you made.")

A case could be made for quickly picking a couple of traits at the same time, but I don't think we should press them to fill out anything else like a blurb. (If we do have htem pick out traits, we should still do the above. ^) This character is for the player and their partner (or partners), rapidly joining a roleplay, not for us. If any of us have an indignant response at them not properly creating their character for our sakes, that's our problem, because it wasn't for our sakes. People can already create a blank character if they want to jump into something quick with a friend as well — many such characters exist, and I've had one of these myself. They may fill it out just because they want to later even if we don't prompt them (but we should prompt them) — I don't like having a blank profile for my characters, they might decide they want a pretty picture like other people, and add more details while they're at it.

If we're creating minimum barrier to entry for them leaping into a roleplay, that does a service to them and whoever invited them. Extra requirements going to have to be worth it for them and their partners (who already know them), rather than to us, or it defeats the point. At the same time, they can go and explore the site, sample what it's like, and sign up properly when they're ready, so offering this also has the benefit of getting more people into Litphoria and increasing site activity. Consider this invitation process to also be effectively a recruitment process, which benefits all of us.

My thought, on the structure is to have a very small set of standard traits... i.e. age, gender, species (even just something as basic as feral, anthro, humanoid), a sort of 'baseball card' version of the character profile. Even if the players are already familiar with each other, it is pretty standard in a role play, any role play, to have a few basic details tied to a character. As for the text box that I thought might go along, that would be something much more optional, like the text box at the bottom of standard profiles. I cannot imagine that we could come up with a basic set of interests for all profiles (they just vary too widely to decide which ones are important), but this area could exist for people who WANT to add a bit more than the baseball card stats.

I do agree that those profiles should not show up on the searches, and that they should be marked as something different from normal profiles.

I also think it should be an absolute minimum of what the profiles require, but I believe that a few traits should be a part of that minimum. This will also get new potential players a peek at how the traits and profile building works.. like a mini version of the real thing. That way, if/when they do decide to fully join, they are not hit with a completely foreign and perhaps overwhelming process.

I think this boils down to something else entirely that could be split off from quick profile creation.

1. Make a quick profile creation, and all it needs is a name/email.

2. Give profiles a minimum threshold before they'll be listed in the search results.

Both would probably be good.

Give profiles a minimum threshold before they'll be listed in the search results.
While this is also a good idea, that is not what I am talking about. A minimum profile threshold would also include preferences and interests. I just think the quick profile needs a smidge more than just the name/e-mail.

I'd disagree strongly with that. Quick profile creation shouldn't set a higher bar and require more work than actual profile creation. That just seems...super obvious to me. It wouldn't be quick in that case.

As for the threshold requiring preferences and traits, it'd be good if there was a wizard for preferences and only the most common interests were put forward to weigh in on with another wizard, but failing that, there should be a relatively easy standard.

What makes it sound harder than normal character creation?
You enter Name
E-mail
then get a quick drop down selection that is something like:
Gender: male female trans herm
Age: child adult elder
Species: humanoid furry feral

Like literally those three, clickable and basic stats.

Because a normal profile doesn't require any of those things. Now, adding a profile creation wizard to make it easy to fill in some of the core traits/preferences/interests would be nice too, but again, that's something else entirely.

Quick profile creation in my mind will require exactly:

• A name
• An e-mail address
• A password

The way it will work is something like:

• They will get a generated special link from a roleplay that will allow them to make one profile
• They will use that email/password to login instead of a user name or password
• They will not be able to reset their password or get an e-mail to remind them what their username was (duh)
• This will technically create an actual site account, so they would be able to create more profiles for different roleplays, provided they had links given to them to do such and entered the same e-mail/pw combo

The requirements will be different in that:

• They will not have to see any of the profile creation
• Their profile will not have a proper profile page and it will not exist publicly on the site
• They will not have to agree to the site's TOS or verify their e-mail
• If they do not make a post their account's data will be deleted eventually

However, such accounts:

• Will not be able to view any page other than ones that they've been given special roleplay links to, since they haven't agreed to a TOS
  • They will be presented with a login screen for anything that isn't guest-visible and isn't a roleplay they've been given a link to
• Will not hit any normal tutorials and will not be able to change their account settings/theme/etc
• Can be converted to a full account by agreeing to the TOS, confirming their e-mail, and picking a username

This in mind will make it so that someone can have a very low-barrier entry into actually roleplaying, and can gradually adopt make their presence more legitimate by first confirming their e-mail (after the site has gained their trust through the sample roleplay that it's worthy of that) then by spending a bit more time fleshing out their profile.

After this is in place, it could conceivably allow for full accounts to make similar quick profiles that only consist of a name. This could be useful for people who want to make NPCs for a roleplay.

I don't think it's in the interest of the site or of the trial person for them to fill out anything more than the absolute bare minimum. The entire point is about lowering the barrier to entry - the closer it is to zero, the greater chance someone will try it, and the greater chance someone will like it enough to join the site and contribute proper.

All of that sounds good to me.

That actually makes a lot of sense. I would also love the ability to generate super simple npc profiles. I'm still concerned that it may result in lots of people running around with blank profiles, whether they show up on lists or not; and that that may in the long run be detrimental. But I suppose that is a bridge we will cross if we come to that.