This thread is reserved for posts and feedback relating to the posted news article, Yahoo! Profiles.

Thank you.

Yep, saw this the other night.


De-Lightful.

Not that there's a lot of worthwhile roleplaying, or even chatting, going on in that godforsaken venue these days.

Why would they do this? I love my alias and now its worthless. This is a new low for yahoo.

I think it's time to stop trying to clutch something dead to our bosoms. Yahoo for quite some time now has only been useful as a search engine, a place to set up free email, and a means of keeping in contant with older friends through messenger. Of course, even most of that is hardly any better than what else one can find out there anymore. The email is all that is really left, other than some random tools such as maps and weather. For us... as creators of any kind, it is dead, dead, dead. A rotting corpse which will never breath or flourish again no matter how much sustenance we try to provide. I for one say appox to Yahoo. Let us rejoice in a new birth. FR is the future, and other sites like us. Hoozah! Okay... so I haven't ranted in a while. I'm abit rusty. By the by, hello all =) Nice to see everyone.

Nice rant! :)

Perhaps worth noting that players can ask for their data on any old profiles:

We also know lots of you worked hard on your old profiles and want your data. If you feel like you’re missing data, we’ve saved a copy of your old profile (and alias) and our Customer Care team can retrieve this information. You won’t, however, be able to revert back to your old profile format, but you will be able to get any data that you think is missing. To do this, please go here http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/profiles/general.html to contact Customer Care.

I've also done a quick check with the Internet Archive, http://www.archive.org, but it doesn't really work too well, retrieving only the odd profile page.

Jupe is right. I guess we should all have held out hope that Yahoo would somehow recognize our value as a community and re-instated custom chat rooms. Now that they've erased ANY vestiges of hope that there might be a Silver Age of Y!RP, we should just give up.

Would there still be participants if a similar service were to pop up, anyway? Would you join? Well, I guess, the answer is "Of course we would!" Because that's what we did. But there's not enough spontaneity!

Aud. Duck has a good point. I think if we tried, we could get a decent idea going. I've never done chat room RP, but I wouldn't be against trying it.

I have an idea, and if anyone wants to try such an effort, I'll gladly lend a hand.

A new group in FR, kinda like the members hub. Or maybe just a new members hub chat room. Anyway. Anyone can open the chat room, and anyone can join. Pretty much anything goes, and the only requirement to this is that a news post is sent to the group when someone opens it saying what the genre of RP is (To avoid accidentally mixing a sci-fi character with a medieval fantasy group for example).

The other lesser requirement is that you have a name for a character, and an idea for them. The person who opens the room can organize everything, or let it turn into a whatever happens does situation. Since anyone could open the chat room, it would be more random, and if people take some time to check in regularly, they might get a decent short RP out of it. Also, end of the night doesn't have to mean end of the adventure. Just be quick to open the chat room the next day, and let the group know the adventure is continuing.

As I said, just a thought.

Heh, Dart you would have fit right in in the old Yahoo chat. Thats exactly what it was, freeform rp in a chatroom. Everything you stated in your post was true for them, and still is for those groups on FR which came from yahoo and sometimes are even older. I think there are several chatrooms already on FR for that express purpose, if only there were people to frequent them.

So, a chat for all people of all kinds? A crossroads then, one that can bridge genre, space and time. The Cliffside has stood for that in the past and can do so again. It has already been partially updated once, last year I believe, to reflect changes to the basis of its reality and can further change now, to allow any to open and all to play. Of course with certain days where it will be open for all those who do not wish to open it alone. Lets see if we cannot breathe life into chat and keep her breathing this time!

I really like the positive thinking here, kudos to all. There're a few things with our chat, as I see it.

Duck mentioned one: spontaneity. People generally need to be willing to make the effort and take the chance to just create a room on the fly and try and play. I can say I've done this myself, the spontaneity thing . . . however it was using IM in Yahoo! Messenger (with transcripts posted here). I should've probably been opening up our FR chat and using that. The reason I didn't (and others may not) is because it's quicker just using Yahoo Messenger. It's a bit of a chore getting into FR, then bringing up the chatroom page, then logging in. Communication is another factor: how does one communicate to another player that you're wanting to chat in FR? Group posts will work, if players read them and look at the Events listing: but that's giving time for people to know. I've tried sending a PM to the odd floating newcomer but it doesn't often work because the player doesn't recognise they have a PM.

The second point I would raise is that sometimes when someone/group is in the chat, no-one joins or comes in. Including myself on the odd occasion. I could say that I'm generally a busy soul and don't have time for it, but that's not really a valid excuse. Are members/guests visiting the site? Definitely. Then I ask myself: are our chatrooms *fun* to use--do they enthuse players to go in there and try things/experiment, is there an allure? I'm not sure what I come back with here: our rooms seem to me to be purely functional, and since they're catering to all groups, there's not much of a personal stamp can be made on them. Maybe that needs to change . . . ? I know certain individuals may also have some kind of aversion to going into chatrooms (much as some players do using forums), but that's maybe more a culture thing.

Recently, I've been mulling over the new BU-RP.com (website down, going live soon) chat system which goes a long way down the freeform path into fantasy, and I wondered if it wouldn't be easier gearing our groups to chat in that/another domain (purely optional): if we were to use another domain of course (IRC, etc.) if could be even more of a chore. However, there is the distinct possibility of our users joining a larger chat user base: which is fundamental for interaction.

But if you guys/gals are willing to try and put life into the chat (and I know Jupy is already active on this) I want to try and make the system work better, so let me know what you think will work and I'll try and pull out the stops.

Well, going out on a limb of a limb, it would be great if people could request notifications for when someone is in chat and FR will send an email or an im or something when that occurs to those who wanted it.

For the chat itself, its pretty good as is (doesn't crash like it used to which is great). It could still use some text customization (more fonts plus Bold/Italics/underline and the ability apply these changes to one part of the text instead of all of it), but thats not critical by any means and really just adds flavor and variety. Along the same lines would be color scheme for window per room / larger images on the side bar and/or images acting as links to group page or map, etc. Just misc. things that aren't important, just aesthetic.

NO WAY am I going to support directing FR users to ANY OTHER SITE for functionality. This website is an incredible machine, and I believe that we have the capability to do anything we think we need. Fantasyrole is the Facebook for Fictional Characters. If we made Chat Access a little simpler - say, putting a huge button on the front pages that says "Chat!" or "Live RP!" that leads straight to it - than I'm sure we could encourage spontaneity.


Also, what is this: !?

Pirates should be feared. Otherwise, no one listens to you and it's just work, work, work.

I'll see what I can do on that front, o' pirate to be feared . . .

Think you can do better then, eh? Try making your own speech bubble at http://wigflip.com/ds/ (it's well smart).

I've drawn up a little list of thing for the chatrooms:

- Index page promotion
- Rich Text tags, with validation [DONE!]
- Themes, more moving imagery (In Progress)
- Welcome Room?
- Group Mod/Admin: Post any chat segment to message board of choosing
- Built-in language translator. New Commands: /drow and /elven

Here're two images from the theme-work in process: I was thinking "Among the Stars" and "Vampire Tavern" at the time:

They look good.... might be interesting to do some freeform rp In the Among the stars setting.... stuff not having much to do with the main plots...