OngoingWorlds blog

News & articles about play-by-post games, for roleplayers & writers

Jan
7

By

I've been rejigging the homepage!

Category: Website Improvements Tags: , Leave a Comment

OngoingWorlds homepageI’ve been rejigging the Ongoing Worlds website to:

  • Help make it clearer what the site is about
  • Help people find a game easier
  • More easily show the features of the site

Things changed on the homepage

You might have seen the mockup I created and added to Facebook last month showing these changes. I wanted to get approval from users before implementing them.

  • The freetype search has been removed, looking in the website analytics showed that this wasn’t used very much, so I’ve removed it for now. One possible reason it wasn’t used is that new users might not know what to search for, so would rather pick from a list, and members might navigate to their game from their ‘My Profile’ page, which lists all the games they’re a member of.
    The search will probably return at some point as I believe it’s common practise to include a search in the top right of your website, and removing this might frustrate some people. But for now I wanted to remove it to make the other options clearer.
  • The ‘Want to join a game?’ option is now at the top, this is a dropdown box of game categories. If users are thinking about joining a game or want to see games on the site, they can see all games of a category by selecting them here. Read More

Jan
4

By

How I have been using Facebook to advertise Ongoing Worlds

Category: Advertising your game, OngoingWorlds site news, Website Improvements Tags: 2 Comments

Ongoingworlds facebook pageSo I’ve created this website called Ongoing Worlds. I think it’s pretty cool but I got to the point after I’ve put it live to the internet where I realised it’s missing something. Members! So I had to go about getting people to use the thing, quite nervously biting my nails because I’ve put so much effort into building that site that I really don’t want it all to be wasted if nobody likes it.

With Facebook dominating the news lately as the most popular social network in the world, I had to at least consider it as a way to promote the website. I’m a keen user of Facebook anyway to chat to my friends, but I didn’t really have a lot of friends on there that were roleplayers.
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Dec
30

By

5 ways to advertise your roleplaying game

Category: Advertising your game Tags: , 3 Comments

join my play-by-post game

Often it’s very difficult to advertise your roleplaying game. Lots of new games are created every week, so there’s a lot of competition. What you have to do is advertise your games to get new members, but this is quite difficult. It’s most likely that you don’t want to spend any money on advertising, so it’s not like you’re going to pay for a large billboard to advertise your game, and even if you did you probably wouldn’t be hitting the right audience, roleplayers.

What you want to do is make sure that when you do advertise your game, you’re doing it to the right people.

Here are some ways you can advertise your game and make sure you’re showing it to the right people:

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Dec
14

By

What to do when your Facebook roleplaying account is deleted

Category: non-PBP roleplaying Tags: 11 Comments

Facebook logo in a coffinFacebook can decide whether your roleplaying character lives or dies.

Facebook doesn’t like roleplayers, and if it sees that you have a separate account that you use for roleplaying, your account might be deleted. I’ve written about the reasons why in this post. One of the roleplayers I heard about being deleted was Fleet Admiral Michael Knight, roleplaying as a Star Trek character. He had to recreate his profile.

Michael Knight on FacebookI made up a new e-mail address and then a new profile. Luckily i am friends with a few RP people in RL so they re added me and told other people to add me. was quite easy really. but was a pain in the butt having to make up a new profile.
FltAdm Michael Knight on Facebook

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Dec
9

By

Facebook hates roleplayers

Category: non-PBP roleplaying Tags: 46 Comments

no roleplaying allowed on facebook

In a recent article I explained how you can use Facebook for roleplaying. You can create a new profile for your character and post to your own wall and other people’s walls as your character, speaking as if you are the character updating their own Facebook account.

But roleplaying is something that Facebook doesn’t like.

Vice-Admiral KirkI just personally feel that Facebook doesn’t like our Hobby shall we say. It is a means of escaping real life pressures but facebook won’t allow us to do that.

Vice Admiral James T Kirk on Facebook

Facebook might delete you

That’s right, if you don’t use Facebook the way they intend for you to use it, your account might be deleted. If that happens, there’s no way to get it back. All you messages are deleted, all your wall posts deleted, all your friend connections, all your photos, all your Farmville scores are all deleted.

I’ve seen it happen. I’ve experimented recently with having a separate roleplaying account for Facebook and made some connections with other roleplayers. At least once a week I heard that someone’s account had been deleted, and they’d had to create a new account.

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Dec
5

By

#Multiverse IRC event will be back next year

Category: non-PBP roleplaying Tags: , 1 Comment

A few weeks ago I wrote an article about the 4 day IRC event called #Multiverse. The event was to bring the IRC roleplaying community together and to grow it.

The community you see on DarkMyst is the best collaboration and community of players that many have ever seen amongst IRC role-playing community.

It’s an amazing group of talented and friendly people. Bringing folks together and creating the effort that you see was risky and an incredible challenge to do but it has worked out quite well and has been part of a massive and on-going plan to bring renewed interest and growth to the community.

Ryan, Network Coordinator, DarkMyst IRC Network

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Dec
4

By

Using Facebook for roleplaying

Category: Play-by-post discussion Tags: 14 Comments

Facebook logoMany people use Facebook as a place to roleplay as a character. Facebook is one of the most advanced websites for keeping in touch with your friends and allows you to post regular updates that your friends can see and comment on. There’s great potential here for roleplaying as a character, but there’s also some really annoying limitations, the main being that Facebook really don’t like roleplayers and might remove your profile.

Roleplay your character’s social life

In other forms of roleplayign you might be used to playing the part of a character to create a story, or complete a campaign. Facebook is a lot more social, and you can really assume the role of your character and interact with other people as if you’re acting out your character’s social life.

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Nov
19

By

I've created a new game, now what?

Category: OngoingWorlds guide Tags: , , , , 1 Comment

So you’ve just created a new game, given it a title and a description (if not, go back and see my article “How to create a game in Ongoing Worlds”). And you might be wondering what you have to do next. Your game is merely skin and bones, and you need to do a few things to flesh it out, by adding an image, some initial characters, and develop the story by writing some posts. You’ll probably want to do either of these things next, but you can do them in any order.

Brand new game

Add an image to your game

The image will display on your game’s homepage, next to the description you’ve already written. This image will be shown on the “All Games” page so make sure it’s inviting to the kind of people who you want to join your game. Click “Edit this image” under the default image and choose an image from your computer.

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Nov
16

By

How to create a game on OngoingWorlds

Category: OngoingWorlds guide Tags: 2 Comments

Ever wanted to run your own roleplaying game? There are many ways you can run your game, either using a forum, or creating an email newsgroup, or using a Yahoo Group.

Use OngoingWorlds!

OngoingWorlds has been specifically created for roleplaying games, so it’s better than trying to get a forum or Yahoo Group to do something it wasn’t intended for.

With Ongoing Worlds, you’ll be able to approve pending members with a simple click, and this will automatically put their character profile into the Character List. Also as a Moderator, you’ll be able to edit the questions that you ask new members when they apply to join.

Create a game

On the Ongoing Worlds website, click “Create Game” at the top.

Click create game

Login or Register first

You need to login for the next step. If you already have an account login with your username and password. If you’re a new user, click register now.

You’ll now be taken to the New Game page

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Nov
12

By

4 day IRC roleplaying event #multiverse

Category: non-PBP roleplaying Tags: , , 1 Comment

If you’re a roleplayer and use IRC, you might be interested in an event happening this week called #Multiverse. The event starts on 11th November and lasts for four days. Players from across many IRC networks and communities are invited to participate.

portal to another world

I asked Ryan from DarkMyst about the event and got this reply. As the event has already started, I’m just going to paste his reply below:

One of DarkMyst’s primary areas of focus right now is to bring the IRC role-playing community together and grow it. I am incredibly passionate about this and it’s become my personal mission to ensure its success. With the decline of IRC role-playing over the years and the struggles that it has faced, we have an opportunity to make a play to reinvigorate this wonderful community and bring folks together. That’s why #RPG-Hub was started – to make it easy for a new player to jump in, socialize with like-minded individuals, and find a game on DarkMyst that’s perfect for them. We do extensive advertising to promote the network and community on creative writing and role-playing websites, we are ranked top on Google for hundreds of text-based and IRC role-playing related keywords, and have an easy-to-use website that focuses on new players and bringing them into the community. The work that’s been put into things and the end result you see is a culmination of years of progress, and it’s starting to be noticed across the creative writing and role-playing communities.

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