Official Announcement regarding changes to conversations (private messages)

Kelp said:
I suppose I should begin by asking what makes you use conversations so much and why use them for activities like roleplay rather than using an open thread? This is something that I and im sure my peers are interested in hearing about.
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I use convos often to speak to people who I have grown close to in a more secure environment. I also am able to talk to people here that aren’t able to use other sites.
Esther said:
As for this, while I can't quite say much about the roleplay part specifically, many people in the roleplaying community often use conversations for planning things privately, or for showing work-in-progress characters or lore with only people they feel comfortable showing it to before it's finished.
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This sums up what I do concerning roleplays in convos.

And while I have done actual roleplay in convos I prefer threads as they feel more accessible and slightly better organized.
 
Got so many friends I want to keep in touch with...

Grown close to multiple on here, some of which I can't exactly reach anywhere else..

There's also important lore I don't want to have to remake...

...

But I suppose sometimes things we gotta kinda just deal with.
 
When you take the time to think about it, the old convo max was 16.

I was in 3-4 convos that were that big easily, if not beyond that. They each had several thousand, if not tens of thousands of, messages..

I just wonder if all of this being taken away and affecting.. what I’d assume is a significant group of actually active forums members.. is going to be detrimental.
 
Niko from GUNshot! said:
I just wonder if all of this being taken away and affecting.. what I’d assume is a significant group of actually active forums members.. is going to be detrimental.
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I feel like it will be, personally. And I'm someone who mostly stays on the public side of the forums, with only a few actively used convos.

An individual message limit, while likely a better option than a global one, could possibly lead to people reaching that limit and just... making a new convo with the same people. The only other idea I would have is to limit the amount of convos any one user can be in at one time, but I'm not sure how well that would work?
 
Esther said:
Honest opinion from me: It's the opposite. Having small groups that share interests is better than having one large group that barely understands each other, and at times people in large groups just won't get along, while those same people talking to each other with nobody else in the room might get along really well because there's no other people causing stress for the two.
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Having conversations with small groups of people that you get along with is what they are for, yes. I do completely agree there, but in the general forum I'd like to believe that every useris capable of ignoring those they don't get along with or not responding to any provocations - Mutual respect, if you will. If that fails there's always the block option. Conversations should not be a way to "avoid and exclude others" in my opinion that is quite different from the previous mentioned usage.
Esther said:
As for this, while I can't quite say much about the roleplay part specifically, many people in the roleplaying community often use conversations for planning things privately, or for showing work-in-progress characters or lore with only people they feel comfortable showing it to before it's finished. And while this next part doesn't apply to me, sometimes I'd assume people do roleplay stuff in a conversation because it's more personal and not something they need other people seeing, or something they know another person is very uncomfortable with seeing at all, in which case it's just better to move it to a place where that other person doesn't have to look at it, preventing them from being too affected by it.
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Yeah, I do imagine that coversations are great for sharing WIP of characters, coordinating and discussing specifics of future plans that you might not want the rest of the Roleplay Thread to be aware of, or just simply not to derail it and from that view 15,000 seems like a fairly respectable count, there should be pleny of room for private converstions as well but it seems that's not the case for some people.
In the case that they feel uncomfortable about roleplaying in public I can understand shifting to conversations and this is when I can understand that the 15,000 limit may impact a user, however 15,000 messages is still around 750 pages. Most roleplay threads don't have this many posts but yes, there are a number that have considerably more but that should be expected from a thread accessible to anyone. For you to hit the message limit we have put on conversations there would have to be a total of 750~ pages between them all and thats really quite a lot - Most threads don't even have nearly that many and often become inactive.. I would expect the same from conversations.

Once again I would really like to believe that users can feel comfortable on this forum, even when roleplaying. If someone is being a jerk because they don't like your roleplay or think its "cringe" or whatever then users should absolutely report or approach staff to resolve the situation.
If its something so divergent from the rest of the roleplay on the forum then it may even be in their interest to roleplay somewhere else entirely rather than here. We try to be as inclusive as possible to roleplay but we aren't a roleplay forum.

I do apologise for my slow reply.
Niko from GUNshot! said:
… is the roleplay section next?
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No, we are not going to be removing roleplay threads.
 
Kelp said:
Once again I would really like to believe that users can feel comfortable on this forum, even when roleplaying. If someone is being a jerk because they don't like your roleplay or think its "cringe" or whatever then users should absolutely report or approach staff to resolve the situation.
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It's not always because it's "cringe" or things like that though. I for example would probably ask people to move detailed transformation descriptions to a convo because those can, at times, make me really uncomfortable, despite it being completely acceptable and others being okay with it. I don't want people to stop doing it just because I get nervous from seeing it, I'd rather have them move it to a convo, handle the detail away from my view, then come back and just say "okay this character's a dragon now" so we can all continue without anyone feeling bad.

I'm too tired to really properly read or answer the rest sadly.
The Entity's Reflection said:
like i can see how some people could use convos to avoid the rules since mods can’t see them but pretty much everyone on the forums that have friends they want to talk to privately got caught in the crossfire of this
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This, too. If anything it should be made clear that convos are not a place to get away with things that aren't allowed, and that rule-breaking things in convos should still be reported same as in a public thread.
 
Claire Is Memed🌳 said:
Why I do roleplaying in convos is that I prefer doing rping privately instead of publicly as I'd have to read all the 300+ pages of the public RP to understand what's happening and mixing posts with ooc and ic gets way to confusing for me to understand

But the main reason I use convos is having private chats with friends especially since some of the things I say in convos are quite private and are to do with what is happening in my life ATM and sometimes that is not acceptable to be told in a public place as it would get me perma banned as I'm on the whole last chance thing

Limiting it the number of messages basically locks me out of talking to 90% of my friends as most of them don't have other means of communication or are only online on them at 4am for me
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I understand the importance of talking to friends in private, especially when it concerns private details... but perhaps if the contents of your discussions are in breach of the forum rules then you should probably take them off-forum as yes, they do violate the forum rules even in conversations. There are multiple other services you could use to circumvent this without putting your accounts status at risk, Steam and Discord being the largest and most accesible ones.
But to speak strictly in terms of data, 15,000 messages really should be quite enough for you to discuss private matters and engage in small RP groups. At least from our observations.
 
Esther said:
This, too. If anything it should be made clear that convos are not a place to get away with things that aren't allowed, and that rule-breaking things in convos should still be reported same as in a public thread.
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and yeah that’s why the report button exists in convos, so you can report things that break the rules. pretty sure mods can’t see convos either way and need details to issue a proper warning though
 
...I understand I shouldn't be here. But I feel the need to make my opinion, at least.

I can understand the reasoning behind this. I do, honestly. But as someone who is in arguably some of the biggest convos... the message limit feels extremely arbitrary.

The people who can be in them? That I honestly can accept. Makes sense, and the reasoning adds up. 👍 all around.

But having such a hard floodgate in message counts just means that people aren't going to use it as much. I get its a minority of people who are affected, but do we really get that little impact on this? As you said, it's not going to actually  affect a majority, so this feels a very targeted response to a worry i have not seen. Am i saying it can't happen? No, absolutely not. But what i  am saying is that the forums is full of the genuinely kindest people I've met, who I doubt even considered doing that. Personally I'm now losing out on conversations with several people I need to keep a 1 on 1 with, and I can't do anything but watch.

I doubt my message will change anything. You've said that this decision was a long time in the making, and I believe that. I still think this was made in a genuine attempt at preventing a honest concern. But I ask, if nothing else, to view it from the other side of the fence. Because from my position, this just ruins a lot of things.
 
Esther said:
It's not always because it's "cringe" or things like that though. I for example would probably ask people to move detailed transformation descriptions to a convo because those can, at times, make me really uncomfortable, despite it being completely acceptable and others being okay with it. I don't want people to stop doing it just because I get nervous from seeing it, I'd rather have them move it to a convo, handle the detail away from my view, then come back and just say "okay this character's a dragon now" so we can all continue without anyone feeling bad.
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This is understandable, I've no idea how detailed these things could get but surely it couldn't be more than 10% of the entire roleplay threads post count?
To put this into perspective one of the largest roleplay threads has 7600 pages, thats around 152,000 posts. Given this would be an optional, opt-in conversation for those that want to see such details it would really need to be quite active to impact your conversation limit.

Anyway, I feel like I have a sufficient grasp on the impacts to roleplay this could have and will take it into consideration. My thoughts remain mostly unchanged but I at least have food for thought. The roleplay thread I mentioned that has 7600 pages far surpasses practically every other roleplay thread in terms of post count, I could definitely see a conversation detailing future paths, detail character transformations and info etc potentially impacting the Conversation limit significantly but that is very much a stand-out case as most threads rarely reach the triple digit pages, though there are a few.

Thank you for taking the time to talk to me regarding this.

I'm still open to more if you have things to say, but for now I'm going to try to focus my thoughts a little. Roleplay is not really "the reason" that we've done this but does play a part.
 
Kelp said:
I understand the importance of talking to friends in private, especially when it concerns private details... but perhaps if the contents of your discussions are in breach of the forum rules then you should probably take them off-forum as yes, they do violate the forum rules even in conversations. There are multiple other services you could use to circumvent this without putting your accounts status at risk, Steam and Discord being the largest and most accesible ones.
But to speak strictly in terms of data, 15,000 messages really should be quite enough for you to discuss private matters and engage in small RP groups. At least from our observations.
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I've said this before
Even in that message
I can't use other platforms with them
It's not that it breaks forum rules in what im telling them it's just normally things about depression or sh or things that I'm not allowed to post about in public here

(Istg If this post gets me perma banned)
 
I don’t want to come off as snarky or mean either, but…

These convos have represented many hours, if not days, of our typing, our ideas, heart to heart conversations, laughter, and maybe even just stupid :red:. Ripping all of that away just in terms of “moderation parameters” and whatever other reasons you’ve deemed important is just.. honestly pointless.

Part of what made convos fun was the fact you realized a mod WASN’T going to be breathing down your neck every time you posted. Not in the sense that “oh I can post naughty things and slander people hahahahahha” but in the sense that you can loosen up a bit and not get in trouble. It goes from business casual around the forums where the public can see to at home casual in a convo where you can be a little bit raunchy, or make that joke that might make someone mad.

If people had problems with feeling awkward or seeing something that was going too far, it’s not like they can’t report it. The fact that, at least in the convos I was in, and as far as I know, nothing was reported, and we did make some kind-of raunchy jokes, is just proof that some people on here want to be able to do that, but may be afraid to in the public eye.

There’s the whole facet of secretive roleplay discussions, heart to heart conversations with DIFFICULT topics, and then the facets of.. just wanting to chat with a select group of people easily.. but people have discussed all of that well enough.

I doubt that my rambling will change anything, but all this is just to say that I’m pretty disappointed.. and I think a lot of my “minority of users” friend group would agree with me.

Oh.. and some of us can’t get discord or just “migrate elsewhere”, if that idea is going to be brought up. This is it for some of us.

Edit:

It seems like you’re trying to childproof a website that’s used by people other than children at times..
 
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