OngoingWorlds blog

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

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The day OngoingWorlds ate all its bandwidth

Munching bandwidthAs OngoingWorlds gets popular, good and bad things happen. Good things = a great community is forming, great games, great roleplayers, great characters & story. Bad things = more pageviews means we hit the bandwidth limit.

The site went down yesterday, and was replaced with the scary message “Bandwidth Limit Exceeded”. This tbh has been a problem building for a while now, and each month we’ve been getting closer and closer to the limit as the site gets more popular. Read More

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We’ve reached 47%. More donations please!

donate-to-ow

Each month we get closer and closer to hitting the OngoingWorlds website gets closer and closer to its bandwidth limit. It’s now so close that I got an email earlier that we’re at 95%, and with only 4 days remaining we might *just* scrape by.

I’m not complaining of course! Over the last few months and years, OngoingWorlds has got more popular, which is amazing, it’s been great to see it used to create the most amazing roleplaying games. The only problem with increased popularity though is increasing costs! Hosting, traffic, email usage & domain name all have to be paid for. Read More

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The new way to select characters mentioned in a post

Select a character is now easierHere’s an update that was originally asked for by Phantasmagoria, who a while ago asked in our Facebook group for a better ways to select characters mentioned in a post. The problem was, that games with too many characters got too difficult to select them from a drop-down box. Read More

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Add your Facebook & Twitter URLs to OngoingWorlds

Social iconsHere’s a very simple addition to OngoingWorlds that we’ve added this week, social icons on your profile.

Adding your Facebook or twitter allows an easy way for your fellow roleplayers and OngoingWorlds members to contact you.

To get a link to your Twitter or Facebook account, simply edit your profile and add the URL for your public profile. For Twitter this will be your username (but don’t add the @). For Facebook this will be your username, and the URL in your browser’s address bar when you click on your own profile. Read More

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10 roleplayers to watch on YouTube

Kim from RPRepository

Gorgeous Kim, the creator and site admin of RPRepository often uploads videos for her community like the “Epic Anniversary Adventure”, created using 3D animation software, and voiced by her members. You can see Kim herself do wacky things like stick her face in a cake (no joke!), or even bellydance for the Geek & Sundry vlogger contest.

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Writing character death scenes in roleplay

Grim reapers drinking tea

I’ve asked a few people recently about their experience of the killing off characters in their roleplay, and have got some great snippets which I’ll publish here on the blog. I know it’s a morbid topic, but quite an interesting one! Read More

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Is it wrong to RP a relationship, when you are in a relationship yourself?

This question was first asked in our Facebook group, where it provoked an interesting discussion. It was such a great topic that I copied it over to RPG-Directory and asked the roleplayers there too, who are a very vocal bunch of mostly forum roleplayers.

Chris, who plays Phil in Blue Dwarf replied first with:

184498_10151691127821967_1346191233_nI don’t think so, otherwise authors etc would never be able to write about relationships if they where in one, same for actors in films – as long as it was open and not explicit then there is not a problem – The problem only arises if the person doing the writing has problems distinguishing between the *characters* relationship and the *players/actors* and thinking they are the same person. Read More

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RPG Rating: Provide a standard rating for your game

RPG ratingA while ago I asked Sarah Carney the creator of the RPG Rating system for an interview. Because I’m an idiot I forgot to publish the article, & it wasn’t until Sarah emailed me a year later (almost on the exact same date – freaky!) that I realised I hadn’t published it. So here’s the interview!

To give you a bit of background info, RPG Rating is a universal rating system which comes as a little graphic you can add to your site to display the levels of bad language, sexual content or violence the game allows. Sarah’s created a snazzy website at rpgrating.com where you answer a few simple questions and can get your own graphic. Read More

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Disown & adopt characters

Part of the updates I worked on last weekend included improvements to the way characters can be “disowned” and “adopted”. Read More

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OWCH awarded to Jack Tennant & other awards

The OWCH awardI’m proud to announce that I’m awarding the OWCH award (OngoingWorlds community honour) to Jack Tennant, for being an awesome member in Blue Dwarf and for going “above and beyond” being just a member of a roleplaying game. For months Jack has been recording the Blue Dwarf story into an audio podcast, a task which isn’t as easy as it sounds. it takes careful planning, organisation, practice, a talent for recording your voice and… well… the guts to record your voice in the first place! Believe me it does take guts, and I’m almost an emotional wreck when I record things like the how-to Youtube videos. Read More