State of the Springing

[sagacious_rage]

So it seems that in the last eight hours or so my personal Formspring situation has gotten worse. The lag between when I send a question and when somebody receives it has shortened from 2 hours to about 1/2 an hour (last time I tested), which is an improvement.

However, I have not received any questions from other players in about 24 hours. I have no idea if they will ever arrive (from what I understand, if they do ever get there, then I am in for QUITE THE SURPRISE as to what exactly Cailan was doing to Laica for all those hours, but I digress).

In addition, starting about eight hours ago, I can no longer answer any questions from my inbox at all. The only questions I've been receiving are the Question of the Day and the random Formspring ones you can generate if your inbox is empty. If I try to answer those, I get an error message. I then have the option to send the question to my followers, and answer it from my feed. But that is an incredibly awkward work around. And it only works if other people answer the question first.

Also, I've noticed that other people do not have the same lag issues that I do. And some people have much worse lag issues.

Over here, scarylady suggested maybe finding other options. I'm of two minds. On the one hand, I really love the cracky anarchy that Formspring seems to inspire. On the other hand, unless they get their act together like, yesterday, it's pretty much impossible to play any sort of coherent story line.

Twitter is an option, though the character limits are much much stricter than Formspring, and even those were a bit restrictive. There's also IRC. Or we could set up a comm on DreamWidth. I'd be willing to mod, though I'd probably need some assistance because of work and the fact that I've never RPed before. (I'm a fast learner, though!)

What do you guys think?

ETA: We now have http://blackcobalt.net:9090/?channels=fade_bar for in-character chatting and http://blackcobalt.net:9090/?channels=f_bOOC for more talk about what to do next. If you're into that sort of thing.

ETA 2: solitae and I are slowly starting to get questions. I just got @KahrinCousland's about going upstairs to lie down and @ReinarHawke's about ordering coffee and how crazy things are. So it looks like we're running about a day behind, give or take. Neither of us can actually answer questions yet, but it's an improvement, right?

ETA 3: ALL SYSTEMS ARE GO

Comments

[solitae]

*rubs temples* I still haven't received ANY questions on Lilian since the downtime, but Pounce seems to get them eventually.

I really like the short and silly nature of things on Formspring, and I like that you can look back to see what's been going on.

Personally, if this lack of functionality continues, I'd prefer IRC or some kind of chat I think. Might lend itself to similar sorts of interactions.

Maybe we should just loosely set up a room somewhere and see if we like it? If not, then start looking into the heavier work of setting up a comm or something else.

[sagacious_rage]

I can set up an IRC room on the server we use for #swooping_is_bad and #biowarebang really easily. Should we just call it #fade_bar or should we actually name the place?

[solitae]

#fade_bar sounds good to me. We can at least use that until we figure out what to do since Formspring HATES us right now.

[sagacious_rage]

http://blackcobalt.net:9090/?channels=fade_bar There you go!

[solitae]

You're the best <3

Man, it's been ages since I've used IRC!

[scarylady]

Thank you for offering this. I had enormous fun.

Philomene working up the courage to approach Fenris literally had me in tears.

[onemorealtmer]

God, it was like being in junior high again. *shudders*

[solitae]

That was hysterical! It was so fun to be able to interact more broadly with characters.

I don't think this is a replacement for Formspring (especially now that it's working), but I do think it'd be fun to play around with from time to time.

[amhran_comhrac]

I'm not getting questions at all, actually. And I can only answer questions by clicking "answer this question" on the main feed. If I try from the questions page I get an error. And that's if I can OPEN the questions page- usually that gives me an error, too.

A dreamwidth comm may actually be the best idea. I could help out. I've never been a DM, but I do have a rather nice dice collection.

[sagacious_rage]

Yeah, that's exactly my situation. It is incredibly frustrating.

I like the idea of a DW comm so long as we're clear that it is pretty much a free-for-all the way Formspring was, like no limits on canon characters (just please some identifying info as to where they're coming from as to avoid confusion) (unless your character is easily confused) (like Laica) (poor @SebastianVael)

[analect]

I've never used IRC, but I could probably pick it up. Going to investigate. Kinda like the idea of a free-for-all comm, I think. I'm not an experienced RPer (or anything-useful-er, frankly), but I am on my arse in front of the computer a lot, so happy to offer anything I can do that might be handy.

[onemorealtmer]

Yes, I'd like to stay free-for-all. My concern about IRC is that you have to be there right at the moment or you're out, whereas Formspring (when it was working) gave what I thought was a perfect amount of time flexibility on responses.

[cave_fatuam]

This.
IRC would be fun for general hilarity, but if you're a crazy person and have a continuing little plot-like-thinger (Oh God! WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME?!?) then you want to be able to come back to it.
I want something that I can go to work and when I come home hop back into things.
So basically, I would like FS, but FS that works. -le sigh-

[sagacious_rage]

I agree. It worked out remarkably well that way. But until we get a comm organized or FS decides to get its act together, you're all welcome. It's better than nothing, I guess.

[cave_fatuam]

Don't get me wrong, I think IRC is a great short term solution, but I think long term we should look into the Dreamwidth comm or something of that nature if we abandon FS. I totally volunteer to draw up the layout graphics if someone else wants to code it this time. ^_^

[solitae]

I'm with you on that. FS working would be ideal :(

[cave_fatuam]

-nod-
Join me in crossing your fingers and wishing on a star.

[solitae]

*wishes lots and lots*

[onemorealtmer]

Hey - we're all perfectly happy that WYWAnders and Tesni have found exhibitionist true love. No one's complaining but their writers. :3

What about something like, um... a mailing list? I know, so old school.

[ouyangdan]

This too.

IRC gives me fits sometimes (and I have to be walked through the set up because I am so very very bad at using it even with the program I use). I like something I can hop in and out of.

Twitter

[https://profiles.google.com/105520290246219802035/about]

You know Twitter is actually a great place to RP. That's where I do my RPing. If you need to go past 140 char there is always Twitlonger.com and Tweetdeck for google chrome that allows long posting.

Re: Twitter

[sagacious_rage]

Is it really different than IRC? I would imagine it would be difficult to do the stories. IDK.

To be perfectly honest I was also feeling like maybe we were crashing y'alls party and was reluctant to do the same thing on Twitter, lol.

[sealcat]

I found IRC is rather difficult for me...

So not one want to try Prurk at all? because you can back track time line, and you can see one whole conversation topic will stay at one place (Every one could join in too). In case someone missed it, you can Re-plurk or link back to it. so actually it is rather useful...

[sagacious_rage]

Link?

[sealcat]

http://www.plurk.com/

[sealcat]

More info: http://www.plurk.com/faq

http://templatize.blogspot.com/2009/04/how-to-plurk-plurk-parts-and-how-to-use.html

At first it might be a bit confuse, but later on you might find it rather easy...

[onemorealtmer]

Yes, link please. I'd give it a look.

[sealcat]

http://www.plurk.com/

My... you guys are so fast!!!!

[sealcat]

Oh and I should include more information...

http://www.plurk.com/faq

http://templatize.blogspot.com/2009/04/how-to-plurk-plurk-parts-and-how-to-use.html

[miri1984]

I have a problem in that I'm RPing a .... LOT of characters. IRC wouldn't be possible for me really because I'd have to log out and in too many times, as would twitter, and even DW to a certain extent. As it is I'm having to twoggle around like a mad thing to catch up on Formspring and that's even WITH the stupid time lag.

I'm assuming things will get better. Saga have you tried emailing Formspring and listing your problems? Perhaps they'll have a suggestion on how to fix it (or fix it themselves, which is what I'm ASSUMING they're trying to do)

[solitae]

I emailed them about my problems last night, and all I got was a form response about the downtime :(

[scarylady]

The IRC allows multiple browser windows logged in as each char. Praise be.

[darkrose]

Also multiple tabs of the same browser, which is nice, except that there's no way to tell which tab is which.

[scarylady]

I memorised left to right: Zev/Aedan/Ali I only cocked it up a couple of times

[visser]

TweetDeck- lets you have multiple accounts, longer posts, and it's EASY to keep track of everything. I know of people with bloody TWELVE ACCOUNTS *cough @Apostate_Anders* that use TweetDeck

[twist_shimmy]

I'm willing to give them a couple more days, especially since the problem is with Amazon and not Formspring. It's not their fault the service is spotty, and when it works, the chaos is delicious. :D

Tesni is missing an entire day of, uh. "questions" still. That had better get fixed, though. DX

[sagacious_rage]

Yeah, that's why I'm thinking IRC as a stop gap and if it's still going by like IDK Tuesday or something look seriously into Plurk and/or a comm

[twist_shimmy]

Agreed. The IRC channel is an awesome idea. Faolan might pop in. I doubt that Tesni will. Which is fine, because she's kind of stuffy anyway. XD

I'm trying to wrap my head around how we'd do this as a comm. The comment crunch issue alone would be a massive con.

RPing it Old Skool

[darkrose]

Back in the day, with Hogwarts Online and The Establishment, we used AIM. Things could get confusing with multiple people in a room, but it had the advantages of being able to set logging, and with Trillian, you could have multiple characters running at once.

In fact, I've just logged in to the long-distance D&D game I've been part of for five years now. Each player has two character windows, plus an OOC chat open. It works surprisingly well.

[dalishstorm]

Seriously, ladies. What is this madness. I am confuse. I can only express my level of confuse with this icon, because I am that guy being killed by cake in the face.

[scarylady]

*nods approvingly* it's a good icon

Suggestion

[darkrose]

Formspring is nice because it's not real time. It sucks because following a conversational thread is somewhere between difficult and impossible, and it's hard to log.

IRC is real time, and it's difficult to follow threads. It's also difficult to tell who you are at a given moment.

If we're really going to do this, a community is probably the way to go. Most of us should have at least a couple of DW codes by now, and it's much easier to follow the back and forth of a conversation and to edit logs into fic.

Re: Suggestion

[sagacious_rage]

You make very good points. However, it is very easy for me to sneak onto IRC and Formspring at work and not so much with a comm.

We could probably do all three and just leave the option so that people can use their preferred methods.