Announcing the new OOC update – sign up to get it first

Last April the game Blue Dwarf had been running for 12 years, the game HMS Sovereign has been running for a year an a half, and next month the game What will be will be… will be 1 year old.

Half of the battle of keeping a successful play-by-post game going for a long time is communicating with other members, and many people have told me that it’s the community around a game that keeps them interested.

Update to character groups

Some updates to a website take a long time and a lot of effort, but there’s not always something obvious when it’s done. This is one of those changes that’s taken a long time, and the advantage isn’t totally obvious straight away. I’ll start by explaining the problem.

Characters can be organised into groups

OngoingWorlds allows you to list all characters on a game’s character page in groups. By default there was a maximum of 10 groups, which wasn’t enough for all games. Another problem was that the order of groups could not be changed, which I’ve now solved by a nice easy drag and drop interface.

Updating the default character groups

I’m currently working on changing the character groups in a game, if you don’t know what these are, look at the character list of any game on OngoingWorlds (for example this one). See how the characters are grouped together? Those are character groups.

Groups will be different for each game, which is why if you create a new scifi game you’ll get a different set of character groups than if you created a fantasy game, although you’ll be able to change these if they’re not suitable to whatever you want.

If you think these default character groups aren’t appropriate or you think they might need changing, now is actually a good chance to speak up and give me some suggestions. This won’t affect existing games, only ones that will be created from now on.

New mobile style

Have you noticed how you use your mobile phone differently to a computer? Because of the small screen of a smartphone, apps usually push content into one narrow column that you can scroll down through.

When I originally created the OngoingWorlds design, I hadn’t thought of this, so never created a mobile specific stylesheet until now.

Chat box added to OngoingWorlds

A few weeks ago I created a poll asking users what feature they would most like to see added to OngoingWorlds. The results were pretty clear and most people wanted an instant chat box.

How to give awards to members of your game

Why not reward the members in your game for taking part, and writing great posts? Some players work really hard to create an interesting storyline, and write great dialogue between characters. It’s time you gave them a little something for their effort!

We’ve been testing a new awards feature that has previously only been available for a very small amount of games. To have the ability to give awards to your members you had to sign up for it here (but now they’re available to everyone!

New feature: Rating member posts

Here’s a new feature that we’ve recently added to OngoingWorlds. There’s nothing better than receiving feedback to help you improve your writing. We’ve added a new feature that allows you to rate other posts to let the author know how good it was.

How to rate posts

When you read through posts in your game written by other members you’ll see 5 stars at the bottom. These will show the current rating for the post, showing the average rating that everyone else has given.

Need an autosave?

One of the features that has been requested to be added into OngoingWorlds is to add an autosave feature for when you’re writing a new post.

Play-by-post or Interactive Storytelling?

When I first started creating the OngoingWorlds website I was faced with many challenges about how to technically build it, but also I had one question which was far more difficult to solve, how do I describe it?

I’ve always been clear in my head what I wanted OngoingWorlds to be. I want it to be a place where a group of people can create a story together. This isn’t an original idea, nor is it unusual. There are thousands of roleplaying games across the internet that people have been playing for years. But everyone seems to call it something different.

Searching for common terminology

One of the most common terms was PBEM, meaning play-by-email, even though the capitalisation of this is not standardised, I created a poll to find out which was the most common way it’s written. This is a term that has existed for a long time, when games were played by email, and before forums existed. Despite this being an accepted term, I decided not to use this term for OngoingWorlds because it’s inaccurate, and anyone just getting into roleplaying might ask what the abbreviation stands for and then get confused when their game isn’t actually played by email at all!

Rewarding your members with awards – sign up to add this to your game

You might have seen the mockups that I’ve put on Facebook already, showing a peek at a new feature in OngoingWorlds that allow moderators to give Awards to their most worthy members.

Give Awards to your members

As  a GM there are times when you might want to reward your members for some really exceptional storywriting, or maybe some good collaboration with another member, or going above and beyond to help out with a group event or competition. These are the times when you might want to give them something to say thanks.

I’ve been rejigging the homepage!

I’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.

How I have been using Facebook to advertise Ongoing Worlds

So 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.

Website Update – Post Summary and Formatting options

I’ve added two great new features to the Ongoing Worlds website this week, as well as fixing a few bugs that were causing problems.

Post Summary

This was something which was inspired by the Yahoo Groups page that I’ve been running my Blue Dwarf game on for over 10 years. A table allows you to see how many posts were submitted each month, and different years will appear on different rows underneath. It’s a great way to see at a glance how long a game has been running for, and how popular it’s been.

If you’re worried that a game might be too involved for you, and has hundreds of posts per month, then you’ll be able to see on this table. Or the opposite, if a game seems to be struggling with only a few posts per month and you want a faster paced experience, you’ll be able to tell by looking at this table.

The post summary, showing posts per month since the game started

This table will show on your game’s homepage, and will only show if you game has more than 20 posts.

OngoingWorlds website has been updated

The latest upgrade of the OngoingWorlds website is really to fix some bugs, and tidy up a few things which were a bit rough around the edges the first time round.

Here’s a list of what’s been changed:

Posts changed to “View Posts”

Not a massive change, but one which I thought was important. When testing the site when I wanted to view the posts that have already been posted, my eyes were scanning the menu down the left for the keyword “view”, but it wasn’t included because I’d tried to be as concise as possible when coming up with names for pages. I’ve decided to change it now to “View Posts” which I think is a lot more intuitive.

New feature: Character tagging in posts

I want to let you know about a new update to the OngoingWorlds website that I’m quite excited about! Now, when you write your post, you can select which characters are in the post. This will show the characters names and thumbnail photos down the right-hand side of the page when you’re reading the post.

I’ve been talking about this feature for months on Twitter and to any interested people who I’ve talked to directly. I even did a blog post back in December, about why this feature is so cool. It’s part of what I want the site to be about, making it easier to see information at a glance. Being able to see a quick snapshot of the characters involved, you’ll quicker be able to see what the post is about.