My intention with this hub was to crack down on two major issues I have noticed when looking at the comments of our discussion on roleplaying, those being not knowing what the literacy of said roleplays are and the quantity of public roleplay chats. In doing this, I was hoping to cut down on both issues. Let me explain my rationale as to why I thought both of these issues would be fixed.

To my first point of literacy: Think about posts you would see on latest feed asking if anyone wants to RP with no or little direction whatsoever. People have expressed that they dislike seeing these sorts of posts as they don’t know what they are getting into and most of these aren’t the literary level they desire. It is laid out very clearly in each comment that is allowed on this hub what level the roleplay is, what sort of roleplay it is, and you can see if the plot interests you any. Think of this as shifting all of the posts you see on latest feed asking to RP and all of the public chats with little to no direction into one comment on one blog and with more detail than normal. Because it is in this location, and not the latest feed, more people will find it if they have a specific place to look and they are looking to RP. I see this as beneficial.

To my second point of the excess of public chats: I am very well aware of the limitations that an all private chat system has. I elaborated on this a bit in my guideline changes post: “...we understand that by making these roleplays private, we cannot easily moderate them. This is why we are relying on the community to have open communication with the moderation team in regards to problems you may be seeing in not only these private roleplays, but any problem in general. This requires that you are more open with the idea of pming us when you see an issue. We hope that with this new policy, you are more open to discussing any issues with broken guidelines that a chat may have.” I’ll return to this point later. With this being said, I have never in my time on Amino here have reported or have seen a dead chat reported to me. I have seen a fair bit of complaints telling us about how we should just disable the dead chats here. That’s all fine and dandy, but I’ve never once seen someone report one to me or any of the moderation team, probably because there is nobody in the dead chat to relay the message of the chat being dead (kind of a who delivers the mailman’s mail problem but in reverse). We also aren’t going to scroll up in all of the public chats and determine which ones are dead and disable them, as we have a lot more to do than disable chats that don’t go against guidelines anyways, as being inactive isn’t a good reason to be disabled and you would normally just leave a dead chat without asking it to be taken down. So how you compromise the community’s desire to see less public chats with our desire to not disable chats that nobody reports and that we don’t want to wrongly disable? One of two ways. Either condense them into one public chat or have everyone make their own private chats.

This is why I agree that a public chat alongside private chats would be ideal, but I had my doubts about implementing just one public chat.

The problems I foresaw with a public chat is that it would be too cluttered and too limited in scope. The chat limit of 1,000 would easily be reached, and unfortunately we cannot fit everyone on Amino into this chat if there is constant activity and this is the only source of roleplay. This is also a nightmare to moderate. 1,000 different people all active in the same chat because it’s the only place they can do what they like makes messages fly by very fast. It would take someone constantly on watch to even begin to properly moderate. Not to mention that we can’t really force everyone to enjoy the one topic we have decided as a chat to roleplay as.

This is why I had decided on the later option. Everyone can moderate their own chats and not come to just one. They can have their own topics, their own plot, things that we should not be controlling anyways if they are not inappropriate. They also have the preference of literacy, returning to my former point.

Now to come back to the problems of communication. A theme that I have been pushing hard for as leader is communication between the members and the moderators. People have expressed that now it is easier to get away with breaking guidelines because who on the mod team can moderate a private chat? Not anybody that you don’t invite. Now what is the solution to people breaking guidelines in your chat or any chat that you are in?

It is the same as it always has been. You have to talk to us. I am very well aware there are some people who have commited wrong in private. I had to deal with a situation like that in my first week of being leader. If you see something wrong, it is okay to talk to us.

You guys communicated to me that this was a solution that you wanted, and I had done my best to understand the situation and provide something for you guys.

I hope my views are crystal clear, and if you have any questions, let me know.