First Christmas Post on Roleplay Republic

I'm a little incredulous that this is the first time I've thought to make a Christmas post specifically in Roleplay Republic since it was first launched on December 4, 2012. I suppose I figured all of you came from Asianfanfics and already see my stuff on there anyway but I've been proven wrong and have met a few of you who hadn't heard of AFF before RPR.

I originally made Roleplay Republic because I noticed all of the roleplays on AFF and I thought "AFF is a pretty ty platform to roleplay on. It just isn't built for it. I want to make something better just for roleplays." So I gathered a few roleplayers from AFF then kept the best beta testers from that already small minority (so good at testing and reporting properly that I still remember them) and we built Roleplay Republic together from scratch out of their unique requirements. Asianfanfics version 1 was admittedly easy enough to make mostly because the idea was already there (post a story on the internet... ooohh). It took a week for me to code the thing then released it on a Sunday. It took me a month to make RPR from having to go back and forth with the beta testers to build something I hadn't had seen before. Not to mention, as little as I knew about fanfics back then, I knew absolutely nothing about roleplays.

Just like with AFF, I thought I was done. Mission accomplished. Got my focus back on AFF, then life stuff happened, and RPR fell by the wayside for a while. I don't really remember what got me started working on RPR again. I think someone PMed me on AFF and pleaded with me about getting more features for RPR. I logged back in to realize that there's a real community here. It's not just an AFF offshoot with the same people on both sides but it's now its own independent entity. In fact, it reminded me of how AFF first started out: small, tightknit, and for the most part, people got along. I worked to try to make AFF get that small community feel back but it's tremendously hard with nearly two million users. RPR has it, here and now, so I wanted to work on it to make sure it kept it.

For months, I did work on it. I fixed a TON of glitches, people got avatars, character multi-tagging, and I think people liked them. A lot of it was truly thankless work though. The server was going down since it could no longer handle RPR, so I needed to get more servers then upgrade both the code and the database at the same time to take advantage of it. That's not the sort of thing anyone notices. At best, I'd just get more complaints about RPR being glitchy or down for a few minutes because I have to bring parts of the system down every now and then to upgrade something. I had to stop reading random posts because it would just go downhill from there.

It might have been fine if I had a partner or coworker or something to spread the misery around but solo? It was truly exhausting. Then I saw the padlet yesterday that some of you wrote in and I got to meet the community I had been working for months for. I get so busy that I don't really get to interact with any of you and when I do, it usually results in more work to do. So I really appreciate it. That wall of posts probably meant more to me than any of you thought it would. Thanks to all of you for being here and I hope to see you guys around again next year. Merry Christmas!