How It Works

Why Join?

For Roleplayers: Instead of having to register multiple accounts to play as different characters, you can play as any number of characters here using one account. The site organizes which characters you are playing as and which roleplays you are a part of so you never have to mess around with having multiple logins. If participating in multiple roleplays, you will also be alerted for each new message posted in every roleplay you are taking part in.

For Admins: If you create your own roleplays, there are a number of administration tools available for you. You get to choose the characters for your roleplay and organize them into groups while ensuring that only people you allow in through the application process can participate. You can also set the number of days that a character hasn't posted until they are considered inactive and the system will let you know when they are. Admins can also tell the total number of posts a character has made as well as their overall activity through the activity points system (explained in FAQ) all of which making activity checks much easier. You are also able to have private rooms to discuss roleplay ideas with four other of your designated co-admins.

Examples
Masterlist of Characters (Create your own roleplay to see administration features)
List of open characters available (Feel free to apply to any of these characters and test things out)
Roleplay Room for characters to interact in (Create your own roleplay to designate private admin rooms)
Sample Character Profile (Participate in a roleplay to update character settings)

But the best way to know if this is the right place for you is to join and make test roleplays of your own and find out what you can do! If you have a cool feature you'd like to see here, let me know by posting it on my wall (Nichiren)!

How It Works

Troubleshooting

Other Questions

Tips for Layouts

Roleplay Republic V2


Q: How do you participate in a roleplay?

A: If someone wanted to join a roleplay, a prospective roleplayer would go to the roleplay's Masterlist and apply for any open character indicated by green font by clicking on the APPLY link. An applicant can write anything in their application.

After a prospective roleplayer has applied to an open character, the admins get a notification of a new applicant and they can accept or ignore the application. If the admin accepts, the new roleplayer can then be able to participate as their character in the roleplay's rooms as well as converse with the roleplay's other characters. Note that admins also need to apply to their own characters in order to participate but you can simply approve yourselves.

Also remember that a roleplayer can play as several characters at once so you don't need to register multiple accounts.

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Q: What are "characters"?

A: Admins can assign roleplayers to characters that they create. Let's say that you have a Harry Potter roleplay. Admins can create the "Harry", "Hermione", and "Malfoy" characters that will be in open status when first created. People can then apply for these characters and the admins can choose to accept their applications.

Once a roleplayer owns a character, the roleplayer can then edit their character's descriptions and settings, customize their character's profile, and participate in the various roleplay rooms of that character's roleplay. Only people with accepted characters for that roleplay can participate in the roleplay rooms but anyone can make comments in the roleplay's comments section. Roleplayers have the freedom to leave their characters to let someone else take over or an admin can reassign the character.

For admins, you can create characters by going to the masterlist section of your roleplay. You can quickly create any number of characters by separating each character name with a comma.

For roleplayers, simply apply for a character in the masterlist of the roleplay you want to participate in. Applying for a character will let the admin know that you are interested in playing as that character. Note that a roleplayer can play as many characters as they would like to apply to in as many roleplays they would like to participate in.

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Q: What are activity points?

A: Characters will earn 1 point per post that they make in the roleplay rooms. It's a measure of how active a roleplayer has been. Admins can also reward points to their roleplayers if they are playing any sort of games or challenges. User profiles also earn 10 activity points every 24 hours since their last post using any character they own and is a good measure of someone's lifetime activity. In the future, activity points can be used to purchase items that the admin can assign for purchase within the roleplay.

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Q: What's "days inactive"?

A: You can set the length of time when a roleplayer hasn't participated in your roleplay when they are considered inactive. So if a roleplayer hasn't posted a message in 5 days, the system will indicate which character hasn't been participating. This keeps you from having to do spot checks all the time.

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Q: What are roleplay rooms?

A: Roleplay rooms are the various open areas in a roleplay where all the characters in a roleplay can interact. Roleplay room participation is restricted only to that roleplay's characters so a roleplayer must be assigned a character first before participating. A roleplay can have multiple public and private admin-only rooms. Think of these as chat rooms that only assigned characters can participate in.

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Q: What does it mean when a room has an orange color in the sidebar?

A: These are the rooms which have had the latest activity (newest posts) in the last 5 minutes which helps determine currently active rooms.

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Q: I made a roleplay but I can't find it anywhere.

A: You first need to ensure that your roleplay has characters since RPs are not listed without them. Also, don't look for your roleplay in the latest active section since that section only shows roleplays with the most active roleplay rooms (if you're RP is brand new, obviously you have no posts to your rooms yet). Try looking for your newly created roleplay in the newest or the alphabetical sections.

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Q: What will happen to the roleplays on AFF?

A: Nothing would happen to them. RoleplayRepublic was created to make roleplaying easier. If you guys don't find that it does that, then you can stay in AFF.

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Q: Why was RoleplayRepublic created if there are already roleplays on AFF?

A: I wanted to make roleplaying easier on everyone. I saw that there were problems with making sure that roleplayers stayed active, other people disturbing roleplays, etc. This system has a lot of stuff built in to help admins actually have more time to participate in roleplays rather than keep having to maintain them. The system is also designed to help roleplayers keep track of all of the roleplays and characters that they participate in. RoleplayRepublic will continuously evolve as long as someone finds it useful.

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Q: Why are my words being censored?

A: The bad word filter is only in place in the non-rated rooms.

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Q: What is the stylesheet used for RPR?

A: Stylesheet

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Q: How can I build robust layouts that can endure a stylesheet change?

A: The primary way to ensure that your layouts survive any site style changes is to specify styles within your markup yourself and not depend on the site defaults. For example, say that you like the font "Helvetica Neue" which happens to be the site default so you decide not to have to specify it in your layout. A few days later, "Helvetica Neue" changes to "Arial" and now your layout uses Arial. To ensure that your layout is protected from changes like this add the "Helvetica Neue" style to your tags. If only certain paragraphs use "Helvetica Neue" then do <p style="font-family:Helvetica Neue"></p>. If your entire layout uses "Helvetica Neue" then wrap your entire layout with a div and do <div style="font-family:Helvetica Neue">[your layout]</div>.

The usual culprits in layout breakage tend to be line-height, width, margin, and padding. For example, the default line-height for RPR v1 was 1.5em (which was actually an incorrect way of doing it). The new default for RPR v2 is simply 1.5. This will most likely not change in the future since it's a standard but if you want to safeguard against it anyway, wrap your layout in a div and add the "line-height:1.5" style to it. The main takeaway is that the more the layout details are specified to be less reliant on the site defaults, the more that layout will be protected from future changes. Note that multiple elements can have different values where "ul" elements can have different margins from "p" elements so ensure you specify styles for separate elements.

In regards to widths, I do suggest that layout coders learn to use percentages (e.g. width:100%) and to learn to design layouts that will look good on both desktops and mobile screens (usually around 320px width). Most site visitors these days are on mobiles and it is bad form to make your visitors scroll horizontally to see your content. When it comes to specifying sizes, I also recommend em rather than px so that your text and content can adjust itself based on the visitor's viewing preferences. We are not a layout site so it's not our primary focus and are unable to provide further advice on code markup but if you want to learn more about how to layout modern responsive sites, check out this tutorial at w3schools or learn more about css layouts.

Lastly, don't use the toolbar editor if you actually want a layout that is fully in your control and within your understanding. Toolbar editors were meant for publishing text articles and aren't great for making complex layouts since they tend to generate sloppy and verbose code. You're better off going into source mode and specifying your styles yourself. If you want to experiment on your markup and understand the underlying styles of your elements quickly, use Chrome's inspect element feature or get Firefox's Firebug extension.

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Q: What's new for version 2?

A: Version 2 uses a new responsive design framework for the platform UI to better render on mobile devices. The new platform also fixes multiple issues for major and minor problems found on the old platform.

Shortlist of changes
  • Completely redesigned to be mobile-friendly
  • Fixed bad login sessions (if you were having login problems before, the new version fixes it)
  • Fixed bad redirects
  • Fixed broken links and pages
  • Fixed other programming bugs including the tag search form and miscellaneous items
  • Overhauled platform with more robust security and protection for your accounts
  • Added convenience features for admins
  • Dynamic rooms and profiles

* Note on dynamic rooms and profiles: This is a convenience feature for active wall and room posters. The goal is to allow authors to show you what they wrote but to also allow active visitors to more easily post on their favorite walls or rooms. For example, by default, profile images and info will be found at the top for small screens and the left for larger screens to allow visitors a quick look at someone's info. But once you start posting on their wall, their wall will then be set at the top of the page for mobiles and right of the page on wider screens. This is so that you won't have to keep scrolling to continue posting on their wall especially if you message each other often. This setting will last for 24 hours then the page goes back to default for the visitor until they post a new message. Note that profile owners will always see their own wall at the top since you'll most likely be spending more time looking at your wall than at your own info. Rooms work in a similar way in that a normal viewer would see the description of a room first but once a roleplayer starts posting to that room, the room post section would then become the primary focus so that you wouldn't have to keep scrolling past the room description every time you post. If you're confused by this explanation, just try it out by posting on a room or wall.

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Q: Why do most layouts need to be readjusted for version 2?

A: A number of complex custom layouts will probably need to be adjusted but not all. The redesigned platform uses a new css framework while the old platform uses one that's been dead since 2011. The new css framework uses different settings for things like line-height (which is usually the culprit for layout breakage) and even different units (em/rem instead of px). New css frameworks tend to revolve around the responsive design paradigm to better accommodate smaller screens and will do things differently from our old static css framework. There isn't much I can do about these framework settings without the risk of breaking the framework itself.

* Tip for layout coders: RPR has more mobile viewers than it does desktop. If you are setting widths for your layouts, try to make your layout use percentages (e.g. width:100%) to avoid making mobile users have to scroll right to left to see your content.

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Q: Can I still use the old platform somehow?

A: Yes, you can at old.roleplayrepublic.com. Just note that the version of RPR at old.roleplayrepublic.com is unsupported and does not receive any of the bug fixes or features included in the newest platform. They use completely separate code bases and very different frameworks so are incompatible with each other.

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