Currently, the server is having issues fully booting after a couple of crashes. No ETA, but I'll give updates as I see them!

For some folks, the holiday season is a time to get grumpy and get through all the shopping you have to do, or dealing with all the grumpy people doing their shopping (grr, retail!). For others, it's a time to (attempt to) be more generous, congenial, and a generally good person!

For a while, I've noticed a lot of folks being generally not pleasant with each other - mostly in forum posts. Yes, this has happened for a while, which has been troubling. Whether it be a lack of tact or not much experience dealing with other folks in a respectful manner (or at least not realizing how your words may be possibly misinterpreted in a negative way), it's irrelevant. What I would like to do is make an appeal for everyone to, for lack of a better term, extend the holiday spirit (or at least the positive aspect of it) for an extra month.

This means, when posting a reply to someone -

• Stop and think for a moment after composing your post.
  
• Consider if your post may be perceived in a negative manner.
  
• Try saying your post out loud to yourself - if you had the same thing said in return, would you possibly find it rude? Borderline disrespectful? Be honest!
  
• Try going out of your way to compliment someone on a good post (it doesn't have to be a reply to the post, but if it is, please add something to contribute to the thread)

Server coming down momentarily for a revision update! Estimated downtime is a few minutes.

I would like to make a public reminder of the purpose of the Character Profiles board, and the Workshop. We have been receiving a slew of profiles that do not meet our standards or our requirements, often showing a lack of effort on the part of the writer. To be clear:

The Character Profiles board is ONLY for character profiles that you have written, completed, spell-checked, and have confidence in, in terms of lore-friendliness. Profiles which are incomplete do not go in the Profiles board, they go in the Workshop. It is not a GM's job to write your profile for you, and putting an ill-thought out profile on the board only serves to waste a GM's time and delay the profile checking of everyone else, slowing down the process considerably.

I would also like to remind everyone, both players and GMs, that GMs are in no way obligated to provide for you anything in terms of spell checking or specifics in lore checking. We are, in fact, not obligated to tell you anything about what's wrong with the profile, but we often do in order to help get a profile fixed and moved along quickly. Point being, we are not your spell check. If there are obvious spelling and/or grammar errors, GMs are encouraged to simply say so without pointing out individual errors. It wastes time, and the profile writers should be capable of loading up an online spelling checker or a word processor in order to quickly find the errors themselves.

If a profile is posted on the character profiles board in an obviously incomplete state, GMs are not only able to move said profile to the workshop without any need for further comment, but may also provide warnings and further forum punishments if necessary.

In order to ensure that the rules for character profiles are more easy to locate, I've added to the main information sticky in the profiles board and changed the title to something more eye-catching. Hopefully things will go more smoothly in the profiles board from now on.

Happy Holidays to all! Hope everyone's day goes well!
(And hopefully many presents have been stockpiled!)