User:Banaticus/rpol

Primarysources COI Roleplay Online (RPoL) is a play-by-post role-playing game website. With thousands of active games and users, RPoL is the largest active play-by-post website (approximately an order of magnitude larger than the next largest active play-by-post website).

Format
There are 24 different genres of games at RPoL, such as Anime, Comedy, Historical Fantasy, Horror, Werewolf, etc. Games at RPoL vary by type as well, from freeform systemless games to system-heavy games such as Dungeons & Dragons and GURPS, including also Discussion and Strategy games. The "RPoL Forums" genre is dedicated to "official" purposes; advertising games, asking questions about how to use the site, seeking advice and feedback on game ideas, etc.

Each game has a built-in dice roller (capable of generating scores for dice ranging in size from 2 sides to 10,000 sides), which also includes pre-set roll formats for several popular game systems. Game Masters and players may send each other private messages within a game. Game Master may also create a character sheet for each character in a game, which can only be viewed by the player of that character and a Game Master for that game. Each player in a game has a private "scratchpad" for keeping notes and storing information pertinent to the game.

Custom Written

 * RPoL has a message board system, RuBB, custom written and dedicated to providing an RP-rich environment.

FAQ System

 * A FAQ system, very similar to the help system, is available throughout the site.

Context Sensitive Help System

 * Not only does RPoL have an extensive help system, but the help contents displayed are relevant to the page being accessed at the time.

Visually appealing content

 * RPoL takes all possible measures to ensure that the content seen on screen is appropriate to the roleplay theme of the site and not visually jarring. More than just the portrait system; font sizes, colours and styles are available, but controlled to ensure that a user cannot, by design or accident, compose a message that does not display well on another user's screen.  Yellow text will display properly on a white background, and conversely brown on black.

Enhanced Message Formatting

 * RPoL supports many HTML-like commands. These include, but are not limited to; bold, italics, underline, strikethrough, superscript, subscript, small text, centre (center) aligned text, tables, quoting, hidden (spoiler) text and different font styles (sans-serif, cursive, monotype)).

Colour Schemes

 * Over 15 colour schemes are available on the site to suit every user's preference.

Anonymous Support

 * More than not providing any personal details to other members (or any external agencies), RPoL supports anonymous roleplaying from game to game. The only time an account name is visible is when they post in a public forum, or to the Gamemaster (and only the relative Gamemaster) of a game they apply to access for.  The general user has no way of knowing, or confirming (beyond directly asking), which games another user does or does not play in.

Multiple Personas

 * Within a game not only is your account name seamlessly hidden behind your character name, but (with the GM's permission) a user can have multiple, completely autonomous, characters within a game.
 * The DM may post NPCs made on the fly, or even masquerading as another player.

note: The DM's user name is displayed on the link to their individual games now. DM's no longer have anonymity.

Multiple Groups

 * More than just providing private messaging, RPoL allows GMs to utilise sixteen groups within each game for separating characters. Each thread can belong to any individual group.  Each character, independent of who controls the character, can be assigned to any combination of groups.  A character can only view and post messages to threads they are a member of.

Game Map

 * Various details are available for each game, and one of the more important features is the ability for the GM to upload a game map to the site.

Game Introduction

 * A game introduction, separate to the game threads, is available for the GM to create an introduction (or background) for the game.

Game Advertising Forum

 * A forum has been specifically designed to allow all GMs a place to fairly advertise their games.

Private Lines

 * RPoL has supported private lines since its launch in August 2000. This allows users to insert text in public (or private) messages that is only visible to the characters they choose.

Character Sheets

 * A GM can establish a character sheet for each character in the game. These character sheets are private, and the GM can either block or allow the character owner from editing the sheet.

Character Descriptions

 * Each character owner can create a publicly visible description for their character.

Character Portraits

 * RPoL has over seven thousand (7,000) portraits available for every users selection. Submitted by users and tweaked by the portrait managers, portraits of fixed size and quality are hosted on RPoL's portrait servers.

Character Biographies

 * Two short lines (entered by the character owner) accompany every post a character makes, allowing users to put in any little tid-bits they like to add to the flavour. Popular choices include race, gender, class, stats or brief personality descriptions.

Private Notepad

 * Within each game a user has their own private "ScatchPad" to maintain their own notes. This ScratchPad is not visible to any other member on the site, not even Moderators nor the site's administrator.

Dice Roller

 * RPoL has an advanced dice roller for each game. Each dice roller can roll multiple dice, and different kinds in one roll.  Game system presets are also available to avoid user error, or the necessity of in-depth knowledge of the system for a particular game.  Other dice rolling options such as reroll max, reroll max, drop (or keep) the lowest xx dice and unique rolls are available.  Furthermore a GM can set a predefined default for the game.

Within games

 * Private messages are fully supported. A character can post a private message to any other character that they have a group in common with. The GM can always read these messages.

Outside games

 * A user can also communicate to other users via "rMail", RPoL's own internal mail system. Functioning much like any other internal email system, rMail also allows users to contact the owner of a character within a game in a manner that does not breach the anonymity that RPoL provides unless each party opts to.

RPoL itself is under constant development, having undergone 6 "major" revisions and 47 "minor" revisions over its (at the time of this comment) seven year history.

History
RPoL went live at 11:58, Friday 25th Aug 2000 when its creator and a small group of fellow role-players were unable to access the Bulletin board system they had been using to that point. The first of June 2002 saw a huge rise in the number of players joining RPoL due to a conflict between the administration of Play by Web and several of their members.

Since inception, features have been added as requested by site members:
 * 8 June 2001: Character groups were added.
 * 7 October 2002: RPolls, automated, voluntary polls of users.
 * 16 October 2002: "Portraits" or "avatars" added. (The portrait servers, currently supplied and managed by volunteer users, host 7,070 portraits as of 16 March 2007).
 * 16 July 2004: RPoL moved to a new server which is paid for by donations from FoRPoL, the Friends of Roleplay Online.
 * 5 May 2007: RPoL coding upgraded to include the new "Adult" and "Mature" game tags.

There have been three major outages since RPoL first went live:
 * In 2002, a number of problems occurred between RPoL and its shared webserver host, including a disk failure and conflicts pertaining to the host's ToU about RPoL's CPU usage. RPoL was eventually moved to a RAID5 at jase's place of employment.
 * On 15 July 2004, the day before RPoL was to be moved to a new dedicated server, its RAID5 crashed. Approximately 12 hours' worth of posts were lost, but the outage itself was short due to the planned move already in progress.
 * The "Great Outage" lasted 11 days, occurring from Sun 07 May 2006 to Thu 18 May 2006. RPoL became one of thousands of victims of a disastrous webhost migration. The new webhost misplaced the disk in another customer's server. The other customer discovered this error and returned the contents of the disk to the RPoL admin. No data was lost.

jase (RPoL coder, creator, owner)
Jason Roper (known on RPoL as "jase" with a lower-case j and otherwise known as woof) is the creator, owner, and coder of the Roleplay Unlimited Bulletin Board system on which RPoL runs. He currently resides in Perth, Western Australia.