Just forking this off into its own post to not flood the development thread.
Some reasons:
Convenience; the RMB is on the region page, and you get notifications when you log in for new RMB posts, as well as being quoted or mentioned in a post. That doesn't happen on the forum. A forum thread for a region is just like the RMB, but no notifications, and it gets swept away in the thread list and is hard to find. I find that it's hard to keep track of RPs in the forum because I just... forget. My "view your posts" list is so long that any meaningful discussions get swept away by threads that I made posts on a year ago.
It's also easier to moderate; On the RMB, the moderation process is:
- Suppress and notify the poster to read the rules
- Banject if continues
On the forums, however... (fyi I've never had to do this but I think this is how it works)
- Contact the mods of someone breaking the rules of your thread
- Wait for the post to be deleted
- Repeat offenders should be... uh... I'm not sure what you can do with them (can you ask the mods to force them to stay out of your thread or something idk)
Also, roleplay on the RMB is a lot more friendly for newer players, as they can stay on-site instead of having to move to another the NS forums or a regional forum.
There are two ways I see this happening;
The first way, which is probably optimal, the RMB just being 1 forum with a list of threads. This would help out with organization as instead of posts just getting flooded away, you can view threads that you're interested in and participate in just that thread, without worrying about other RP story lines pushing your posts out of view. You would get notifications based on what threads you have posts in; when a new post is posted in a thread you have posts in (you could also possibly subscribe to a thread), you get a notification on the sidebar where you would normally see the new RMB post amount.
It would be opt-out, since some regions may not want to use the change. ROs with Communications permissions can move posts from thread to thread, suppress posts, lock threads, and stick threads.
The second way is the RMB becomes a full forum with restrictions. For example: you can have 2 forums, and each forum can have 3 subforums etc. This would be virtually identical to the first option, except now RP regions can have different forums like a war forum, diplomacy, media, maps, facts, etc.
I really do hope this change gets implemented; it would make keeping track of RP a lot better.
