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Can I get some guidance on the forbidden content rules. specifically the one about Roleplay?

I was going to start a thread in the Mission reports and have a mission narrated as if by one of the crew ("I am Jebediah Kerman. I flew a rocket into orbit. Bill and Bob joined me by docking another craft. We went to Minmus. I thought it looked like mint ice cream"). I had seen some mission reports formatted this way but just before I posted I had a quick review of the guidelines and saw that Roleplay is forbidden, have I misunderstood or wouldn't first person mission reports be disallowed under this rule? or does "acting as a Kerbal" mean something specific that isn't clear to me? (or is it that nobody has complained about the threads that I saw written like this?)

I'm perfectly happy to do it in third person ("This is Jebediah Kerman. He flew a rocket into orbit. Bill and Bob joined him by docking another craft. They went to Minmus. Jeb thought it looked like mint ice cream") if first person isn't allowed but I can't see why switching viewpoint would make something forbidden into something acceptable.

I'd also like to check if referring to the inner lives of the Kerbals that we literally can't know (i.e. what they think or actions that take place off screen) is also a problem by the rules. I mean I've seen enough of this to assume it's fine, but I've also seen people talking about adding a Hitchhiker can to their craft to give the crew space to live in on long journeys literally refer to it as roleplaying.

To be clear, I know that "Jeb went EVA to retrieve the science from the instruments and placed it in the lab" must be absolutely fine as that can literally happen in the game, but "Jeb thought that Bob  wasn't cut out for deep space research as he'd gone a bit odd and decided to lick the Vall surface sample to see if it was 'minty'" certainly can't actually happen.

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28 minutes ago, Robin Patenall said:

Can I get some guidance on the forbidden content rules. specifically the one about Roleplay?

I was going to start a thread in the Mission reports and have a mission narrated as if by one of the crew ("I am Jebediah Kerman. I flew a rocket into orbit. Bill and Bob joined me by docking another craft. We went to Minmus. I thought it looked like mint ice cream"). I had seen some mission reports formatted this way but just before I posted I had a quick review of the guidelines and saw that Roleplay is forbidden, have I misunderstood or wouldn't first person mission reports be disallowed under this rule? or does "acting as a Kerbal" mean something specific that isn't clear to me? (or is it that nobody has complained about the threads that I saw written like this?)

I'm perfectly happy to do it in third person ("This is Jebediah Kerman. He flew a rocket into orbit. Bill and Bob joined him by docking another craft. They went to Minmus. Jeb thought it looked like mint ice cream") if first person isn't allowed but I can't see why switching viewpoint would make something forbidden into something acceptable.

I'd also like to check if referring to the inner lives of the Kerbals that we literally can't know (i.e. what they think or actions that take place off screen) is also a problem by the rules. I mean I've seen enough of this to assume it's fine, but I've also seen people talking about adding a Hitchhiker can to their craft to give the crew space to live in on long journeys literally refer to it as roleplaying.

To be clear, I know that "Jeb went EVA to retrieve the science from the instruments and placed it in the lab" must be absolutely fine as that can literally happen in the game, but "Jeb thought that Bob  wasn't cut out for deep space research as he'd gone a bit odd and decided to lick the Vall surface sample to see if it was 'minty'" certainly can't actually happen.

The problem with roleplay, and why it was forbidden, was that it tends to cause problems with forum users interacting with each other in this way.

If you are just writing mission reports in first person as a kerbal, that should be fine.  The problem stems from pretending to be a kerbal while interacting with other forum members who are also pretending to be a kerbal.

You can make up whatever you like about the kerbals' inner lives, just make sure it stays family-friendly and follows the forum guidelines.  As long as it's made clear that everything you're typing is coming from the perspective of a kerbal as part of a story and not you "as" the kerbal, you'll be fine.

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The roleplaying rule is there to prevent arguments and such arising between forum members.    
If you’re the sole author of a mission report, you’ll have no issues.    Even if you have a tiny few people writing a mission report in collaboration , you should be fine.   

What the rule was written for is when you have multiple people assuming the role of a Kerbal, agency, or country, and then role playing that one entity, usually with a number of other users role playing a single entity.    The conflicts that developed in the storyline often spilled over into real problems between users on the forum.   Eventually it became bad enough we had to outlaw roleplaying altogether.    
 

Writing a mission report from the first person?   Fine.     Role Playing an single entity vs a number of other members?   Not fine.   
 

If you’re still unsure if you’re in the clear, go ahead and make the first post or two, and then report the thread and we’ll take a look.   Worst that happens then is we say no.  

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The "Unread Threads" (with "Mark Site Read") feature is something I heavily use now.

I do not believe there is currently a technique under the Invision forum software for an individual user to mark a particular topic (thread) "of no interest" such that any activity in that thread is filtered out of the Unread Threads list presented to that viewer.

I've looked at the "Follow" menu and believe I am either correct or just missing something.

Please advise?

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5 hours ago, The Aziz said:

That's something I brought up a while ago

You did, and I'm glad you did.  I realize it's not directly under the control of the Forum/moderation team and requires perhaps some work from Invision, but I think this is a feature that could go a long way to salving certain "rifts" (shall we say) currently plaguing the forum.

And my opinion is that the KSP Forum is large & diverse enough as to be an interesting case study for Invision (if it cares about product improvement).

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 9/16/2023 at 8:18 PM, Hotel26 said:

And my opinion is that the KSP Forum is large & diverse enough as to be an interesting case study for Invision (if it cares about product improvement).

I realize I am preaching to the proverbial choir here, so please don't shoot the messenger. :P

One of the biggest problems with software development, particularly forum software design, is they want to design it to satisfy the maximum number of clients while maximizing profit. I am sure there are nice features many clients would like, but if only 10% of customers like feature X, then there's no reason to include it in the core product. And, of course, they develop that feature as a paid-for plug-in, much like other software developers such as Microsoft and NCH Software do for their products.

The problem is when you have a corporation that uses the software; ultimately, it is up to them if they want to purchase these QOL1 plug-ins. The moderation team has no control over what plug-ins Take-Two will allow IG or the community managers to get for the forum. And, of course, we've already mentioned a few plug-ins; as a team, we'd like to see added that would make moderation easier and life better for the forum.

1 QOL: Quality of Life for those who do not know this acronym. :)

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14 minutes ago, Kerbalsaurus said:

Is it in any way bannable to frequently change avatars? I like to change mine for the holidays, and since the holiday season is coming up, I'm probably going to be changing mine every month or so.

No, change those as often as you like. There's a limit on name changes because we have to do it for you so it makes work for us, but avatars you can do for yourself as the whims strike you. 

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  • 3 weeks later...

Every so often since like june or july ive been getting 502 bad gateway errors. Most recently just a few minutes ago as typing. Fwiw im on iphone xr current ios 16.6.1 using safari as browser. Is this something thats known?

115410132023

just happened again when i refreshed the forum games tab.

121410132023

Edited by AlamoVampire
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We've been having issues loading the forum for the last hour or so.

Not all of us, though, and personally I've been having issues with a couple other sites.  I think there's an issue going on with one of the large-scale comm infrastructure companies.

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Hi.

There's a way to temporarily unlock a thread to allow editing a post to remove unwanted words?

It came to my attention recently that two words that I were using more or less usually is not acceptable by this Forum standards, and so I come back to my old posts to remove it too. However a bunch of them are locked on closed threads, preventing me from editing it.

There's a way to fix them?

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Just now, Lisias said:

Hi.

There's a way to temporarily unlock a thread to allow editing a post to remove unwanted words?

It came to my attention recently that two words that I were using more or less usually is not acceptable by this Forum standards, and so I come back to my old posts to remove it too. However a bunch of them are locked on closed threads, preventing me from editing it.

There's a way to fix them?

Just report the posts and we’ll handle it in good faith.  

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  • 2 weeks later...

Anyone notice some users pfps are kinda broken? As in blue little box with a ? in said tiny blue box? It seems those with custom avatars/pfps are not affected but those (not all) with the default kerbal silhouette are affected. Or is it just my phone? Current ios on iphone xr. Noticed it tonight.

023411012023

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