We have three things to cover.
Doing this week's activity check has produced some unsurprising but also disappointing results: people aren't RPing very much. This is bad considering this is a new group and our activity should be up!
Most of you know the state the indie scene is in right now: slow replies (sometimes days or weeks to get one, if you ever get anything at all), abandoned blogs (after a week or two), lack of motivation to write—et cetera and so on.
Aeviternal is not a modern-verse indie group. I would like to remind everyone that the purpose of joining and being a part of a closed group is to avoid those problems. We want to give RPers for SnK a fun place to RP where they get responses in a reliable, fairly prompt manner—where they know all of their partners are reliable and won't get bored or jump ship partway through a thread.
The entire purpose of this group is to not be like the indie blog scene.
The two-week buffer is there for extenuating circumstances: vacation, illness, schoolwork—not as an excuse to go nearly two weeks on the regular without replying to other people! This is a closed group, which means we only RP with people affiliated with this group; there are only 19 of us, so options for who we can RP with are limited: we require regular replies to keep activity moving. Generally speaking, our goal is to have nobody going more than 2-3 days without replying to people. If everyone waits a week to reply to things, the group will be really dead really fast, and I'm sure none of us want that.
If you haven't replied to things in a couple of days: please do so as soon as possible.
If, for some reason you feel you cannot be regularly active enough in this group to avoid contributing to the problem, please get with a moderator and discuss the situation/your feelings on the matter.
After discussion with other members and my fellow moderators, the conclusion has been reached that the OOC chat is doing more harm than good for our community. While we do want our members to learn a little bit about each other to foster some sense of togetherness, I'm afraid the OOC chat moves too quickly and proves to be more a distraction than a useful tool for camaraderie. In fact, due to the fast-moving pace of the chat, and its lack of relevance to RP 99% of the time, several members of the group have felt excluded.
Our OOC chat will become an RP-discussion chat instead; its only purpose will be discussion of possible threads, starters, plots, and so on, as relating to Aeviternal (not SnK in general unless this relates to Aeviternal: for example, it's a part of your character's previous life).
This may seem harsh but things said in the OOC chat have made some people feel unwelcome, uncomfortable, alienated, or offended (among other things), and it's hard to write with people who have made you feel uncomfortable—yes, even OOC—so we'd like to bring things in line. This group should be conducive to writing considering it's an RP group.
Please add fellow members to your own Skype if you'd like to converse with them OOC. We also encourage plotting privately, but this method might be nice as other members could have good ideas for you to use for your own characters/can offer advice.
The moderators will speak to all members privately to see what we can do to improve the group and make it a better place for camaraderie and for writing/RPing. If you have any thoughts, ideas, complaints, et cetera—please bring them to a moderator's attention ASAP so they can be dealt with!