Roleplay Group Story Index

In case you haven’t heard, rpnow.net is back! (More info about that here)

I’ve always wanted to have a proper mobile app which would notify me whenever someone posts in my RP’s. And now I believe I have the skills to make it!

Will you help me make it possible?

:) thanks for asking

Hey everyone,

RPNow.net is back. Yes, it’s true! And the RP experience is about the same as it ever was. However, there’s a lot of improvements which I think will make it a lot better.

What’s new?

User accounts. You probably used to keep track of dozens of bookmarks, or just had one extremely long RP. Now, just log in and have all your stories on a dashboard.

Goodbye link-based system. Since people have user accounts and dashboards, you can no longer access an RP by simply having the link to it. Instead the owner invites participants individually by entering their usernames. This is a bit less convenient but I think that’s okay because it’s definitely much more secure.

End-to-End Encryption. The only people who can read your RPs are the people participating in them. I can’t read them and neither can the people who run my hosting provider, or even the people in the server room the data eventually ends up sitting in.

Why is it back?

Every so often I’ve thought about bringing back RPNow but ultimately kept reaching the same conclusion: I had neither the time, nor energy, nor confidence in keeping everything online, stable and secure. But recently, the situation changed - a new platform called userbase.com allowed me to wire up my existing graphical interface to their system for user logins, data storage, encryption and real-time updates. It’s even cheaper than the hosting I was using previously. None of this would have been possible without them.

Will my old RP be there?

Because everything is account-based and encrypted now, there’s not really a way for me to automatically add the old RPs back to the site, so no. If you exported a .json file from the old rpnow.net (or a self-hosted version) you might be able to import it, but the new site is optimized for handling many small stories rather than very large ones so you might run into trouble if it’s more than a few hundred pages, and even then it’s a pretty slow process unfortunately.

Anything else?

There’s some features that aren’t in there yet which would be nice to add in the future. Including being able to change your username/password, moderation options such as setting people to be read-only or removing them, exporting .txt files, and deleting your user account and all your RPs. I don’t know when I’ll get to these but if I do I’ll post about it here.

I know this whole thing is pretty out-of-nowhere, but I didn’t want to say anything before in case I didn’t follow through. But here we are!

I’m a bit anxious about re-launching this again after years of being gone but I think there are probably still some of you who miss the site and would like to use it again. Knowing that is enough for me to want to take a chance and try again.

Right now a majority of progress is going into backend development and (most recently) a thorough automated testing suite. I gotta build this thing on a solid foundation. Although this results in me not really having a lot of interesting things to say, yet.

Hi! I’m Nigel, and I made RPNow.net! I’d like to give a huge thank-you to everyone who’s used this site and shared it with their friends. The site has seen tremendous growth over the last year! Every month, 5,000 unique users send 350,000 messages across RPNow!

Because I want people to enjoy my site, RPNow has always been free-to-use, virtually ad-free, and has never collected nor sold any of your information to third parties. I’ve put many hours into developing and maintaining the site, and have been paying for server costs out-of-pocket. Each year, I lose $92 to keep RPNow alive, and make no money from it.

If you’ve enjoyed using my site, and are able to donate, please consider becoming my Patron. If you can’t, please consider reblogging this post to spread the word. Thank you so much!

Rewards!

Patrons will receive:

$5/month: be listed on the credits page!

$10/month: your name will be bolded on the credits page, and we’ll give you a shoutout on this our tumblr!

$30/month: Custom RP URLs! Planning a big RP party? Let us know in advance, and we’ll put it at rpnow.net/rp/{your title here}!

Become my Patron!

Do you have any work you’re proud of? Well step right up!  We’d like to invite you to enter RPNow’s 1st Annual RP Contest.

The Lowdown

Enter it by filling out this form (it’s easy, trust us)

You have until Thursday Night at Midnight (MT) to enter. 

Sometime that weekend, the RPs you’ve submitted will be posted as a Read Only Roleplay on a new page on the website, and the voting will begin!

For a limited time only (another week) you can read the RP’s and vote on your favorites in each category.

We will reveal the winners sometime that final weekend.

The winners will earn an elusive spot on the website in our RPNow Hall of Fame where they will be preserved for generations to come. (They’ll also receive a humble but actually fairly cool prize that we can’t reveal too much about yet.)

The Theme this year is PICK YOUR POISON

There are four categories:

Original Fluff. Original Angst. Fan Fluff. Fan Angst.

The RP you submit may have both aspects of fluff and angst. It’s up to you to decide which category it will do the best in.

THE RULES

You may submit multiple RPs but only one submission per RP.

To make it easier for us to host the competition, RPs must be on RPNow

“Original” RP submissions must be solely original characters and worlds. “Fan” RP can have OC’s or AU’s.

Try to keep the content Rated G to PG-13.

To prevent a popularity contest, the authors of the RPs will be anonymous while voting is up. Competitors must not reveal which RP they submitted until the winners are announced. Competitors may, however, promote the event itself and and share the RPs of other competitors.

If minor editing is needed to ensure eligibility or ease of reading, we can arrange for that. 

Whew. That was crazy.

Last night I caused a database catastrophe where dozens of characters and thousands of messages disappeared into the void. That was scary!

Good news though: it wasn’t easy, but I think I’ve recovered everything!

You’ll probably want to take a quick look through the archives of all your important RPs, though, just to make sure that the whole thing is there. Also, make sure your characters are in-tact.

RPNow message box update!

I’ve done some things to make RPNow better for y’all. Here’s what you’ll notice!

Better input text box! The message box looks different depending on who you’re posting as. This is very important because now it’s less likely that you accidentally post as the wrong character. ;)

As per this ask, RPNow will remember the last character you posted as, even if you refresh the page.

Here’s what you probably won’t notice:

Improved response time for posting messages

Various other improvements related to improving bandwidth usage, subtle aesthetic things, and lots of miscellaneous fixes and code cleanup