#rp threadtracker

Hello, friends! Happy 2025!

First allow me to apologize for having been quite off the radar recently; the last year was, to put it mildly, very chaotic for me and I have not had a ton of mental energy to put towards managing RPThreadTracker. That is, frankly, probably going to continue to be the case in the coming year as well.

While I'm not planning to close the app at the moment, I don't anticipate I'll be doing a ton of new development on it. A couple of associated notes:

I'm going to be closing the Patreon I have had running for the last couple years. I'm in a position now where I don't need the support to continue hosting, and I don't feel like it's reasonable to continue taking membership donations on Patreon when I'm not really producing any new development on the site. Thank you SO much to everyone who has contributed to me there over the last few years; your support has meant a ton. Paypal donations are still always welcome if you want to contribute, but I won't be taking regular Patreon donations anymore.

I have received a couple of messages from people asking for help recovering their account which I know I never followed up on. I will be trying to do so for some of those outstanding messages in the next week, but if you tried to reach me in the past for help logging in and did not receive a response, please feel free to message me again at [email protected] from the email associated with your account.

There have been some bug reports recently from people reporting issues with not all of their threads being loaded. In a lot of cases this seems to be happening to people who have had accounts for a long time and have built up enough threads that attempts to fetch all of them from Tumblr start getting throttled. While I hope to eventually do more work to improve performance in this regard, I recommend archiving, or exporting and then removing, some of your oldest threads if you are starting to encounter this issue.

Thanks again so much to those who have supported the app over the years and who are continuing to use it. I am sorry that I do not have more news to report as far as improvements to the app but I do hope that it continues to be useful to you all in its current form. Please do continue to feel free to reach out to me if you encounter issues unrelated to the above one.

Thanks,

Hello, all!

Apparently, the password reset function on RPThreadTracker has been busted, probably for quite a while, due to an issue I missed with connecting to the email provider I use. So if you have tried to reset your password and been unsuccessful at any point, you might want to try again now. Major apologies for any inconvenience/confusion this has caused.

(Shoutout to @girl-next-door-writes for letting me know about this issue. :) )

As always, please send me an ask to let me know if you run into any issues with the site! I'm happy to address them.

Thanks,

Hello, Tracker users! 

Pretty much what it says in the title - RPTT will be temporarily offline for maintenance starting at 4:30pm US Central on August 13th. The maintenance in question shouldn’t take more than an hour.

The changes being made shouldn’t result in any major user experience differences (although a few things have been tweaked and refined); however, this update is primarily a lot of under-the-hood optimizations and code changes that will make further updates easier going forward.

As always, please send an ask to @tblrthreadtracker or an email to [email protected] if you have any questions, or suggestions for further updates and improvements to the site. You can also create bug reports or feature suggestions directly at https://github.com/blackjackkent/RPThreadTrackerV3.FrontEnd/issues . Do *not* try to contact me using the Messenger feature; odds are I will not see it.

Thanks much, and happy writing! :)

- Trackermun

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Hello, everyone of the Tumblr RP community!

As I mentioned in my previous post...I’ve been really floored and touched by the response to my original intention to shut down RPThreadTracker. I’ve gotten plenty of extremely kind messages from so many of you saying that it’s been a critical part of your roleplay experience, and I’d be lying if I said that enthusiasm hasn’t helped rekindle my own for the project (and programming in general, really; 2020 has been a tough year...)

However, a number of the things I said in the original shutdown post do still stand. I have other projects which are becoming a conflict for my development time, and hosting the tracker is (sadly) not free. With that in mind:

RPThreadTracker is not shutting down! But it could really use your support in the following areas.

Patreon Support

I have a Patreon for my web app development now! With Patreon, you can contribute a monthly amount of your choice to help support the site’s hosting fees and development time. If you can contribute, you will really add to the likelihood that I can keep supporting RPThreadTracker, and other applications, long-term.

You can sign up to be a Patreon patron here:

https://www.patreon.com/blackjacksoftware

Every bit of support definitely helps - and I have some perks offered in return! Definitely open to suggestions on other perks as well. (I don’t know if people, for instance, would be interested in merch with “RPThreadTracker” or my business logo on it. :D But I can make that happen.)

Even if you can’t contribute, I would very much appreciate anyone sharing this to get more eyes on it.

Development Support

RPThreadTracker is fully open-source, located in three projects on GitHub:

https://github.com/blackjackkent/RPThreadTrackerV3.FrontEnd https://github.com/blackjackkent/RPThreadTrackerV3.BackEnd https://github.com/blackjackkent/RPThreadTracker.BackEnd.TumblrClient I welcome anyone with development interest or experience to contribute to fixes or feature development on any of these projects. They are all furnished with documentation regarding how to set up a local development environment (ReactJS for the frontend, C# and SQL Server for the backend) and should hopefully be accessible to new developers interested in getting involved.

I will over the next few days/weeks be using the Issues tab on these projects to start collecting a list of outstanding issues and feature ideas that I have for the site, so that should be a source of ideas going forward for anyone who wants to contribute coding time. I will also be phasing out the contact form in the application in favor of redirecting users to log bug reports on GitHub as well to make it easier for contributors to address them as well as me.

Please feel free to get in touch with me if you are interested in contributing but don’t know where to start or have questions. You can also join the Discord server linked in my GitHub bio - it’s primarily oriented towards my Twitch gaming community but I also discuss programming stuff there and would love for it to be more of a forum for web development chat.

Again, Thank You

I really did not expect the support and response that came out of my previous announcement, and I hope that I can keep counting on your support in the future. Please contact me with any questions or suggestions, and best of luck in your writing adventures!

EDITED TO ADD: Based on the response to this post, i’m considering other options besides shutting the site down wholesale. Updates to follow.

On April 4, 2014, I released the first announcement of the very first version of RPThreadTracker. It was kind of a messy project at first - really, I originally set it up for my own personal writing use and didn’t expect it to go anywhere.

But people found it, and they used it, and they sent incredibly nice feedback and for six and a half years now I’ve been thrilled to help support all of you in the RP community on Tumblr and keep this tool useful and up to date. It has been an amazing learning experience for me in so many ways and I’m so glad I’ve been able to be a help to so many people as well.

Unfortunately, I have reached a point where I can no longer commit time to maintaining the site (as you may have all noticed, given the dearth of updates lately) and general usage has also dropped steadily in the last few years since the Tumblr porn ban, which is making it harder to justify the amount I’m spending on hosting and data storage every month. So I am sad to say I will be closing RPThreadTracker.com down permanently starting Feb 1 2021.

It’s my hope that this two-month leadup will give plenty of time for anyone still actively using the site to export their threads (there’s a tool for that on the site!) and get settled with a new system. I’m happy to assist anyone with this that needs help. On Feb 1, I will be shutting down the site and deleting all stored databases.

Also, as a note - the code for RPThreadTracker is 100% open-source; I would completely support anyone else who wanted to make use of it for a future tool. Feel free to get in touch with me if that’s something that interests you.

Thank you again to everyone who has supported the site over the years. You all are fantastic and I wish you all happy writing forever.

I’ve had some people ask about providing monetary support and some ask about providing development support. Based on this, I’m doing some thinking about other approaches besides shutting the site down completely. Updates will follow soon.

Thanks to everyone who sent kind words about how positive the site has been for them; it means a lot.

Holy mackerel, you guys. 

I asked for your support to keep RPThreadTracker running and you guys came out in force, and I couldn’t be more grateful.

So far on Patreon, we’ve blown past my first goal and well on the way to the second. I don’t know how to thank you all for the support cropping up in my notes, my inbox, my Patreon, and over on GitHub where I’ve been contacted by several of you interested in contributing to development. It means a ton to me that this little project of mine has been worth enough to you all that you want to give back to supporting it.

What’s Next

New Site Updates

The aforementioned support woke up a lot of my motivation that has been beaten into the ground by 2020, and over the weekend I got a number of updates pushed live. The main feature addition at the moment is the ability to delete your account, which some people have messaged me about in the last year asking for and which I was incredibly delayed in getting around to, but which I’m finally getting out the door. So that is now available if you would like to close out your account on the site and remove all of your data.

Other smaller updates that are now available or will be available sometime this week include: 

Highlighting rows when they are selected in the thread tables

Persisting the left-hand navbar being open/closed between page refreshes

Fixing an issue causing certain elements of the site to look funny/unreadable in light or dark theme

Removing the “Contact Me” form in favor of a link to GitHub, where you can open an issue and make it easier for other contributing devs, as well as myself, to see any suggestions or bug reports.

Ongoing Patreon Campaign

While, as I mentioned, we’ve hit my first goal on Patreon, further support is always welcome. With higher levels of monetary backing, I can bring in further resources to help refine the site’s behavior and usability. And honestly, I would love to reach a point where I can turn community-based site-building like this into (at least a portion of) my full time work, but that’s a very long-term goal. 

https://www.patreon.com/blackjacksoftware

This is, of course, not required; RPThreadTracker will always remain free to use. And I am incredibly grateful to everyone who has reached out to contribute.

Welcome, New Developers!

A number of people have messaged me stating interest in working on the dev side of RPThreadTracker. Once again, the codebases are available at:

https://github.com/blackjackkent/RPThreadTrackerV3.FrontEnd http://www.github.com/blackjackkent/RPThreadTrackerV3.BackEnd http://www.github.com/blackjackkent/RPThreadTracker.BackEnd.TumblrClient

I have started adding items to the “Issues” section of RPThreadTrackerV3.FrontEnd and will continue doing so throughout the near future; if you’re interested in grabbing one, feel free to assign yourself to it. If you have any questions or just want to chat about it, hit me up on Discord!

If you’re not a developer, but have a suggestion for a new site feature, improvement, or bug fix, head to https://github.com/blackjackkent/RPThreadTrackerV3.FrontEnd/issues/new and give us the info! :D

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And I believe that’s all the news I have at the moment. Thanks again so much to everyone for your support. Happy writing!