Forum:CHBRP 2.0

CHBRP 2.0
First I’d like to say that I’m sorry for not being as active and attentive that maybe I should be for being a Crat, and I want to try and make that up. It is clear and has been for awhile, that the Wiki isn’t in a good place. I don’t think it’ll ever die completely, but that doesn’t mean we should allow it to continue like this. I think we need to stop looking back, we’ll never be what we were and honestly I don’t think we should be. That was the past, things that worked then I don’t think work any more. I’ve been talking to Bach a lot the last month, and to Wonder, and they both agreed with me that for this wiki to move forward we need to make it our own. So I spent some time talking to Bach to understand why certain rules and policies were made back then, what purpose did they serve. What I am about to suggest to you guys, some of it is pretty extreme, please read everything carefully. I’ve put a lot of work into this, gone to others for opinions to make sure I word it right, and tried really hard to come up with compromises and solutions that will save our wiki while at the same time not destroying everything it is, but we need change, we need to make this our wiki. We are the users here now, we are the ones that make edits every day and see the struggles, we need to stop hoping the wiki will return to the past and start working towards making it ours.

Some of the changes I’m proposing are to try and more evenly spread the work loads while at the same time cutting out rules and policies that are redundant or no longer serving any real purpose. Again, I’ve put a lot of thought into this and gotten help and advice from others, I don’t make these suggestions lightly. I don’t want users to think that this is all just me randomly picking things to change just for the sake of change, so if you have questions please ask and I’ll try to explain. Bach is usually better at this stuff than I am, but hopefully I can help you understand. I’m hoping we can fix some confusion that seems to keep happening with policies. I’ve noticed, and others have too, that it seems people confuse policy with guidelines or popularity. Just because one user has 3 paragraphs of a personality or a nicely coded page, doesn’t mean that is what’s required.

New Wording
Without characters there can’t be roleplay, but on this wiki we are all roleplaying in the same world and the same overall large plot, this means there has to be some basic guidelines that we all follow in order for everything to be both fair and make sense. To accomplish this, aside from the policies, we also have an easy claiming process to go through for each character just to insure that the histories work on this wiki. Please remember that your character needs to be your original work, it can not be canon characters from the Percy Jackson series or anything else that was written by others. Plagiarism is a serious thing and will not be tolerated. Also, if a user goes over 25 days without notice or over 6 months having given notice of inactivity, the staff reserves the right to archive and/or delete characters as needed, however deleted pages can easily be restored if a user returns. It is also important to remember that even though we use the present day date on the wiki because it’s just easier, it’s technically like roughly 18 or so years after the books ended. That might seem confusing, but it would be just as confusing to have to keep adding 18 years to the date every time you needed a date for something, so just if you’re confused ask an Admin. If any user creates a character page that does not have a claim or Admin permission to do so, the page will be deleted and user given a verbal warning. If you want to have some place to work on your claim before actually putting it in the claiming forum, feel free to set up a sandbox off your user page to do so.

The Claiming Process
If you are ready to create your claim and get a character approve, go to the Claiming pages and pick a name for your character, please be reasonable about the name, it shouldn’t be offensive or complete gibberish. If you are a new user you are allowed to have one demigod and unlimited minor characters, see the level policy to understand better how the levels work and how you can get more character spots in the future. Because claims can get quite full at times, WIP claims are not allowed for more than 7 days, the best place for WIP projects isn’t in claims but in a sandbox page created off your user page (User:Name/Sandbox).

The following is what you should put in your claim:
The title of the page/claim should be the name of the character. Your signature or some link to your user page (not strictly enforced as we can check page history to find out who made the page). Current age of the character at the time you will start role playing them (your character can not be younger than 9) and if they are immortal than how long they’ve been alive. Name of god parent and mortal parent, if created then the name of who created them Brief personality (if a user makes this longer fine, but it doesn’t need to be more than a sentence or two and should match the history). History that details conception/birth up through present day that you will start role playing them. Obviously that is going to vary a lot depending on the age of your character and what kind of character it is and stuff. Please remember though, this is a community where we all role play in the same universe with same major plots, so characters should not be unkillable and canon characters definitely are not allowed at all. The histories should also be reasonable, sure gods exist, but the books are still about our Earth in our present day. (See below for a more detailed list of what is required to be in the history for the claim).

History Requirements:
The point of the history is to, as clearly as possible, give a brief but detailed look at the character’s life before camp, from conception to present day. That doesn’t mean write a 400 page book, but it also needs to be more than a single paragraph. Some can be insinuated or summarised, but a few of the important bits like conception/birth, first monster attack, going to camp the first time, etc should be written out in greater detail. Demigods Specifically: Demigods are not raised by their god parents. A child of a goddess might reasonably keep the infant for up to a few months for feeding and care, but after that it would be delivered to the mortal father. This is a rule that stems from the books, not from Greek myth itself. Zeus imposed a no “direct” interference rule for the parents of demigods. This can cause people to be confused by what direct means, but basically it means major in this. So they might be able to see their kid or drop off a weapon for a present in disguise, but they wouldn’t be allowed to raise their kid or save their lives or prevent monsters from finding them, big things. In the case that your godly parent preference is Athena, do keep in mind that Athena is a virgin goddess, and that she can only have children through the union of her and her partner's minds; as such, she cannot have children through means of physical contact. Please consider this when you are making your character's history/claim.

All Species:
No matter if it’s a demigod or a nymph, histories should be reasonable. Just because mythology is real and monsters, doesn’t mean that Harry Potter is real or that we are living in the world of Divergent. It is still also present day our real life world, with all the real life things that come with that. This wiki has been actively roleplaying this world for almost four years, this isn’t the type of role play where if I haven’t rp’d with you, then you can’t know my character at all. If we both have a child of Zeus in the Zeus cabin, even if we haven’t rp’d them, odds are they’ve seen each other and at least know each other’s name. Same world, same big plots, same camp. Because of this it can get confusing if you come along with a new character and try to say they’ve been there all along for the past year but no one’s seen them. This is a hard rule to make though, there’s probably loopholes we haven’t even thought of yet. Because of this, the general rule is that you need to find some way that your character hasn’t been at camp for the last year. It shouldn’t be too hard to do as the books portray camp as a place for summer and not year round for most. However, if you feel you have a good case for a special circumstance to say that your character has been at camp all along, you may attempt that but you will need Admin approval and a good solid reason. No children of Artemis or Hestia allowed, they are strict virgins, no exceptions. And children of Hera are only allowed in the Broken Covenant. See the guidelines for nymphs if you aren’t sure how to make a Nymph/Nature Spirit character.

BC Characters:
For BC characters the claims aren’t that different except at the end for BC claims a user has to explain why they want to join the BC instead of going to camp, which faction they want to join and why and in some cases they may need a power set if the god parent they chose doesn’t have one yet. The claim will need to be approved by a member of the Admin Team as well as the Lt or Head of the desired faction.

If you want to join the BC with a character that you originally had claimed for camp, defecting is a lot easier than creating a BC claim from scratch. You just need to get the permission of the Lt or Head of the faction you want and a reason to join that faction.

It has been voted that children of Chaos will not be allowed, the version of myth we use on that Chaos is a primordial thing and not something that can go out and screw mortals.

Some god parents may be technically "allowed" to have kids (versus like Artemis and Hestia who are strict virgins), but are difficult to create a character with them. For instance Kronos, he was thrown in Tartarus ages ago, and yes he was Possessing Luke in the books, but he was a bit busy trying to regain power to go about sleeping with mortals and making babies. So to have a child of Kronos, you have to rationalise how the child is alive hundreds maybe even thousands of years later. Here is a list of some difficult god parents to choose:
 * 1) Kronos
 * 2) Hera
 * 3) Selene
 * 4) Pan (if he had kids they would be satyrs, not demigods)
 * 5) Ouranos
 * 6) Gaia
 * 7) Tartarus

Creating Your Character Page
Templates and coding is pretty and fancy but not required, however there are some basic things every character page should have on it, though if your page is found missing some of these things the most that will happen is that someone will either message you or fix the issue themselves if it’s something minor like a missing category.

These things should be on your page:
It should be clear who owns the character, you can use the My Character template at the top of your page, just as long as it’s clearly stated as well as using your personal user category (which are named the same as your username). The only categories we absolutely require be on the page are your personal user name category, active characters, god parent if applicable, model if known. There are a variety of other categories that may be added either by you or other users, but they are not strictly required or enforced as mandatory, they are simply helpful and interesting. However, we do draw the line at a category for every tiny little thing. If you aren’t sure ask an Admin. Even though fancy coding isn’t required, the pages should still contain at the least all the information that was required on the claim minimum. If you do use fancy coding it should be clean and easy to read, and if the coding is done so badly that the page is broken we may have to put it on lock down, but only if the entire page breaks, if it’s minor coding issues we are permitted to add a template so no one copies that poor coding, but it’s up to you if you want to fix it or not as it isn’t breaking the page. Powers is optional, but if you do list the powers, make sure you use the templates Most people will probably list their weapons here, despite there being Stygian Iron in the books, the Wiki voted to do away with it and it will not be allowed here.

Word Bubbles
Word bubbles are technically optional, though most want one. The images in the word bubbles should be reasonably sized, the point of a word bubble is for speech, not to have a huge image that dwarfs the speech bits. Most users find that a width of 160px is a comfortable size.

Character Powers
To keep things fair for fighting, activities, competitions, contests, events, etc the wiki uses power sets that are created by numerous users on the user base, voted on by everyone, and upkept by the Admin team. These are the powers you must use, no exceptions, interpretations of the powers in the sets sometimes can be a bit less strict but only if it’s silly things being used in non-combat situations.

Admins/Crats
Administrators and Bureaucrats are exempt from having to make claims first for their characters, it is kinda hoped that if they are that high up on the Admin Team, that they ought to know our policies by now. If an Admin or Crat is ever caught intentionally breaking policies and taking advantage of this exemption, there will be no leniency for their punishment, depending on the severity of what they’ve tried to get away with this could be as severe as immediate demotion or even temporary bans.

Explanation/Differences
A lot of the differences will boil down into claims. Hopefully this will make it so that instead of AS department being given a ton of work they can’t keep up with, this will lessen their claim work, and spread out to all users who enforce policies more to generally keep an eye out for. If you see someone breaking a policy, say something, it’s good enough for other wikis, why can’t it be for ours?
 * 1) There’s a couple of problems with the current claiming process. One, for some reason over time users who check claims have been expecting and asking for things on claims that aren’t even policies or rules. Two, without users on the wiki like Bach who had insane time to edit, keeping up with overly detailed claims is hard to do. I asked Bach about how claims were in the beginning and how they changed over time. By the time I joined the wiki a claim needed to be really detailed, the first claims needed virtually zero information, it was more or less picking a god parent and a character name which I think is too little information.
 * 2) Bach said the reason they chose to make claims more detailed over time was to confront any major policy breaks in characters before the user started role playing instead of after. It put more work on AS department instead of all users who enforced rules. This new method should split that up, instead of having crazy detailed claims to prevent policy issues before the character is created, the idea is to check less in the claim and to treat it like any wiki treats any policy. Any user who is allowed to enforce claims, if they see someone has broken a policy with their character page or in a role play, it’s reported and appropriate action is taken. No matter how much effort or detail we try to put into claim checking, we can’t prevent policies from being broken any way because users can always change things after. I feel that right now it is more important for us to focus on activities and the users, than worrying about that we might have to pass out a few warnings later on to users who didn’t properly read the policies and added something to their character page that wasn’t allowed (an overpowered weapon, or powers they shouldn’t have, etc).
 * 3) I think to make sure we have enough users to help monitor for policy breaks, that we allow Level Five users who only have reg user rights to give out verbal warnings as long as they are really rule breaks and are nice about it. I think that official helpers should be allowed to give out official warnings.
 * 4) I’ve lowered the minimum age to nine, it’s not a huge change, only 3 years younger than what we have now, but I think it’s a fair compromise, it’s not too young but it also follows the books more and gives younger users on our wiki who are more comfortable with younger characters more to work with.
 * 5) Categories are fun and it’s cool that we have a lot of them and if people want to use them that’s fine, but I don’t think we should go over board with how many categories we see as “required”, so I’ve lowered that a little.
 * 6) Claim histories are supposed to be both brief but also cover important details, but over time some users have started asking for people to add things to their claims that isn’t anywhere in our policies at all. Admin team members have gotten it mixed up between a strict policy and a general guideline. We can’t write a strict policy that could possibly cover everything that could come up in a claim, so a lot of it we have to just use common sense and take as it comes and try to be open. As long as a user has described their first monster attack, there’s nothing that says it has to be one a year after until they officially come to camp, they can summarise and just say like “For the next few years before blah could finally go to camp they did their best to fight off the occasional minor monster attack.” There is no reason to force them to write out every single possible attack in the claim, it wastes their time and ours.
 * 7) I’ve changed the 2 year rule to just one year for how far back you have to go saying your character hasn’t been around and also I think we should at least allow the possibility for special circumstances if users can come up with good reasons why their character has been around all along, but those special reasons need Admin approval.
 * 8) I propose we completely do away with cabin counts and 3 god parent choices and all of that. Now hear me out. I talked to Bach because I was wondering why that was a thing to start. She said that it was something that TBUA, Ghost and Pers were the users who really pushed for, which was partly because they were also apparently being sorta selfish about who they wanted to accept into their fav cabins. She also said that it had something to do with Flame wanting them even for CTF, but guess what, we don’t even have CTF or any activity that requires even cabin counts. I mean I think it was fine for when the wiki was starting to at least try to fill evenly, but we’re like 4 years in and with everything else going on, I just can’t come up with any good reason why we still need it besides just the whole change is scary stuff. This would be less work on AS dept AND it would allow users making claims to be more thorough and specific with their histories. I mean if it gets to the point that one cabin has like 50 demigods in it, we can always call for an emergency vote to block that cabin from new demigods temporarily. I think that would save us time.
 * 9) I know some users have refused to accept claims all because of it missing a signature, that was never supposed to be enforced that harshly. It’s too easy to find the owner of a claim to outright refuse to accept it if that’s all the claim needs. I mean it’s fine to ask if they would, but don’t deny a claim just for that.
 * 10) I think appearance shouldn’t be in the claim, obviously the character looks like something or someone, but it’s not like they’ll be denied if we don’t like it. I also don’t think that the Admin Team should be responsible for enforcing already in use models or models that “may” be “too famous”. Admins can mediate disputes that come up because of it, but I think it wastes our time to run around trying to keep track of what models are shared, which ones have permission, which ones don’t and stuff. If you find someone sharing a model that you didn’t give permission to, politely explain that you were using that model first and do not wish to share, if they become a problem about it, then seek an Admin to help you solve the issue. If anyone sees a model they think is too easily recognised because of how famous they are, then feel free to put it up to vote (please check first to see if there was one already or not).
 * 11) I think having weapons in claims is a waste, I mean as far as it being strictly required. We have policy about OP weapons, just because they said one thing in the claim doesn’t mean it’ll prevent them from breaking the rule later. It would be less work on us if we just enforce this as needed if we catch people breaking the weapon policies.
 * 12) I think we should open up the BC to any level user to join, I don’t see any good reason why they can’t and the BC really needs interest right now.
 * 13) I also think that RBs should be allowed to do the first level of claiming on BC claims instead of Admins only. I never understood that any way and it would help keep claims up to date I think.

Our Departments Revamped
I know people have talked about this off and on for awhile, and I think the most annoying problem people have with the Departments is no one seems to know who does what where in which department when. I’d like to try and maybe rearrange them a bit, add a fourth crat run department and maybe change Support to an Admin run department as it’s just support so I don’t see why it would need a crat to run it. I also think we should actually assign official helpers to departments so they know where they should be doing stuff.

I know other users awhile ago had other ideas on this, some wanted less departments, some wanted more, some wanted no changes, we could argue how to do this for months and get nothing done, but I feel like this is more clear than we have now and better divides the work up. When it comes to enforcing policies I think that level five users should be allowed to report and/or tive out verbal warnings, and then wikia helpers and up should be able to give out official warnings, and Admins and Crats are the only ones that can approve bans.

The 5 Departments:
Claiming Department= This would consist of all claims Pet claims, regular claims, BC claiming, Quest claims, mission claims. This would also involve keeping the claim pages up to date and organised. It would also mean helping users make their claims and get started. They will also at least have to help upkeep the user/character lists by adding characters and users and stuff to it. This would be a Crat run department. Human Resources= This would be the group of users that keep track of user activity, issues with pages, all the tedious upkeep work like categories, images, organisation. They’d be in charge of making sure users level up the right way, contacting users about their inactivity. They would help keep the user/character pages up to date. Recreational Department= They would be responsible for running contests and events and would work closely with the other departments. They would help run things that Development creates, they would help new users learn how to role play after going through claiming. It would help to be in chat a lot where they can connect with the users and always have an idea what people are doing. Maybe users willing to go around and initiate roleplays with new users to make them feel welcome. Bach actually gave me the idea for this department because she reminded me how there really isn’t a lot of people pushing activities and getting excited about them. These guys would be like our cheerleaders Research and Development (R&D)= This is for the users who want to come up with ideas, plans, new projects, things to test, basically stuff that will keep the wiki moving forward. They’ll also actively poll the wiki and talk to the users about what their needs and wishes are. This will also be for users who want to help design thing like templates, the main page, basically keeping the wiki looking nice. Not like the cleaning work like Human Resources, but like Bach used to do with updating coding looks styles and stuff. This is a good department for users who are either strong leaders or able to inspire users to get excited about things. They should also be proactive about getting work done. People in this department need to be able to get stuff done without being told or asked. They’d also be in charge of monitoring the new idea I had for an ideas/suggestions board/forum that I want to get users to actually use more (see down further for more info). Aid and Support Services= So this is sorta like General Support, but it also includes like helping users with anything they need, guidance, direction. So they’d monitor the help and debate forums. They’d help other departments if they are low on help or have extra work.

Official Helper vs Level Five/Reg User
So I think some people think that they can’t help unless they are an official helper or higher, and the only difference is that Helpers can do and help with more official things that normally regular users wouldn’t have permission to do. Like help check claims, but there’s actually very little that Official Helpers can do that Regular users can’t if they want to help out. I think as dept heads we each need to be more proactive about keeping a page that says what projects we’re working on, what things others can help with and stuff.

Ideas And Suggestions Forum/Board
We need to get users more active in coming up with ideas for activities, events, contests, fun things, and stuff. I mean I know we can’t just let anyone do anything they want or ask for, but I think users right now are sometimes afraid to give any ideas. There should be a place to talk about ideas with others so the ideas can become community discussions. The more people there are helping come up with ideas, the easier it would be on the Admin Team. There’s a lot that needs to be done on the wiki with Activities stuff, especially fixing the older activities like Quests and Missions and counsellor challenges and making them more interesting to people so maybe users will want to do them and actually finish them.

Camp Quests
So i realise this isn’t like dead dead, but from what I’ve been told it’s also not nearly as active as it was at the beginning either. I know at one point a change was made in how challenging for lt or head worked with needing to have led quests, but now I’m wondering if requiring less of users has just made the wiki even more stagnant about roleplay, which last I checked was why we’re all here to begin with. I don’t really have an answer, but I had some ideas I guess:

Being able to go on a quest should be bumped down to as soon as you have a claimed character, I mean Percy had a quest pretty much as soon as he got to camp.
 * 1) Right now the only rule is that you wait a month after creating a character, and IF the current head or Lt has a quest led, then to challenge you also need a quest led. What if we do it so that you have to wait a month OR lead a quest. Now, I know that sometimes quests can take forever, but maybe the incentive of being able to challenge before the month will push people to actually post.
 * 2) I think we should pull the rule that a user can only lead one quest at a time, I mean if they have the time to lead more and want to, let’s let them because it gets people active.
 * 1) I think we should make it that you only need to be a level 2 to lead a quest, it gives the user a couple of weeks to learn their way around the wiki
 * 2) I think users who check quest claims, well some, are being too strict. I mean I read over the rules and asked Bach about it so I could understand them better, but they seem pretty vague, yet when people check them they get so picky about stuff. Bach told me that the only difference between a quest and a regular roleplay is that it should be, well she said “not foofy shit” basically like not some generic personal roleplay you do every day. It needs to be thought out, have a beginning, an end, kinda like a story. But they still need to make sense with our wiki, I mean people can’t go looking for the elder wand from Harry Potter or competing in the Hunger Games for Katniss or make like a god or goddess do something that doesn’t make any sense at all.
 * 3) If it’s a reasonable enough quest I think we should allow as few as 2 characters total. I also think that users should be able to rp more than one character on a quest. Maybe quests would go faster if like 2 users could each rp two of their characters, making 4 on the quest but less schedules to worry about.

So I get that this is all just a start, and there’s still way more that needs to be done, but sitting back and just wishing it would get better or making lots of blogs about things isn’t going to solve anything. For now this is a discussion, but I want to move these things into like official voting as soon as we can, so I don’t think we should talk about it for more than a week or two, especially if no one disagrees outright in the comments.

p.s. Bach’s helped me a bit wording this because I generally suck at this stuff, so if parts sound like her that’s why, oh and she says hi by the way.