[quote=@ArenaSnow]
Indeed. Everything here's built from the ground up - I doubt this site is Mahz's priority in life, so I'm not surprised things are missed.
[/quote]
Yeah, more reason why I think a few trusted people should have access to some of the features needed to maintain the place, if he doesn't have time to do it himself. Not inherently criticising his practices, since I wouldn't let a role-play site take priority over - for example - my relationship or my story project, but it still seems like a logical idea to me. That's assuming anyone here actually has his trust and wouldn't abuse that power.

I'm sort of inclined to agree with the previously mentioned comment about the way the forums are organized by writing level instead of devotion level, honestly.

There's really not a whole lot of difference between 'casual' and 'advanced' in the sense that both generally require decent enough grammar and punctuation, and should avoid one-liners. Sometimes an 'advanced' role-player won't put up a large number of paragraphs simply because there's not enough information to respond to or the role-play is currently focused on conversation (meaning all they'd really be writing is responses and their internal thoughts). At the same time, a 'casual' role-player will sometimes need to post more than they normally would in order to give a satisfactory level of writing due to being unable to give all the significant details if they don't write enough. Also, there's a real problem with how the level of depth is presented, since you could have threads in 'advanced' with very simple plots and characters and then threads in 'casual' that have very in-depth plots and characters.

Of course, this is an issue for more reasons than just the difference in writing levels being badly defined. After all, there's no mention of skill level in other categories (Arena, 1x1, Nation, Tabletop), and we've got a tab system that allows us to specify a thread as being 'free', 'casual', 'advanced', et cetera, so I don't even see a point in having those as forums. I'm actually inclined to agree with the idea that they should be categorized based on dedication rather than writing levels. People who don't want to have to deal with someone suddenly disappearing or not putting enough investment into the IC/OOC - unless they have a [i]good[/i] reason of course, since not everyone is just getting lazy or losing interest and then blaming it on life getting in the way (though plenty of people do that too) - can have a forum dedicated to people who don't want to deal with it, while the more whimsical role-players can have a place separate. Honestly, the former are more likely to care enough about a role-play to be the ones who improve their writing - again, not including people who genuinely do have a lot of things getting in the way of posting - so they'd end up fitting 'advanced' in the long run anyway.

When all is said and done, there's just too little of a gap between 'casual' and 'advanced' since a lot of people who can easily post several paragraphs and love heavy focus on depth (like myself) end up taking part in role-plays in the 'casual' threads a lot of the time from what I can tell. Still, I can understand that it'd probably be a bit of a stretch to completely change the format of the forums this late into the life of the site, especially considering all of the threads would likely need to be moved around and reorganized, so I'm not actually thinking this is an idea we should [i]use[/i], but it does make sense in my head.

For all intents and purposes, I work the entire time I'm awake (I'm not getting payed, but that's beside the point) - including on weekends - and sometimes end up having to do all-nighters to keep track of my work, yet I'm still able to manage a long-distance relationship and remain the most active person in all of the primary threads I'm involved with on this site. It's frustrating having to deal with people who don't have enough dedication to at least [i]attempt[/i] to put in a similar amount of effort, even if I - by [i]no[/i] means - expect people to post daily.

Edit: Fixing typos. Sleep deprivation -- gotta love it.