[quote=@BrokenPromise]
[@Karkinos] I find personality sections work best when you give some direction and mention things that actually matter. If left unchecked, yes, it just becomes a collection of random facts. Your character preferring sweet drinks to alcoholic ones isn't really important to the RP. The fact that they build robots as a hobby means your character has a background in robotics, despite their occupation being an accountant or something.

Yes, good sheets do not always mean a good character. Just as a good resume doesn't mean someone is a good fit for the job. That's why interviews exist. Fortunately, it is very easy to look at a posters history to find out how they write characters, if they cause a lot of OOC drama, etc. The types of things they choose to focus on also tells you a lot about the direction they want to take the character in, or what they feel is important about a character. 

Most importantly, as a GM, I just like potential story hooks to be exposed so that I can wrap the story around the characters. I don't need to know every last detail about your character's backstory, just "They use to work for the mob" is enough to let me know it's possible a mob NPC might know of your character. 

I find writing samples are sort of unessisary, as I can just look at someone's post history. Everyone has that one epic post they want to share, but how does their writing look at it's worst, when they aren't working on something epic?

[/quote]

Also a personal thing. 

Hidden tricks, or so in CS and such applications really turn me off. If you want a writing sample or so, please just make it clear. 

I've seen someone use a very brilliant but never seen before broken img type  code to hide the writing prompt, that's bloody hard to find when you on mobile melded into the centre of a paragraph. 

Writing samples... 50/50 on em... But people, please be honest. 

The codling was cool. The level of trick. Far less.