#fr forum sign

[allocenart]

[C] Forum Signature: Lux

Chibi Flat Color Forum Signature from FR.

Dragon: Lux Owner: Luunai

These are exclusive commissions I get only from Flightrising Forum's! You can see and get one in my FlightRising Forum here.

All my Social Medias: https://linktr.ee/allocen

[carriesthewind]

.

[here-there-were-dragons]

after seeing the last full day of constant extremely vitriolic and accusatory rants acting like they're under seige from a ceaseless tide of hateposting compared to the like two more posts i've seen even mildly criticizing the new breed. yeah i'm convinced people are mostly just making up a guy to be mad at. and i checked onsite and unless the staff have deleted a bunch of shit again (which wouldn't surprise me, they're fond of their nukehammer) i didn't find very much of the Endless Flood Of Disgusting Hatred Tm there that people seem to think they're drowning in either, beyond like, a couple of people on the announcement post being rude, and like one disappointment thread where some of the posters were being shitty and fatphobic about it. if nothing's been deleted then the only way i can imagine the near-universal angry defensive outcry forming as it has is if people are going out of their way to interpret literally every single criticism as being secretly about fatness even and seemingly especially when it's not. and two thirds of the "defenses" are just basically "people aren't allowed to have different tastes from me or want different things out of a design" and are one step over the line in the notes of a minor art edit post off from being like that person in the keel announcement thread way back that went around insulting people's keel reinterpretations and calling them skin conditions. i've already seen people calling the person that edited the male silhouette just to move the tail back a little a fatphobe and an entitled whiner and bigot.

people going to legit war over this thing and the mere idea that anyone might not love it quite as much as they do. people defending a goddamned dragon png from what seems to be a largely imagined horde of dogwhistling bigots like it's life or death. acting like the lead actress of wicked when anyone mildly alters a precious dragon png in a way that does not even remotely alter it's weight. i don't know how to express how absurd all of this is to people who seem to genuinely think that the existence of dragon dislikers is a direct and personal attack on their spirit and sanctity of humanity and that this is some sort of vital symbolic battleground for ideological victory against the dark forces of bigotry and hatred. meanwhile i can barely even find anyone both on tumblr and on the forums mentioning the weight as anything but a boon. which again, makes it seem like people are going absolutely out of their way to interpret every single criticism-adjacent post as secretly being about fatness. i like the things generally speaking and i feel very clearly that it's completely impossible for me to say anything honest about some of my issues with them because i know for a fact that literally no matter what i actually say i have an issue with or how clearly i articulate what i'm talking about i'll just get a flood of people screeching about how "you can just say you hate fat people and go" and shrieking about how entitled i am and how i'm a hypocrite because someone else once said they wanted something that mildly contradicts the thing i'm saying i'd prefer and as we all know people you disagree with are a monolith and yelling about how no one is allowed to complain about biological plausibility or factual consistency because it's a "fantasy game" even if neither thing is literally ever brought up at all, and so on. because making sure that literally no one ever even mildly criticizes anything about a dragon png game ever is the single most important social issue of our time i guess. if you mention any issue that could be even remotely construed as related to their weight or body type on any level you get called a fatphobe and if you DON'T have any issue even possibly arguably related to their weight then they just accuse you of being a closet fatphobe anyway. lack of evidence of guilt is treated as evidence of guilt! you can't win! no one's allowed to dissent in the slightest without it being a secret signal of evil and a direct personal attack on Likers in general! and you're not allowed to *like* something unless it's completely unconditional with absolutely no actual thought or criticism either! the repeated posts i've seen as well about how "I'vVE never felt the urge to go on site just to say i don't like something, that's so weird, what's wrong with you?" are especially baffling and stupid as well, because how the fuck do you think the developers are supposed to figure out what people want and don't want if the only thing anyone's allowed to do is log on, post some largely contentless mindless positivity like "OOOGHOUGHHHGHG I LOVE" with zero delving into any real aspect of exactly why they like it, and never say anything at all when they don't? don't lie to me, i know no amount of constructiveness in criticism is ever enough for you no matter how much these types go on about how criticism needs to be constructive. it didn't take very long at all for the people yelling about concrit back in the day to jump all the way to "actually concrit is bad and evil and entitled too. no one is allowed to say anything unpositive about anything i like ever no matter how politely and constructively you word it". this is a problem fr's had for it's entire lifespan and all it's ever done is get worse and more gaslighty and goalpostmove-y. laying eyes on this eldritch horror of a fandom mindset feels unsettlingly like talking to my mother when she's at the absolute deepest point of her deluded violent manipulative everybody's-out-to-get-me-and-i'm-the-purest-saint-alive lunacy.

and i know if anyone manages to find this post (god i hope not) i'll just get someone putting words in my mouth going on about how i and everyone else just want to bitch about their weight and them not being "elegant" enough (and that apparently people have decided that's a secret code for Skinny now) even though i literally never said any of those things and neither did 90% of the other people i've seen even mildly criticizing anything

and i can't emphasize enough to any outsiders that might be watching that all of this is about a png of a grub-based dragon on a neopets clone dragon game, that i like and think represents a step in the right direction for breed design philosophy and body type variety

[salty-cs]

https://www.tumblr.com/salty-cs/766811244829294592/is-there-any-recent-proof-of-happily-wrathful?source=share

This is very much what is to be believed until they prove they don't think this way anymore.

Just because you stop talking about it does not mean you don't believe it.

But here, I went through their CS, TH, and FR

Their TH has about 400 characters, so some of these things are gathered from several characters and I cannot link all of them

Still doesn't accept LGBTQ+ ships: https://www.chickensmoothie.com/Forum/viewtopic.php?f=85&t=3897641&p=130394899&hilit=Fxm#p130394899

Still heavily religious including praying for others when they don't ask

https://toyhou.se/HappilyWrathful

Seems to have a thing for mass murder, drawing their characters injured / on the brink of death, childish and then sexualizing them

Has several characters that were "slaves" including child trafficking, fighting rings, abuse

Several of their child characters were horribly abused, witness horrible acts of gore, in life threatening situations, other weird shit to do with kids

Allows and asks for gore art of their chars including kids.

A sign they're still heavily religious is the continued hatred for witches which they heavily associated as being on the same tier with being unsupportive of the LGBTQ+

Image dump, these images contain the subjects above

https://imgur.com/a/UuIU81y

.

[booasaur]

how are you downloading Ici tout commence?

From the official site!

First, I use a VPN to get a French IP (or Belgian--I'm not sure which they accept, I just know these two work) so I can access the network's streaming site, TF1+. You should be able to sign up for a free account without issue. This is the page for the season 4 eps:

https://www.tf1.fr/tf1/ici-tout-commence/videos/saison-4

Apparently there are always two eps in advance available for the premium subscribers but I'm not caught up plus I think it'd be a little harder to sign up for an actual paid account so I probably won't be able to do that.

So normally I would use youtube-dl/yt-dlp to download the eps but that won't work here, or at least not without some extra steps, because these are DRMed. This is where it gets a little tricky and the whole process isn't super well documented both because it changes a lot and it makes more sense to teach people to learn how to do it than how to do it and also because, well, the more these methods are spread, the more networks change things up and make things harder.

This thread can help you get started: https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/412113-MYTF1-Help-needed-New-DRM-system-can-t-download

The whole forum is quite useful and I've only had to post for help a couple of times, mostly I just search my issue and read through.

That provided command in the second post, that's something to be used in your command line, on Windows in Start you can open that by typing in cmd or PowerShell or just google what you'll need for your computer.

These are the things you'll need to get to run the command:

N_m3u8DL-RE is a tool you can google and download, and also ffmpeg and mp4decrypt. You'll want them in the same folder for convenience. (I think you might need to install python too? If it says you do, then go ahead, lol.)

The way to get the key, this is the most gatekept part, probably. The various streamers out there use different methods of encryption and increasing security levels, and if you read up on it, you'll see stuff about kid and pssh and cdm and L3, it can be overwhelming, but in this case, the things you need are relatively easily accessible.

I'll tell you how to get the pssh and the license URL and you'll be able to use those to get the key. There are several tools you can use them on, one is public and easy, one is private but still easy-ish, and one is pretty complex and not a route I've gone down myself yet (it's the pinned thread in that particular forum). I don't want to link any of them myself, but I'll link to a thread that mentions the easy public one. It does go down at times which is why the hardcore people recommend that last method.

First, before you click on an ep, open up your browser's Developer Tools, usually Ctrl+Shift+i will do the trick. Go over to your Network tab, this shows all the requests your browser makes when you go to a site.

Then click on the episode in the actual browser. You'll see a flood of requests in the Network tab, filter on mpd.

Select the mpd result and the details for it show on the side, click on Preview. Scroll down until you see <!-- Widevine -->. A couple of lines below it, you'll see something like <cenc:pssh>AAA[a bunch of characters]</cenc:pssh>

Grab that whoooole part that starts with AAA, that's the pssh. Go to the Headers detail tab while you're there and grab the Request URL, this is the mpd link we're going to use later.

Now to get the license. Usually you can filter in your Devtools Network tab on license or, in this case, widevine. Since we're already on the Headers detail tab, grab this Request URL now, it should start with https://widevine-proxy-m.prod.p.tf1.fr/proxy?

Now go back to that easy public tool linked in that thread I linked, lol, and just fill in the PSSH and the License. Hit Send and you get a list of three keys at the bottom. I've always gone for the one in the middle and not bothered with all three, but you can try them all.

So at this point, you should be able to fully create and use the command in the first forum link above. If you read the documentation for N_m3u8DL-RE, there are various flags you can use, --save-name "Outputname" will let you name the output what you want, -sv best defaults to the best video quality, -sa best is best audio quality, and so on.

The way to get the subtitle is to turn on subtitles on the video player on the site and to go back to the DevTools box and filter on textstream. Grab the first request, the one that ends with =1000.dash and paste it into a new browser address, and change the .dash to .vtt. That's the subtitle. :) You can use the free tool Subtitle Edit to both convert it to srt, which will let most video players play it with your video, and there's also an Auto-translate option that lets you translate to English. It offers several ways but as I don't have a Google API, I just use the normal "slow" method, it's not that bad.

A second way to get the subtitle is to use the same command as when you're downloading the ep but remove the -M format=mp4 at the end, and instead add -ss 'id="textstream_fra=1000":for=all'

This was all figured out through a LOT of trial and error on my part so please do try your own best if you hit some issues, that's the best way to learn. Also, I just don't want to be the helpdesk on this, lol.

[cerillosvillage]

Lair Review Stream October 3rd, 18:00 FR Time

I'll be doing a lair review live stream in a couple of days! To sign up for a review, please see this forum post:

[fetabathwater]

slides in here 🧎‍♂️ Fans, Baby, Wild card!

questions here!

This got so long I had to stop myself finally.

Fans: How is their relationship with their fans? Do they go out of their way to interact? 

Look, Jennifer Lamb is a category 5 hurricane of emotion on the average day, but something about the fans just twinges something in her brain. In the small bars, yeah she'd be more than happy to sit around the bar later, chatting with the ones who'd hung around, let them buy her a beer or two, and go on her way. Sign some things, and y'know throwing out the usual guitar picks and broken drumsticks to the local small crowd. Discounting shirts and homemade merch at a bar while they were one of the bands to float through the night. Maybe throwing everything in a free tote bag that has a scribbled logo. Especially as favours to any bar owners who let them in, then it'd probably get a lil more of a personal touch especially if they had kids of their own who were fans and/or they were fans themselves, then it would still largely be merch. More or less short circuits her because people like the band. And Her. And the Music. And they want to HAVE something of hers. Wild.

But her interaction with fans is actually her being an absolute nutjob and trawling fansites. Most of her private life has already ended up online or splashed across local magazines, especially because of the very public fight/breakup with Seven, and then recently finding out from Maya that the number one fansite is run by a teenager… it's quite accessible in the worst way. Jen is super interested in reading fansites, just to see what they've posted/what they know. The kind of manic 'I should be sleeping 3am but I'm on wikipedia energy' but instead she's going down a rabbit hole of her own history, especially when people still keep up photos of Seven in the band - and she fucking loves polls. (Jen you would've loved og gossip girl fr). Definitely has made a throwaway account on a forum more than once (she forgets the password not long after making an account) and like. Loves to deep dive on timelines and people breaking down the meaning in her songs. She is that one person who responds to the song meanings like 'its about having sex relax its not that deep' and then is like. Told she's wrong and banned. Also it's so funny for her, when she's wrangled into appearing on their social media, to drop like some batshit insane comment or demo, and then has her little 1 hour scroll through these people going bananas. She has a few favourite accounts bookmarked, even. Stupid head.

Sheenas as the fan name for her came about after one of Jen's first solo covers (pre-breakup actually) was her doing 'Sheena Is A Punk Rocker', but also dressed like Sheena, Queen of the Jungle from the comics, at a Halloween party for the local crowd, and it kind of stuck... she only found out why recently from Maya. So not only is she like, confused anyway, but then she's like doing maths about when this kid would've seen that video. Did they see all of it? Should she check what versions were uploaded? Can she get a copy?

But essentially she's now very much publicly in the space of actually having Orion largely coach her through interactions because... she's floundering. Literally becomes a publicist's wet dream with how she can get the smiles and the eyes and the hand movements, and mostly manages to not let her mouth run, but it's like she needs to be micromanaged because this is no longer the comfortable small bar shit she loves and wants to go back to. Even before ending up on the TV, really. A lot of the focus is also on (pretty much) deflecting questions about Seven, but in particular the like months following it all. There was one very salty former fan who took it quite personally and just missed Jen's eye with a pin (that they actually had handed out at one gig many moons before). And her pre-pin incident comments about him weren't even bad! People just lost their marbles.

She did actually set up a PO Box at one point, with the intent of people sending fanmail to because she has a soft spot for handwritten letters, but it hasn't been advertised since the pin incident. Superfans may know about it, but Jen also hasn't checked it in years.

Baby: How do they feel about Jazzy leaving? How are they coping? What are their plans to stay in touch?

I looked back on my answer for this and. Okay no, we're changing our tune a bit.

Whilst Jen is happy for her, and knows that fundamentally Jazzy wanted something different from her life than Jen did... a part of her resents that Jazzy was able to walk away. And it's not even resenting Jazz! Realistically, it's easier to think that, even for Jen, that she's just so mad that even after everything, Jazz is able to walk away with the house and the husband and the white picket fence (not really but y'know). Those are also just like little bitey thoughts that plague her and make her do the what-if spirals that always end up "why didn't I just walk away, too?" because Jen doesn't even know if she wants any of the other things, anyway.

So Jen's coping is like correlation and causation type scale nonsense going on, especially with choosing to tour with Soft Violence, the way Jazzy reacted, even, and she's like. In such a place where she doesn't even know if she wants to reach out, keep updated and update Jazz, etc, etc. Because she also absolutely loves Jazz, and is so happy for her, and honestly wants to be there with her through this rollercoaster she's about to get on, because it's Jazzy. It's Jazzy. And god, she misses her so much already.

Wild card: Tell us something about your MC! Feel free to really just roll us over with an emotional steamroller and crush the souls out of our bodies, if you’d like. (You’re also welcome to choose one of the other questions to answer!)

Only other tattoo is the one on her lower stomach (Medusa head) (yeah that got repurposed sry Harper I'm doing smth else with you) but she absolutely loves the awful jokes she can make about it when people react after seeing it for the first time. "If someone is getting to a point where they can see it, [she] definitely knows that something turned to stone."

Jen does not understand how her putting on her glasses and Depression Greys™ makes her like. Walk around Clark Kent style. Fascinates her and compels her to try to do stupid shit with it.

This combined with her absolute inability to understand nor use social media has compelled some to see her as a #cryptid, which just further confuses her. She's seen her face on a post. She knows it exists. Yes she knows the name of the app? (don't embarrass her, man, there's hot people here)

Oh! And combining this with her Average Voice Resting Time™, where she's Clark Kent-ed out, wheat bagged and this close to just turning into a burrito, she uses a small whiteboard to talk. She's quite verbose, unfortunately.

Her fave flower is Queen Anne's Lace, because its a complex lil flower made up of dozens of others, and at the centre is a tiny lil red bud. The apparent story for it's naming is a provocation of Queen Anne to make a more complex lace flower than another king's wife, and in doing so she pricked her finger, so a little droplet of blood landed in the middle. There's also a poem! It's also for safety and refuge, because it turns inwards and seemingly 'dies' when it is actually ready to grow. Also attracts wasps lmao. It's commonly mistaken for baby's breath, which is everlasting love… which isnt wrong for Jen either, however it is that inward protection. At the centre of it all, there is a burst of colour, and she wants to protect it… the internalisation of it all.

During high school, she ran one of those ‘Ask Annie’ columns in the school paper. Her advice was ridiculous, and it was really well received even if she was pulling answers out of thin air. She's not sure if anyone cracked that it was her.

It did lead her to testing out some situations on people before answering, even. Or outright going 'hey if xyz happened do you think doing abc would work'. She wasn't even trying to be subtle by the end.

Jen has a pet bearded dragon. Named Lizanardo Da Vinci.

Just like how she has Vlad the Impala

Was voted most likely to date a rockstar. Made out with her own mirror image in response.

Turns out she’s got a real knack for maths. No one knows where it came from. Jen was one of those 'coasted through on C+/B-' kind of students. But no one is ever ready for the quick maths.

The first time Jen went in to get contacts, and was trying to put them in, and her arm was weirdly angled and the optometrist was patient but it freaked her out to think about putting something basically on her eye. Seven kind of like, went through the motions with her until she was comfortable.

He still has the pair of glasses that were always left in the right side pocket of his jacket. The case is worn and faded and cracked and still has all the stickers and scribbles on them, but the frames are still fine, lenses are only a check or two old, but Jen never knew how to ask for them back.

With Seven, especially when they were much younger, watching scary movies was such a big deal and like they were breaking the rules at sleepovers, even if it meant they were literally terrified. For days. It became "their thing" and especially as they got older with rewatches and marathons, and then the band, and eventually dating, the inside jokes were always there. Sometimes, they even used it as bad flirting, which weird people out just as much, if not more, than the fact that they were attached at the hip. Jen hasn't even looked at one of those movies since, and deleted OSTs, etc, off of any and all things.

Is a big fan of meditation because a girl sometimes has a lot of pent up energy and just wailing on the mic doesn't cut it. Quiet time, Jen is in her attempt at a lotus position.

[echthr0s]

wild to think that our first encounter with plurality (not MPD/DID, but the broad spectrum of non-disordered plurality specifically) was actually a favourite author we used to have, who publicly wrote about the fact that she has actual relationships with her characters, who are 100% their own real people, and whose stories she is simply channelling for this world

so, functionally a soulbonder. a bestselling author getting on her forums and posting conversations between her and her characters as if they were as natural as anything. and then putting out a compendium for her series and putting those character-author conversations in hard print, because they were important to her, and important to all of us as fans

like.... I honestly couldn't have asked for a better example to Sid (young!me), whose only other framework for what was going on with her was either "imaginary friends that you never outgrew, haha, how cute" or "Somethin Big Wrong With You FR FR". nah. it is as natural as anything. and the ways it can present are numerous and varied and straight-up fascinating.

we did meet that author at a book signing in Jersey. we had her sign our book with the name we used on the forum, which was also the name of Sid's closest inworld companion at the time. we didn't reveal that part, but every time we looked at that inscription it still felt like he was being publicly recognised, as himself, for the first time

[starwood-stranded]

Non-FR roleplay-related vent

I love forum RP's, but I'm struggling sooo hard to find RP groups that appeal to me and don't use Discord as their primary platform. I like using Discord for OOC communication, but when it comes to RP threads themselves, I'd much rather write them somewhere easier to sort and archive, like a forum. What really hit me today was the fact that the toyhou.se forums are 90% Discord groups. Like, toyhou.se is a beautifully-crafted RP platform, and the Worlds forum is plainly intended for recruiting people to RP with you on toyhou.se, but I see about 3 toyhou.se/forum/website groups recruiting there, including my own -- all the others use Discord for threads. If I don't want to RP on Discord, where am I supposed to go?

And speaking of my own group ... I know the answer to "I can't find exactly what I want" is "make your own," but I've tried that, repeatedly, and everything I try to make flops. In my last few attempts, I've gotten plenty of interest -- sometimes more than I could fit in a group -- started setting things up, put lots of work into the group ... But then when I ask people to submit character sheets so we can start RPing, nobody responds. People won't even say "Sorry, I'm busy" or "I'm confused and need help"; there's just silence.One of my friends today pointed out that part of the problem might be that I usually have people sign up while an RP is still in development, so a little time (maybe a couple weeks) will pass between people being recruited and asked for character sheets, and in that time people just lose interest. But I can't just present people with a polished premise/platform and ask them to jump right in -- I find it extremely difficult to set up an entire RP group on my own, without any feedback to at least encourage me, if not actively help.

It seems like the only way to create an RP group at this point is to already have an existing RP group. I have a few RP buddies, but they don't really want to participate in the kind of structured group RP I like -- we do casual 1x1's on Discord, which are great, but I want something more. Two of my friends did go ahead and sign on to my latest project, but the other 9 people who signed up have gone radio silent, and I can't do it with just the three of us.

I'm at the point where I'm considering RPing in genres or settings that I don't even like just because I can actually find an active forum.

(If you're wondering why I don't like RPing on Discord, I find it very difficult to organize threads on Discord, with its channel system instead of boards full of discrete threads. I also like to be able to look back through threads, which is much easier in a forum environment than in Discord. Finally, I get overwhelmed by Discord notifications very easily -- I can't imagine how painful it would be to get a notification every time someone in a group makes an IC post. And yes, I know muting is a thing, but it's a hassle to manage.)

IDK what I expect from posting this here. Advice if anyone has any, maybe some sympathy if not? Actually, the realistic outcome is that no one will read this post, but [shrug].

[allocenart]

[C] Forum Signature: Foliage

Chibi Flat Color Forum Signature from FR.

Dragon: Fawn Owner: Foliage

These are exclusive commissions I get only from Flightrising Forum's! You can see and get one in my FlightRising Forum here.

All my Social Medias: https://linktr.ee/allocen

[desnik-fr]

Pinglist Widget

I understand they don't do ~everything~ yet but the pinglists are good

So far I'm seeing waaaay more people sign up in a shorter span of time than my Google pinglist, lots of new names, and they're adding themselves even if I don't log into the site

So speaking as someone who once had a Google pinglist over 1000 entries strong before I trimmed it,

I really really like these new FR-specific forum pinglists,,, they are much better, can't wait to see how they grow

...Now if only I enjoyed manually typing hundreds of weirdly-spelled usernames in order to send out my skins and accents!! Then I would be having a lot of fun

[mag200]

omg i was also a howrse kid…i briefly got back into it during the quarantine summer of 2020 but then stopped checking on my horses and my acc got deleted for inactivity :( i miss my horses maybe i should make a third account lmao

if you made a third account and i made a (counts on my fingers) i think fourth account, would you sign my guestbook in my ec forum?

fr tho it was so much fun. however when i revisited it in 2020 i couldnt stay bc as an adult playing it was far too tempting to spend all my real life money on it.

[clarenecessities]

6/18/23

it’s just kind of a huge fucking bummer when i’m all excited to learn shit and interact with people who care about motu and they keep dumping on satpop, often unprompted. like it’s been three years since i got into this stuff & i’m just now dipping my toes into the designated satpop boards because i know the general opinion among he-fans has been, shall we say, unfavorable--and it’s worse than i feared! like for a website that won’t let you say pussy they sure don’t shy away from disgusting rhetoric!

like it’s one thing for toyguru to Be An Idiot on his youtube channel, that’s on me for even trying to watch his content--idk man, this is a moderated forum where people are supposed to have genuine/good faith discussions, not complain about how unfuckable the teenagers look. i know i’m in the minority here, i’m not expecting it to be as busy as the he-man threads, but i’d like it to be as respectful at least. poor fucking Tallstar (and god bless Tallstar, fr) was out there carrying like 40% of the threads and just being swamped in miserably commentary from people who hated what they were watching.

i can’t in good conscience tell people to check out the org, because the people i interact with are satpop people first and foremost, and the org is incredibly inhospitable on that front. there’s like 19k members and nobody’s posted in the satpop boards since may 16th. i’m hesitant to post there, and i’ve been here for years. and yeah it sure doesn’t help that the main website has been down since october of 2021, but CHRIST. i know they’re doing shit behind the scenes. i know that. i have to believe that. they wouldn’t have been Entirely Down for 2 months otherwise, right? but all we have is the forums, and those don’t even indicate that SatPOP has ended. it’s just a bummer! it feels like, jesus, you cared about this for like 30 years, what changed now?

they don’t even have the ‘yeah sorry we’re down for maintenance, could be a few weeks/months’ alert up anymore, so anyone following a link to an article or something will just get redirected to the forums with no explanation.

and i still haven’t gotten my upgraded account. idek if it’s legal for them to refund me at this point because it’s been two years but i just want to change my icon. that’s all i fucking want. i’m not going to use my business email for this, i’ve had fucking four since i tried signing up. just let me in. let me in and like, actually hold people accountable for their shit, perhaps?

god. i should have just stuck with the modern shit. there’s no reason to be doing this to myself at this point. it’s nice to interact with historians and people i respect and all but christ, is it worth it? i can’t even tell someone to go fuck themselves. the censors are higher than on neopets yet the things i’ve seen people say are somehow more disgusting than twitter

whatever. fuck you, Lokus. Lokus go to hell challenge. explode x1000

[humbums-inatrenchcoat]

it's been, officially, ten years since i signed up for eldemore. i still remember the shape of that day; stumbling upon the site, probably from a CS thread, and clumsily navigating to the sign-up on my elderly secondhand phone with the pull-out keyboard. i remember agonizing over the username. thinking myself so smart when i pulled "interestingword" out of the ether - because it's a word that's interesting, see, aren't i clever - and looking with adoring fascination on the batches of ungrown pets i adopted immediately afterward.

i took to the forums. i was an idiot kid. i ran my mouth and posted everywhere and was unabashedly social, partaking in every activity i could find with ravenous enthusiasm. i stayed up late to make dozens of posts and send PMs, constant PMs, daily, good lord; yesterday i sent one PM to someone on FR, and immediately shut my computer off afterwards.

am i embarassed by so much of what i did back then? oh, 100%, no question. i promise my character has developed wildly since then. but do i regret it? god, no. i've made lasting friendships, all of whom i think of everyday, even if our actual orbits only bump occasionally. people shared recommendations for shows and music i maintain a vested interest in now, all these years later. my name, to those i know and love most, was coined on those forums by someone else's hand.

i can trace so much of who i am today to that curious evening ten years ago, signing up for a site with a cool dragon on the front page, and it is with flagrant honesty that i say: if i had the choice, i would still do it all again.

here's to ten more years, whatever the future holds for us. <3

[saltminerising]

A few years ago (I was 11) I made an account and I was absolutely insufferable, begged for stuff, made extremely annoying comments on forum posts, average 11 y/o stuff. Then I started multiaccounting and funneling as well from that account and got caught after a few months. I was absolutely devastated, but I made a new account once I was 13, and I am now absolutely thriving on FR on that same account. Nobody knows who I was before, though I am a little tempted to name drop my old account just to see if anybody figures it out. I now have money, connections to money, connections to people, and some quite famous and pricy dragons. (Maybe this is your sign to restart if your FR account isn’t doing so well). I will admit I have to double check when talking about older drama (in case somebody asks why I know when I wasn’t on FR at that time) but otherwise I genuinely have to thank 11 year old me for getting myself banned. Would’ve never come to this point in time if I was still on that same account. No idea why I am here, typing this out, but I have not told anyone for years and I feel like it is incredibly entertaining to know that anybody you know could be me. :)

[cerillosvillage]

I feel like I say this every year, but every year, younger and younger members join the site and it seems to hold true: I do not think most FR users are old enough to have experience with pre-social media web forums. And to someone whose only experience is the wild west of FB/Twitter/Tumblr/Tiktok, where the userbase is in the millions and moderation is done by faceless contracted employees who are more concerned with removing videos of real-life violence, FR's moderation rules can seem draconian (no pun intended).

There's a very good reason forums traditionally have "do not discuss mod decisions" rules, and that is because letting people openly talk about why threads were locked or people were banned can create great schisms in the community that can never be healed. I speak from experience here; from like 2007-2009, I was one of only two admins on a small community forum (there were no other mods). One day, after brief discussion with the other admin, I removed a user from a roleplay for breaking powerplay rules. The user made a thread to discuss the removal while I was at school, and when I got home I openly confronted him. This caused a nasty back-and-forth with pretty much the entire (small) community weighing in. Most users agreed with the moderation decision, but the fighting lasted for hours and tens of pages before the other admin stepped in and banned the original user. But the forum never recovered after this; every new RP (which were the main point of the forum) got mired in logistical fighting over which rules were fair or not. Eventually, with no RP sign up remaining civil enough to start a game, the userbase all left and the forum shuttered completely.

I saw something similar happen on a LiveJournal RP community - a former admin "called out" the mod team for unfairly upholding rules, the users all took sides, and then 3/4 of the users left and the game - which had been one of the most successful and popular on the site - fizzled out.

This is not to say I'm unsympathetic to skin artists' complaints about skin rules. The rules have a very "I can't describe it but I know it when I see it" feel, which is unfair to users when they have to fork over premium currency to make user-generated content. (I understand the need to sometimes keep banned things vague, because you can't account for all extremes, but there should be clearer guidelines for "this is okay" if there can't be super defined "this is not okay" guidelines.)

My point isn't that users shouldn't push for change; FR staff is getting better at listening to user complaints. But don't be surprised when you do something that is clearly against forum rules and it gets removed. Take your organizing off site. Keep things to the appropriate forums. Do not link petitions or complaint threads in your skin shops.