When looking for a forum RPG, is the host important for your choice?

I care a lot about which host is used because I simply don't like a lot of hosts. I find them hard to navigate and simply don't enjoy writing on them. It takes away from my experience. I will NOT write on proboards or xenforo. I hate them.

 

Host isn't important to me. Content, staff (and staff reputation), community reception, navigation, and visibility are important to me.

 

From a Star Trek RPG point of view I have to say that there are certain organisations I avoid due to past experience. Actually, let me rephrase that – my time is more limited now than it used to be, so I gravitate towards the games that are run by people I know of old, where I know the style and quality of gameplay are up my street. It's probably different in PBEM to forum-based play.

 

For me, it's the staff. Sure, the boards can look fantastic, and that'll keep my attention for a few minutes. But the staff is what'll keep me there - or get me gone, right quick.

 

I honestly don't mind about the host. I'm more concerned about whether the skin looks nice or I can actually see everything laid out easily on the site, and aside from that, the host doesn't exactly matter. Like, you can have terrible skins on JCink and gorgeous ones on really unknown hosts.

 

As a player, I honestly never looked. If the people and the writing were good enough, that was all the mattered to me. I actually didn't even know that jcink existed until I started looking for more forums to play on, and I don't see much of a difference between that and any other forum-format board, aside from general aesthetics. Jcink people seem to hold FAR more stock by how 'pretty' the format and posts are, and often use fancy posts and the like.

I...am not a coder and I don't do great at making my posts look fantastic outside of a normal text box. I pay people to make signatures for me, or draw my own (theyre often pretty bad) and if people care about the RP they won't nag me about it.

 

As a player I'm partial to jcink but will use other hosts if the board is appealing enough.

As a staff member it's jcink or nothing. I've tried MyBB and SMF and they're too difficult to skin.

 

Yes and no. I'm a creature of habit so I will gravitate to the host most familiar to me, but over the years I learned to code (actually HTML, not just that BBCode stuff), so that definitely helped broaden my horizon. The most important feature to me, where forum hosting is concerned, is can I customize it? I need a visually immersive forum, personally - and when I build rpgs I try to provide that to my players in turn.

 

I can't say I have ever particularly cared about forum hosting service so much as forum appearance—is it mobile friendly? Can I log in, read, and reply from my phone? Is the text accessible in terms of size? Are the colors contrasting enough? Those are things that I have come to care about more than which platform the admins are using, though I say that as someone who self-hosts and runs a phpBB board. Take that as you will. lol

 

Speaking as a lurker, I'm not too picky about how the forum is hosted as long as its open to the public and posts are easy to find. Livejournal-based games can be a little tricky to navigate for someone unfamiliar with how the website works.

 

If it's in the genre, active, the site skin is pleasing, and looks like it's sustainable idc about the host.

 

It depends. I regularly RP on forums so those are my main sources of RP goodness.

IPS is my favourite. Although I've played on all kinds.

 

I don't really care about host so long as they can legally accommodate the rating of game I play on. So basically not proboards or free jcink.

 

It looks as if some hosts cater to very specific/specialized types so there is something there. Like Jcink sites are all cookie cutter layouts (which I don't like for some reason) for example.

 

I've seen a lot of sites not allow Proboards advertising because of their "Terms of Service" now. I mean, I mostly use Jcink, but I am curious about what's going on with that.

 

Yes, to me the host site is very important to me. I personally prefer Jcink over proboards,

 

Nowadays, I actually think it's less important. I look for a good story, that everything I'm looking for is visible, and that it's active.

 

Anything that I can't intuitively operate right away, I'm out.

 

I would love to know that too! I run a site on proboards. While advertising I've seen sites that say this, and I'll admit it pissed me off a bit. The advertised on my site first, and then say I can't advertise on theirs. My only idea of maybe why some sites have this restriction is because some hosts (Like Jcink) offer a premium version that lets them include mature content while proboards does not.

Personally though, I'm willing to try any host if I like the site. That includes the overall aesthetic, the activity, the plot, etc. I'll join if it interests me. When it comes to making a site though, I generally stick to proboards because that's what I've been making sites on for years.

 

personally i don't know much about other hosting sites or the like, so i don't have much of an opinion about it. if i was better at coding i would hose my own site and do it that way, however i only know how to do the premade layouts supplied by code/resource sites like caution and thousand fireflies etc. so i really enjoy jcink, but i'm open to trying new things as long as it isn't proboards or journal style