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  • If you were supposed to get an email from the forum but didn't (e.g. to verify your account for registration), email Wes at [email protected] or talk to me on Discord for help. Sometimes the server hits our limit of emails we can send per hour.
  • Get in our Discord chat! Discord.gg/stararmy
  • 📅 April 2024 is YE 46.3 in the RP.

You Are All Awesome

You, the SARPer reading this right now, are awesome.

Tonight in the chatroom people were talking about their various real-life challenges and it really touched me how we have such a diverse group of really unique members. We've got guys, girls, people somewhere between...we've got people with mental conditions, medical conditions, addictions, financial hardship, abuse victims, and more. These people are people you roleplay with every day here on the forums and they're a lot like you. We are all here because we share a common bond of imagination. We're all a little geeky. We all have stuff in our lives we wish we could change or stuff that troubles us, and Star Army helps us escape that stuff when we want.

So I only ask that you be sensitive to your fellow members. We're in this together and nobody wants to be teased over something that's probably not under their control, so just don't. In general people are respectful in the community so this message isn't a warning or complaint, instead it's praise - keep being good to each other, work together, and keep making new friends!

It's almost summer now and I'm reminded about my start with online roleplay ten years ago in the summer of 2000, and followed by the creation of Yui and the PNUgen RP, which was followed by the Star Army community. We didn't get the Star Army domain until 2003. Ever since then we've grown in membership and quality, thanks to great GMs and faithful players. I am touched by the caliber of people on this site and immensely thankful to all of your for support. Not everyone has what it takes to be a SARPer. I have kept my hand on the wheel of Star Army, guiding it as it expanded, but it's been a long time since Star Army was just mine. Star Army is yours too.

So, to you, SARPers, I want you to know that I love you guys and that every day I'm thankful for all the effort you put into writing and designing and communicating and all the things that come with maintaining a great roleplay. You are all so unique and you all so awesome.

Thanks for listening to my rambling and I hope you take it to heart.
 
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Not sure what to make of the responses so far, but they seem positive, lol.

After all this time running Star Army I feel like I’m starting to get good at it…but I realize there’s a whole world worth of stuff that I could do with Star Army if I had the resources. However I will NOT sit back and stop for lack of resources. Star Army’s limits have usually been only inspiration, time for us to work on or roleplay on the site, and money.

Inspiration is the easiest. The world around us inspires us and we inspire each other. As long as we make our posts interesting and keep the conversation going, and keep taking in new members, I don’t see us ever running low on inspiration as a whole. Sure, on an individual level we might feel burnout from time to time but this is transient. I want to inspire the imagination of my fellow SARPers. That’s one of our top goals.

Time is less easy. None of us works on Star Army as our main job (although sometimes I feel like it!) and for the most part Star Army is a hobby done with free time. That’s why Star Army has a wiki to help players find what they need quickly. We can all do our part my making sure everything important gets added to the wiki. I am looking at going back to college soon, and the effect on my time this will have is unknown. I will never abandon SARP though.

Money is probably the hardest. Most SARPers are not wealthy. SARP generates next to no income (Google Ads don’t even pay a tenth of our hosting bill) and survives financially on much-appreciated member donations and that money I can spare from my $800-a-month take-home paycheck. Not only do I want to better myself through education so I can bring in more money for myself and Star Army, but I also want to open the book project up again. We need to eventually figure out some way the site can support itself with products you guys feel are worth paying for, or products we can market and sell to the outside world. Basically, I want the site to be sustainable. What I’m talking about is more along the lines of having creative SARPers design books and swag that everyday people may have an interest in purchasing. Whether or not this will ever happen I don’t know but we should be on the lookout for opportunities. And just to be clear: We’re never going to be a pay-for-membership site. Ever.

With Star Army I have always aimed high, and I think the site has benefited from it, perhaps in quality more than quantity (although more people will join if we keep things high quality). Our community, I feel, may be on the edge of something great, and I feel a challenge to keep working on making that greatness happen. Star Army is already one of the best sites on the internet but we can’t just sit on our laurels. We’ve got to keep moving.

What can you do to help? There are some really simple things you guys can do that will make Star Army even greater:

Contribute: Most of you are already doing this by making roleplay posts, talking in the discussion forums, making new wiki pages, artwork, and generally building stuff into our shared imaginary universe. Simply by participating you help make Star Army great.

Respect: Treat each other and new members well. The community should be friendly! If someone said “Hey, I heard Star Army is a real hellhole of OOC drama,” that wouldn’t feel very good and it would discourage people from joining. So don’t make the site like that. It falls on all users to keep civil.

Share: Talk to people about Star Army. If you think they may be interested, tell them about it. I’ve sent donators business cards to help with this. Telling people about Star Army can be SUPER EASY. In fact, a new way you can do it effortlessly is by liking the StarArmy Facebook group or by giving us the thumbs-up with the button at the bottom of the forums. If every user (including new ones) referred a new member once a week, we could start with 50 active users and have up to 12,800 in two months (8 weeks). Think about that. Obviously that’s more than Star Army is really set up to support, but you get the idea. Spread the word.

Finally, I ask that you keep giving me feedback, so I know which way to steer this community. I’ve tried doing a mini-census with the 2010 News post but a relatively small people actually responded to it so we just don’t have enough data. The more you guys tell the staff what you want, the better targeted we are when we work to improve the site. For example, when I decluttered the link list at the top of the forums, members said “Hey I liked those links!” so now they’re back! (neatly placed on a de-cluttered bottom of the forum).

I’ve been really talkative lately…mainly because I’ve been getting a lot of ideas on how to make the site better and bigger, and because I want you all to know that me and the other admins are hard at work. Our goal is simple: We want every member to have a great roleplay experience.
 
Any chance I could get some flyers or something? I live really close to a few colleges, so I can put them up there once the school year starts up again. I've had a couple really good RP experiences with people from those colleges, so there's potential for some good players.
 
The only ones I have are from 2005...no joke. I think we'll need to design some new ones. When we come up with a really good one I can stick it on the site for members to print as needed. Any suggestions on what to put on it? Last time we had a contest and voted on fliers, IIRC.

Fliers would also be useful for conventions.
 
What about the fliers Brian was handing out last year? I remember someone had made new ones and Brian said he was taking them to a Con he went to.
 
I've got one based on the powerpoint that I should be able to get posted tonight after I get home. I will try to cram some art into it, but it's so full of info I might not be able to. It's based on the same info that's in the PowerPoint I just made.
 
Okay, I ordered 1000 of them to leave at conventions. Cost $76.51 (including taxes), using Office Depot's 10% off orders over $40 sale. I also had them shrink-wrapped in packs of 50. The shipping was free!

Rather than send them out, it'd be less expensive if members who want to use them to promote the SARP had them printed locally. At about 7 cents a page that's not bad. For $14 (a normal SARP donation size) SARPers could get 200 fliers to put on convention tables or wherever you think people will be interested and pick them up.

I also created a page for SARP advertising materials:
https://wiki.stararmy.com/doku.php?id=guide:advertising
 
Hey Wes, you know me I've always been more then supportive of the books idea, and anything I can do to help there I am more then willing to do so, so please send me a line on the IRC or whatever if you want to hash something out.

I can do most anything you need me to, like putting the posts and everything together, or formatting it into book style or whatever, like I said just drop me a Line, I'd love to get working on that Idea. I think with the tech and the stories that we have in our plot, that it would make for a great book series, something that really there isnt much of in the space faring side, least nothing I've ever seen in books outside of a few small DAR series, or the starwars series.
 
Midori: Serrano Legacy series, by Elizabeth Moon. :)

That said, Star Army definitely has the potential for some great novelizations... I've written a handful of short stories with the universe, myself. Doubt I know it well enough, outside of Elysia, to do anything more ambitious though.
 
Well, I've recently been noticing that a huge portion of our forums is now composed of archives we've built up over the last couple of years...so much so that Google thinks that "archive" is the most important word on our site.

If we started going through the old posts and putting them in a book-type format, we could remove them from the forum and instead host them as PDF files or something. People would be able to get these PDFs printed on print-on-demand books if they wanted. Imagine how cool it'd be to have a small collection of SARP archives on your shelf. I think that with huge collections like the Sakura, it would definitely be nicer to have them in book form rather than having to read a thousand pages on the computer.

However I don't think these sort of archives would bring in much money to the site...but it wouldn't cost the site much either.
 
RPG-D RPGfix
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