Fhaolan

Hi @@The Derpy Hooves,
 
The Planning & OOC forums in Roleplay World are for the RPs that are to take place in Roleplay World, so no, you're not supposed to use that spot for organizing off-site RPs. Advertising off-site RPs falls under the 'Advertising' rule:
 
(From the global rules document:) Advertising on MLPF is not permitted. We will allow you to place your personal website, social media, or media sharing account link in your signature and the appropriate field(s) in your profile, providing the content on the site does not link to content considered inappropriate for MLPF. Outside of those exceptions, advertising is strictly prohibited without Administrator approval. Examples of disallowed advertisements include, but are not limited to, commercial storefronts, personal websites outside of the permitted areas, chat groups, donation drives, crowd funding initiatives, research studies, affiliate programs, commission shops, and generally any topics/status updates/blogs with the sole purpose of driving traffic to your site or platform (this includes proxy posting on someone's behalf). If you want to advertise or collect money here, please get in touch with an admin to seek permission. This is for the protection of our members, and to cut down on annoying or spammy ad-centric content.
 
Basically, you can put links to your RP in your signature, and anything further than that requires you to clear the link with one of the Administrators of the forum. Not one of the Moderators, but one of the Administrators.

Sometimes the Character DB UI glitches and produces duplicate entries. We go through occasionally and try to remove the dupes, leaving the most detailed/completed version up. And sometimes the characters contain stuff that is against the forum rules (NSFW content, etc.) so they have to be removed. However in any of those cases we try to PM the person involved to let them know something was done.
 
However, most of the time it's just difficult to find characters once they are made. You can use the search tool, but you have to know the trick.
 
Go to 'My Content' in the drop down under your name in the black menu bar. It will open up a page with a lot of search options on the left side. It'll start off with 'Forums' checked, and what you need is actually 'Pages' and you should see your characters pop up. There's a sub-option to switch from Characters to 'Equestrian Empire Characters' for the other RP database used by the vetted canon-like RP area 'Equestrian Empire'.

The Equestrian Empire section is for canon-like play. It is encouraged that characters retain events from one RP to another, but it's not an absolute requirement. Especially since some cast characters change players on occasion as their players find they cannot support them. It's not exactly fair to expect a different player to keep track of storylines they didn't participate in.
 
We try to adhere to as close to show canon as possible, but as the show is still going on things can change on us. And we allow stuff from secondary canon sources like the comics, as long as it doesn't break the show canon or cause weird and unsupportable issues that would break the RPs in that section.

Oooo. This is one of those fun open-ended questions. I'm going to start from the beginning, because I don't know how 'in the loop' you are.
 
First off, roleplaying on a forum like this is a basically interactive storytelling. You think up a character who you would like to control through various scenarios, adventures and the like. Is it a young pony trying to find their cutie-mark? A grizzled guard veteran retiring to the countryside for some peace and quiet? A foreigner like a  Zebra or a Saola shipwrecked in Equestria and trying to survive in this foreign land? You need a basic idea of the appearance and personality of that character. Then, you take that character, find some other people who have characters of their own that it would be interesting to interact with, and play out some scenario that you all agree to.  A chance meeting at Sugarcube Corners, or the docks of Horseshoe Bay. A monster attack at Dodge Junction, or the characters all wake up alone on a train with no other passangers or crew heading who knows where at breakneck speed!
 
It can get more complicated than that, of course. One player will likely take on the role of 'Dungeon Master', a term from the venerable Dungeons and Dragons game that means that player will have more control over the scenario, running any non-player characters (NPCs), and determining the effects of your actions on the environment or opposing forces. It might be decided to use some mechanics from a Role Playing Game system to determine those effects, or to judge your character's abilities or skills. But these are additional complexities on top of the basic idea.
 
As for the RP rules for this forum; they pretty much all boil down to 'don't be a dick.' Don't try to control other people's characters, because that's rude. Don't make their character's useless by being the best at everything, because that makes it boring for everyone else. So on and so forth.
 
We have a character database here that can give you an idea of the kinds of information characters are likely to have. And you can browse the OOC (Out of Character) here to see if there are any RPs already running that you might be interested in joining. Always ask in the OOC thread about joining an RP before leaping in, because it's just courteous. 

In the upper left corner of the reply box there's a little icon that is supposed to look like a paperclip. Click that to switch it to BBCode mode, and see if that helps.
 
If it does, there's a weird thing with IE and IP.Board that keeps tripping this error. There's been patches for it, but it keeps coming back.

Hiya Candy Star,
 
As @@Blue Moon says, we're reluctant to remove RPs completely unless there's egregious against-the-ruleness going on in it. It's a bit rude for the other participants, as they may want their posts for historical reasons.
 
Locking the threads is an option, if you're absolutely sure as the RP owner. It will prevent the RPs from continuing without you while leaving the posts up. However if the other participants in those RPs simply stop posting on your request it's not *that* much different.
 
I'd recommend simply telling everyone in the RP you're not able to continue at the moment. If people keep posting against your wishes for whatever reason *then* use the report function on the first post of each thread to notify us that you want the threads locked.

Most of those 'badges', as they are called, are post-count activated. You can see the list, and what it takes to get them, by clicking on your current badge (which for you is a Muffin right now).
 
There are a couple of others. Administrators and Moderators get special badges. Sectional Staff doesn't at the moment. There are also special occasion badges that show up... on special occasions.

That would be up to individual RP owner, really. There's no rule against it at all. Heck, there's a lot of Everfree Empire RP's where people are using characters they made up on the spot and don't bother entering into the character database.

This sounds suspiciously like the WYSIWYG bug. IE and IP.Board interact in weird ways sometimes. I personally turn off the WYSIWIG editing by switching the editor over to BBCode mode (There's a little icon in the top left corner of the editing tool, that I *still* don't know what the image is supposed to be.) You will then be able to quote, paste text, etc.

Any of the RP staffers can do that for you. Send me a PM with the links to the various OCs and I'll see what I can do.

In the Everfree Empire section of Roleplay World, you can play Silver Spoon that way, yes. There may be multiple people playing Silver Spoon at any given point of time, each a different version from their own headcannon. Characters may be from any number of alternate dimensions, and are really only limited by your own imagination, the global rules of the forum (which restrict the more adult content), and whether you find other RP'ers who want to interact with your characters.
 
In the Equestrian Empire section of Roleplay World, things are more restrictive. That area is an attempt to get as close to show canon RP as possible. The concept of the Mirrorverse as shown in the comics where characters personalities are reversed, and the Humanverse shown in the Equestria Girls movies, haven't been added to the options available yet as how to handle alternate dimensions and travel between them without getting overwhelmed is still being debated.

Okay, try this. First, go down to the quick reply box, and in the upper left hand corner there's a odd gray square icon with what... might be a paperclip in the middle? I'm not sure what that actually is, it's too small on my screen. In any case, click that. That should switch you from WYSIWYG mode to BBCode mode. Try going up and 'quoting' again.
 
I don't know why this is, but with some versions of Internet Explorer, many of the IP.Board functions don't work right in WYSIWYG mode. The tech guys sometimes fix it, but the fix never seems to stick and it goes weird again several days later.

Yep, message a mod, or an RP staffer like me. I can take a character out of the list for you.

It depends.
 
For most RPs, a work in progress is absolutely fine. It's up to the RP owner to decide if the character is 'done enough' for their RPs.
 
If you're looking at joining the Equestrian Empire section however, all characters have to go through an approval process. For those, the character application process has certain minimums that have to be met. The Equestrian Empire is a special sub-section of the RP World where cast characters are played by specific people and is an attempt to stay within the show's canon during all RPs.

If, however, you mean 'hide' a topic so that you personally don't have to look at it but it's still visible to everyone else, I don't think that's currently possible with IP.Board (the software the forum runs on).

Hiya!
 
There are often people organizing Tabletop games in our OOC area: http://mlpforums.com/forum/23-everfree-empire-planning-ooc-discussion/. Most of them are for Forum-style tabletop, but there are calls for PM-based and other types of games. As I understand it there are plans to create a new subforum specifically for organizing Tabletop play and depending on the number of requests we get for that, we might accelerate those plans.
 
However, I do have a list of resources for MLP-themed tabletop RPG supplements, if that would help:
 
The big one, of course, is Ponyfinder by Silver Games: http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/browse/pub/5559/Silver-Games-LLC. As it's an actual published RPG, it's not technically MLP but is as close as copyright will allow.
 
As for Dungeons and Dragons supplements, there are a lot of fan-made ones, each one for various editions of the game. Most of these tend to be a bit sparse, because they're generated by a single person more out of curiosity than anything:
 
http://lurkingrhythmically.blogspot.com/p/my-little-pony-friendship-is-dungeons.html
http://dnd-wiki.org/wiki/Pony_(3.5e_Race)
http://littlelunamoonmatron.deviantart.com/art/Courage-is-Magic-1-16-MLP-Tabletop-Game-441941322
http://cheezedoodle96.deviantart.com/art/MLP45E-Dungeons-and-Dragons-With-Ponies-490872927
 
I used to have several more but those links appear to be dead now. Probably ran afoul of copyright.

Interesting question, and very familiar because I did something similar to this years ago on another RP site.
 
We don't currently have a place for that kind of thing, but I think we can arrange something. I'm going to discuss this with the other RP staffers and see if we can come up with something for you, and anyone else who wants to do something similar. I'll get back to you once I've gotten ahold of them and talked this through.

If you go to the right side when you're editing the blog entry, there's a strange link that says 'Publish Immediately (change)'. Click that link, and you can actually set the time/date that it will have as the official 'publish' time.
 
That's how I've got one of my one-a-day blogs set up, so I can have a 'buffer' of posts that will auto-publish every day.

OC is Original Character. Referring to a character that the fan has created him/herself. Differentiated from a Main Character, or a Background Character, who are in the show.
 
OOC is Out Of Character. Meaning that whatever is player is describing is something that is not technically part of whatever roleplaying they are supposed to be doing at the moment. It's either the player chatting about non-game stuff, or talking about the mechanics of the game, or something that is not 'IC' or In Character. When IC the player is supposed to be talking *for* their character, and everything they say should be taken as something the character is saying (or doing).

In our parlance, a moon=a month. That's in fact what the word 'month' means. However, it might also mean a week, as in the span of time between moon days ('Monday'). Or it might even mean a day, being the time between each rising of the moon.

I go into more detail here: http://mlpforums.com/blog/844/entry-5941-it’s-a-matter-of-scale-a-stitch-in-time-part-1/

If you're doing this on your phone, it's possible that the phone is auto-rotating when you are looking at the raw image file on the phone to fit the phone's display better. If you can't get the file over to a computer to check it yourself, I would send the picture to someone who can check the image itself on a regular computer for you.