HMD Preparedness...and YOU!
RUN FOR THE HILLS, IT'S COMING, IT'S COMING, IT'S A BIG TRUCK, IT'S GODZI-
HOW'S MY DRIVING~?
The Information Post
As you may know by glancing at the calendar, polychromatic's seasonal "How's My Driving" post is coming this weekend. I know you're all excited.
Some of you know HMD well, some of you are seeing it for the first time, so here's a general run-down on it:
As in most LJRPs, HMD is the game-wide chance for feedback on playing here in polychromatic. Praise--it's all well and good, but we all should know, constructive crit is best. What we encourage most of all here are questions, if you can't quite find the right words for constructive criticism. It gives you the chance to maybe understand something, (and maybe you think it makes sense after all now), and the player a chance to explain.
For example, "Why is Sue so fascinated with bananas?" (Well...)
Or, "How did Gary get from Point A in canon to Point B in Poly? It doesn't quite make sense to me." (There was this lizard, see, during a curse...)
polychromatic, by community vote, has an anon-off/ip logging-on HMD post. And the HMD post itself will really be two posts. One will be for players whose nicknames on the spreadsheet begin with A - K, and the other for players with nicknames beginning with L - Z. Remember, that's players' nicknames, your nickname, not characters' names.
The format we'll be giving you to fill out will look like this, and we'll provide it for you again come HMD time:
Player name:
Characters played: Character :: Fandom :: Character LJ
Personal concrit link:
Anonymous allowed/encouraged? Y/N:
Other comments?
However, for those who still wish to either receive or give anonymous commentary, we remind you of ye olde personal concrit posts. We're encouraging people to link to their concrit posts during HMD, so that those who feel the urge for anonymous commentary can still have their two cents, too. But remember that personal anon-enabled concrit posts are your lookout. We, as mods, can't oversee them, so be prepared for Anonymous and the comments you might receive.
But here's something a little different this time
(so pay attention, please):
In the most recent HMDs, there has been a lot of flashy HTML, blinking text, glitter, and pictures. It's enough to make your head spin! It's enough to put Las Vegas to shame! Gimme a show girl! What happens in HMD stays in HMD!
But it comes at a price: ...slow...loading...pages...
A little HTML is fine. It makes your comment eye-catching, and it can be entertaining. → By "a little" HTML we mean changing the color of the text; changing the font style; adding underlining, italics, or bold; or adding character entities (such as ℘, ✌, ✗ or →). These generally don't bog down the page when it loads, and not everyone can even see those characters.
The problems we were running into during the last few HMDs were comments with massive images in them, large animated .gifs, sample icons from each character played beside that character's journal name, embedded external links to music or videos (like last.fm and YouTube), and very large html-coded tables laying out characters played.
We've already split HMD into two posts to try and keep the pages loading relatively well. Having so much more data to load in .gif and video format slows down what's already a massive page even more. It's not at all helpful to players with slower internet connections.
If you want to post gifs and multimedia in a thread after that thread has collapsed, that's fine. Images and embedded links posted in collapsed threads don't slow the load-times as much as they do when posted in the parent comments of each threads.
But please consider your fellow players and their internet connections this HMD. It may look snappy to fill up your HMD comment with code, but it slows things down for everyone. Please keep the images and coding to the barest of bare minimums. It makes HMD run smoother, load more quickly, and especially makes scanning the post in order to give that concrit far easier.
Any more questions, comments, concerns, cake, please just leave a comment here or send us an email. We'll be glad to help.
HOW'S MY DRIVING~?
The Information Post
As you may know by glancing at the calendar, polychromatic's seasonal "How's My Driving" post is coming this weekend. I know you're all excited.
Some of you know HMD well, some of you are seeing it for the first time, so here's a general run-down on it:
As in most LJRPs, HMD is the game-wide chance for feedback on playing here in polychromatic. Praise--it's all well and good, but we all should know, constructive crit is best. What we encourage most of all here are questions, if you can't quite find the right words for constructive criticism. It gives you the chance to maybe understand something, (and maybe you think it makes sense after all now), and the player a chance to explain.
For example, "Why is Sue so fascinated with bananas?" (Well...)
Or, "How did Gary get from Point A in canon to Point B in Poly? It doesn't quite make sense to me." (There was this lizard, see, during a curse...)
polychromatic, by community vote, has an anon-off/ip logging-on HMD post. And the HMD post itself will really be two posts. One will be for players whose nicknames on the spreadsheet begin with A - K, and the other for players with nicknames beginning with L - Z. Remember, that's players' nicknames, your nickname, not characters' names.
The format we'll be giving you to fill out will look like this, and we'll provide it for you again come HMD time:
Player name:
Characters played: Character :: Fandom :: Character LJ
Personal concrit link:
Anonymous allowed/encouraged? Y/N:
Other comments?
However, for those who still wish to either receive or give anonymous commentary, we remind you of ye olde personal concrit posts. We're encouraging people to link to their concrit posts during HMD, so that those who feel the urge for anonymous commentary can still have their two cents, too. But remember that personal anon-enabled concrit posts are your lookout. We, as mods, can't oversee them, so be prepared for Anonymous and the comments you might receive.
But here's something a little different this time
(so pay attention, please):
In the most recent HMDs, there has been a lot of flashy HTML, blinking text, glitter, and pictures. It's enough to make your head spin! It's enough to put Las Vegas to shame! Gimme a show girl! What happens in HMD stays in HMD!
But it comes at a price: ...slow...loading...pages...
A little HTML is fine. It makes your comment eye-catching, and it can be entertaining. → By "a little" HTML we mean changing the color of the text; changing the font style; adding underlining, italics, or bold; or adding character entities (such as ℘, ✌, ✗ or →). These generally don't bog down the page when it loads, and not everyone can even see those characters.
The problems we were running into during the last few HMDs were comments with massive images in them, large animated .gifs, sample icons from each character played beside that character's journal name, embedded external links to music or videos (like last.fm and YouTube), and very large html-coded tables laying out characters played.
We've already split HMD into two posts to try and keep the pages loading relatively well. Having so much more data to load in .gif and video format slows down what's already a massive page even more. It's not at all helpful to players with slower internet connections.
If you want to post gifs and multimedia in a thread after that thread has collapsed, that's fine. Images and embedded links posted in collapsed threads don't slow the load-times as much as they do when posted in the parent comments of each threads.
But please consider your fellow players and their internet connections this HMD. It may look snappy to fill up your HMD comment with code, but it slows things down for everyone. Please keep the images and coding to the barest of bare minimums. It makes HMD run smoother, load more quickly, and especially makes scanning the post in order to give that concrit far easier.
Any more questions, comments, concerns, cake, please just leave a comment here or send us an email. We'll be glad to help.