Just thought you might like a little bit of warning: I’ve updated WordPress to the 3.0 version, and it’s now a nice sleek light grey version. Everything should still work exactly the same, however!

One nice new feature of WP 3.0 is that you can easily and quickly get a short link to your post. Simply click “Edit” at the bottom of your post, log in, and at the top of the editing page you will see a “Get short link” button just under the title text box. I don’t really know what relevance it might have, but I do have a feeling it’ll save us some time in the long run. So thanks, WordPress!

As always, if you have any questions about our WordPress system, simply email me at joni (at) wheeloftimerp.net. :)

—Joni

Let the fun commence!

—Joni

Thus concludes a bunch of research and a lot of fiddling from yours truly. I’ve found, created, styled, and implemented a new join form for us, because the last one seemed to work roughly 50% of the time. Grr. Hopefully this one will be a lot more reliable.

We’ve utilized some new fandangled technology (man I love the stuff) to bypass the biography request email—from now on, you can (and must) upload your character’s biography straight away, as well as your writer’s bio. It’ll save us a step, which will be quite nice for a change.

Anyway, just thought I’d share the join form joy! :)

—Joni

It is my pleasure to announce that our message boards are now fully functional, and all exist! I was waiting off on creating the rest of the boards due to some debugging issues, which have now been fixed. So, everything should be fully operational and just waiting for you to post on them! A huge, huge, huge shout out to my partner Luke who has been working on them this whole time. He’s truly worked some magic.

It’s pretty exciting getting the site going again. Things have been buzzing with join forms, writer pages, and of course the boards. Here are a few highlights:

• The string announcing the new Amyrlin Seat, Keeper of the Chronicles, and Mistress of Novices is almost done! Be sure to check it out on the White Tower Board, because it has a lot of back history for where the site is ‘re’starting from.
• Keep your eyes on the How to Use Our Boards page for some tips and tricks and essential know-hows.
• Add yourself to our Google Map of writers!

Last but not least, the Officers have discussed our policy on returning old characters, with a few notes. We’re only accepting characters back who were active and listed at the old site at the time of its closing. If you stopped writing with your character before the site closed, sorry, you’ll have to start afresh! Remember too that you can start a new character at the old rank you had (as in, if you had an Accepted you don’t have to start with a novice again unless you want to). Making a new character is totally the way to go, though, because then you don’t run into any weird storyline conflicts between the old and new sites. We have also put a deadline on reinstating old characters: June 30, 2010. So be sure to apply for them before then!

It’s so good to see all the posting that’s going on on the boards. Keep it up! :)

—Joni

What an exciting week it’s been. I’m very pleased to announce that our boards are almost ready for posting on—in less than a week, we’ll be fully back in business with boards that work and act much like our old ones did. I loved those boards so, so much, but I think I’m going to love these ones even more. Once the boards are fully operational, we’ll have a “grand opening” of sorts to announce to the world that the WoT RP is back.

But, since I know so many of you are just raring to go… you can now start submitting those join forms! And if you’re even more raring to go, start working on that extended biography and intro post—you’ll be needing them before too long. :)

Cheers,

Joni

I also keep hearing from members, past and future, who’re getting excited about creating new characters and getting back into writing. I get pretty excited when I hear about this, because the process of character creation is incredibly fun. I’ve created two new Aes Sedai of my own to write for, and despite a bit more agonizing over names that has to go on, I’m raring to go on writing things for them. Actually, Jeremy (the new Mistress of Novices) and I have already been emailing some posts back and forth to each other—and ten posts and about 15,000 words later, it’s safe to say we’re back in the game. I just wonder where that word count was when I was trying to write essays in university.

It’s also past time that I answer some questions that I keep getting about characters, and whether or not they can be brought back. The long and short of it? Absolutely! If you had beloved characters at the site before it closed in ’07, you are very welcome to reinstate them. Here’s the deal:

– Characters can be brought back by their previous writer, provided that they submit an up-to-date biography with that character for inclusion on the member pages. The character can be brought back at the rank and relative progress that they were before; we have the old lesson progress pages, so if you were halfway being done Acceptedhood, we can transfer that over. Credits are assigned on a case-by-case basis.

– If you were a previous member and wish to create a new character instead of starting again with an old one, we encourage you to start that new character at first rank, so as to benefit from developing that character naturally. But in an effort to get a little more variety in the site, you can also apply for a character at the same rank which you previously left off. For example, if you had a full Aes Sedai last time, you may create another Aes Sedai (but only one). If you had a mid-rank Gaidin in Training (what used to be a Sei’Tar, now a Gaidin in Training with two merit badges), you can create another mid-rank GiT. So on and so forth. This is also subject to approval on a case-by-case basis.

– This invitation does not apply to male channelers in the White Tower, however. This is due to a new back story surrounding how men become a part of the White Tower, which happened only very recently on our timeline. Sorry!

– When you rejoin the site, your relative ‘rank’ is carried over, in terms of numbers of characters and the like. For example, if you had a newly raised Accepted last time and you want to begin with just one novice, you may still have up to three characters, even though other newly joined novices may only create two characters.

– Questions, concerns, requests, suggestions? Email me, we’ll hopefully figure something out. Reinstating old characters will remain on a case-by-case basis, and once the site gets more established again, we probably won’t accept transfers as easily. Better to do it sooner rather than later!

The Join page is finished (though the form itself is secreted away), and despite a bit of drama with it at 2:30 am (namely, the whole thing disappeared on me! grr), it’s a thing of beauty. I’ve always been weirdly proud of my join forms. ;) Ta!

Joni

To keep this short and sweet, here are the top points for ‘something new’:

– Increased faithfulness to the books. Kind of. In rereading the Wheel of Time, a lot of things have stuck out to me in ways that seem like they’d make for better role-playing. Maybe they’re just details, but ones that seem kind of important in the long run. One such realization? That the Training Grounds—where men (and the occasional woman)—come to study under Aes Sedai’s Warders, are actually studying under Warders. Gaidin are Warders, and aren’t some rank unto themselves. Those who study under the Warders are expecting to become Warders themselves. Which brings us to the next point.

– Sections that are more integrated together. In a few ways, I hope that characters from each section get to know each other better; novices and Accepted and Trainees have requirements that ask them to write together, for example. While this had better not result in more cheesy romance strings, I hope that this will result in more PC Aes Sedai and Warders who are bonded. If you haven’t noticed already, one of the requirements to become full rank in the Training Grounds is to actually become bonded. Being bonded is great IC and OOC; it gives you someone to write with all the time, and once you’re done developing your character on their own during training, you then get someone dependable to write with once raised.

– A more flexible administration. In some form or another, my hope is that we’ll have more people involved in helping to run the site beyond the traditional IC roles. This includes expanding the IC roles so that Sitters, Ajah Heads, and Blademasters have increased responsibility and visibility. We’ll see how this works over time, but there are so many people so far who’ve indicated interest in various roles at the site that I truly want to find a way to include everyone. It’ll happen, one way or another!

– One website, not five. We used to have a lot of different “section” sites (such as the Amyrlin’s Study, the Gates of the Black Tower, etc.), but with the new fandangled web technologies, it’s now far easier for us to maintain one site all together instead of each section leader taking care of their own part. I hope that this will result in better integrated information and resources for everyone, not just one section or another.

Of course, there’s more to come, but I just wanted to point out those top four things so far. Also, I’ve been getting emails from folks asking about characters and stuff, and keep those coming! I can’t wait for when we can have a grand opening of sorts and the join forms start slewing in. Woohoo!

Joni

Plans are in the work for the site to have its own boards, hosted on my own server, so that our posts can be preserved forever and ever, without any advertising, and so that they look just the way we want, with modern forms of formatting and saving drafts so that you don’t always (gasp!) have to write in Word. I still recommend it of course, but you won’t have to, anymore.

My boyfriend, Luke, has graciously agreed to bear the brunt of designing these new boards for me, and gracious it is, because I basically gave him an outline of a DiscussionApp board and went, “Here, can you make this for me?” and he looked at them and came to the obvious conclusion that they are the simplest boards in existence today; to which I sagely nodded at and went, “Yes, that’s why I love them.” He then made me write up a giant list of pros and cons for the kind of boards I wanted (okay, not giant, but he did make me do more research!), and his final comment was, “So you’ve completely fetishized these boards, haven’t you?”

Oh baby, yes. Mm-mm. Simple message boards! Yes, I love the DiscussionApp boards more than I really should. I love them because they’re simple, look the way I want them to, don’t have extra bells & whistles, and I used them for a good eight years with many a good time. It’s hard not to love things like that. But, after a bit of research, I do firmly believe that simpler is better, and a lot of message board designs these days (aka phpBB and its spawn), with all their smileys and dashboards and neat .php tables, leave something to be desired; they’re poorly and clunkily designed (if that’s not a word it is now), and do very little (or so I feel) to encourage easy browsing of well-written prose. In fact, I very rarely have any desire whatsoever to look beyond the dashboard of grinning emoticons and a bizillion unread posts to find the good prose.

So I promise you: our new message boards will be the simplest of the simple, and as close to the old boards as I can twist Luke’s arm. He’ll do what he can, and there’ll be a limit, but oh, they’re going to be beautiful things!

In the meantime, while the nitty-gritty bits of the site get back up and running, start thinking about your characters (new or old) and their introductions! Best of writing to ya,

Joni

The WoT RP was a site that I and a few others started back in June 2000. It ran for nearly seven years, until February 2007. It closed because we needed some time apart; to spend more time with our own lives, recuperate, and basically take a break.

But now, with the rekindling of the Wheel of Time with the publishing of The Gathering Storm, it’s time to start writing again. So, I am slowly but surely re-building the site from the bottom up. The site’s name is still the Wheel of Time RP, but as you can imagine, the last three years have provided a lot of time for mulling over how things could have been done differently. The WoT RP is getting a second chance, and I intend to take that second chance and wring every ounce of opportunity from it. Oh, you’ll still recognize the site, but maybe not all of it.

As you probably also know, Robert Jordan passed away in September of 2007. He was a true genius, and I owe a great deal of who I am to the Wheel of Time, as reading it and beginning this site was probably one of the biggest influences in my life growing up. I literally wouldn’t be where I am today if it weren’t for Mr. Jordan, and I know of many others who can say the same thing. So here’s a tip of the hat to you, Mr. Jordan, and I hope that the writers who will soon grace this site will keep you close to their hearts.

Brandon Sanderson is also to be highly commended for his continuing of the Wheel of Time. We all have our own take on the series, and I’ve seen a lot of writers take on Mr. Jordan’s expansive world, but Sanderson has been able to make it come alive as–in my own opinion–only Mr. Jordan could. I’m pretty darn excited for the next two books, to see where the series goes and to discover all the twists and turns that Mr. Jordan had planned for us from the beginning.

Some things you can’t plan, however. I find myself where I was ten years ago, oddly: in front of my computer, typing madly late into the night, cursing under my breath at slow internet (which is still faster than the dial-up internet I used last time this site was built), oddly obsessed with things like novice requirements, Trainee names, and a new character in the works who needs to be just-so. It feels good to be back.

So let’s see where this takes us, shall we? Keep checking back for new updates, a new look, and message boards that are being designed especially for us.

Cheers,

Joni