I have stopped rping for a while as I don't have the time to commit to it. I'm still adminning my own site with the help of two fantastic fellow staff members. I'd be lost without them.

Anyways, this is my query. I have two characters that I might bring into the rp at some point in the future if I have the time to rp again. But it didn't occur to me that I could just approve them automatically. I would have to apply just like everyone else and if the other staff members have criticism, then I'd edit.

Maybe it was easier for me to think that way cos in the beginning, there were two of us as staff members so we were able to approve each others' profiles after consideration. I was on a site yesterday which looked fantastic! I won't say what genre or the name because its not for me to do that. But I was a little taken aback by what I saw and it turned me off the site.

This particular admin had a great document about mary sues etc and how they were not allowed. She made a big deal about it. I go to the approved section. Her female character turns out to be a real mary sue with "eyes the colour of a rainforest" or something equally nonsensical. (How can eyes be the colour of a forest??). Anyone whos actually been in a forest knows that the amount of colour to be found there is too much to mention and certainly cannot be found in one pair of eyes, unless the character is some sort of alien??
She approved her own character adding a note about how it was an amazing application because she wrote it??.

I understand that if you are the only admin there and you have no one else to approve your character, then you have to do it. I understand and appreciate that. But to blatantly go against your own rules? How can you think that won't put players off? Maybe I am just overly conciencious or worried about what players think?

Can you approved your own profiles as an admin? Even if there are other staff members? For myself, I have other staff members and am grateful because I wouldn't feel comfortable approving my own stuff on a whim. Does anyone else have any opinions on this? Feel free to disagree with me of course!!


Ise

I am of two minds about this.

1. I hate hypocrisy and thus never approve my own applications if I can possibly avoid it.

2. I think admins ought to trust their own standards and judgment, so I'm OK with them approving their own applications. <--in fact, as with the admin you mention, it can be a good gage of how well-run the board is; that board isn't one I'd join, given the admin standards. See?

I agree that admins should check each others profiles. More often than not, they have veryy sue/schmo characters. Even -I- have caught myself in the act, but its always good to have someone else checking. ^_^

It annoys me heaps when a rule is 'no canons', and they make characters exactly the same to a canon character. >=[

In my RP, unfortunately, I'm the only admin; and the staff members that I have are just people that I trust to help other members out, if members have any questions, or if members need to get a hold of me right away (those staff members have my cell phone number and txt me all the time about RP things).

First of all, what I do to keep myself from going overboard is just have my mods read the application over. Usually I don't get too much flack, but they have in the past pointed out some plot holes, grammatical errors, and whatnot.

I'm very lucky to have a group of RPers that I regularly play with that I can trust enough. We all trust eachother, actually, and none of us take it too personally if we give our real opinions about histories, personalities, and even PBs.

I am fine with an admin accepting their own profiles - for OCs. Then...well- they should look over it with their own rules.

However, for a canon character I feel that even if you have to ask a normal member who has been runing around a while, and follows the rules- that is what you should do to make sure the profile is ok.

Thats just how I am.

I accept most of my own characters- but I also go over them twelve times- and most of them have been posted on other sites and accepted there at other times...so...

I'm with SmathNa on this one... If there are other admins, I'll let them check my applications, but I've read through literally hundreds of applications, so I should pretty well by now what kind of things I normally comment on, and try to keep it out of my own applications. But, that being said, I'm not perfect, and I probably do have a bit of a 'blind spot' when it comes to my characters. Of course everything in it is going to be plausible to me, but (as several of the applicants I've evaluated have proved) what's plausible to one person is not always plausible to another person.

My site has open applications, which means that you join the site by posting a character profile, no approval needed. This is good for admin because, although you still have to fill a profile out to have a legit character, there's really no obligation guilt involved.

For sites where you do have an approval process, I think it really depends on how close you are to your staff. If you don't know your co-admin or other site staff very well, it would probably be a good idea to exchange profiles to make sure that you're keeping your own standards up. But if you're very close with your staff, I don't think it's as big a deal. It's your site, after all. If you can't uphold your own standards, you need to rethink something other than who checks your character applications.

It's hit and miss. I, too, look at administrator characters and writing when I'm trying to decide whether or not to join a board.

I'll have fun as long as I have people to bounce off of my characters. Yes, I'm selfish. I'm in it for me. :3

An administrator's poor judgment tends to be repeated throughout a forum. I'm lucky to have a good, sensible co-admin.

I don't get people to check my applications because I'm usually the one who checks them. I'm not so full of myself that I'll make a "Mary Sue" and just overlook it. :sweat: I put a lot of effort into creating a character's personality and history, making sure they have flaws and negative qualities. Of course, that's my word as the admin of the board so people are free to take it or leave it. I never saw it as an issue; only one person has ever told me my character was a Gary Stu, and her "critique" of my character was ridiculously biased (she did it to insult me, after we denied her character).

Sometimes my co-admins ask me to read their applications and accept them, because they feel weird accepting themselves... But I don't ask them to accept mine. I ask them for their opinion on an incomplete profile, but not because I feel "weird" about accepting myself.

EDIT: If an admin accepts themselves, that's fine. It is a good indication of how they'll critique applications and how much 'better' they think they are than other players. For instance, admins accepting their own incomplete applications? Lame.

No I don't tend to accept my own profile- I don't know why, I don't suppose there's anything against it, but I just can't...it's weird! I think it is just some trait I have. On my site we just have admins and moderators, so there's no "application mod" and "graphics mod" - so my moderators can accept my character if they think it's okay. I think the only time I accepted my own character was when one of my mods was too lazy (-.-) to accept me, so told me I could accept myself...heh. I have a loving relationship with my staff. :lol:

Personally, I have never had a problem with an admin accepting their own application SO LONG AS:

1). They follow all their own rules (like, say, a character app has to have a four paragraph history and they post two = a no go).

2). They only accept it if they would accept the same app from someone who was not them. : )

3). If someone (like another admin) asks them to make some changes later (and they are reasonable changes) they do it.

What I don't like one bit is when admins make characters and NEVER FILL OUT AN APPLICATION because they're just "too" busy to be bothered. If the app is that darn hard, maybe it just needs to be changed. That's just my little rant though. : ) On the site I used to admin at, I somehow found time to both run the site and do a character app (-gasp-).

Well, when we finished spiffying up TFW, me and my admins immediately posted up our applications (completed) for an example to members. We accepted ourselves, of course, but we weren't high and mighty about it.

I HATE when admins have a rule that applications will be 'trashed' or something if they're not completed in X amount of days. Then they have their own applications sitting there for weeks, months, years. Or, like you said, never fill it out at all! What if you want to plot with the admin's charrie? They get mad because you got their personality and mannerisms wrong, but there was no fricking bio to check up on! :rawr:

Tasty horror story about this-

A year or so ago, a friend and I joined a board. It appeared to be pretty active. Sixty, seventy members. Pretty good-looking, semi-good RP. We decided to join. We made characters. We played for a while.

Then, we noticed something. A large group of characters were making the same grammatical errors. Then we took a look through the character list, focussing on the player's names. Shock and awe. Three people had ninety percent of the characters. One of them had pureblood Mary Sues. All of the three- ALL of them- were admins. Most of them broke several rules over the course of a dozen character creations (of particular note, a HALF DRAGON and it was a modern, gritty Vampire-themed board. HALF. DRAGON. Nowhere in the rules did it say anything about dragons. At all).

Admins should not be allowed to auto-accept their own characters. Admins should be put through the same wringer as everyone else. And, personally, I think it should be a rather severe wringer. The characters should be Great. Not just good enough; the character sheets should be lyrical and concise and entertaining. You should WANT to go wading through the character sheet area, rather than only digging into it when you really, really need to. Making a character sheet should be fun. And it should be strenuous, because characters that come through the fire end up stronger for it.

But that's just me, and I've seen a bunch of annoying things.

I don't like to do this, so I wait for the other admins, even sometimes not telling them that I've done it. *spoon whackage* Yeah, so, that bit's a little odd. But I'll say something like 'I made a new character' and then drop it. They do all the admin work from there, because for me, that moment is where I'm a regular member again.

Now, I'm the only admin on Endless Horizon, and a canon character. That was tricky for a few seconds. However, my trustieeesstt mod was there, and I asked her opinion. She ok-ed me. She didn't say I got through in writing, however. I did that. This is what I said:

After a while, people started to think it funny and stuff, I think. haha. *makes a face*

Usually I start out a forum on my own, so then I have to approve my own application. But I won't go about adding a message saying how great my own application is XD. I'll just post it in the approved applications.

However when I do have other staffies at the start of the forum, I always let them read the profile over and see what they think of it. And if somethings not right or whatever, I'm happy to hear it so I can change it. Also I'd like to think I've never created a Mary-Sue character, I know what a Mary-Sue is so if I get a feeling I'm creating one, I'd rather start again with my profile XD.

I've never created a new character on a board where I was an admin (my last character on Meliora was accepted right before I became an admin there), so I've never had to accept my own application. However, if I was in a situation where I had multiple application admins in addition to myself and I was applying for a character. . . I would have someone else (if not multiple people) review my application. It's easy to miss things in your own writing (we know what we're trying to say, so it's harder to catch mistakes!), and other people often point out things that you (as in whatever admin is applying. . . not necessarily YOU) haven't thought about. It's extremely helpful to get input from outside sources.

Obviously if there aren't other application admins, this can be difficult or impossible. In a situation without other admins to check an application out, I would consider it completely fine to accept your own application.

However, I'd like to think that an admin who typically checks applications is capable of creating a quality sheet of their own. I would prefer not to make it mandatory for my application admins to have their sheets checked because I would prefer to have application admins that can create great character sheets (I shouldn't have to tell them that mandatory information is missing all over the place and their character doesn't fit into the game!). In an ideal situation, I think admins should seek the help of other admins when creating a new character, but they shouldn't be required to have someone else accept their application. Hopefully that makes sense. XD