Thread: Threads or PMs

Since no one else did, I thought this was a good discussion to continue from this Questions thread . Personally preface emphasis on personally , I prefer threads over PMs for several reasons 1 Easier to keep track of The only -possible- way to be able to keep track of multiple simultaneous PM RPs is to sort them all into Folders, but even then, keeping track can still be a challenge you have to click on each and every folder that you -suspect- has had any activity recently to check and see if you need to reply there, and that gets a bit annoying. With the Subscribed Threads feature, this is a total nonissue with threads. 2 Easier to re-read later With threads, everything is presented in nice, neat, linear, post-by-post, page-by-page fashion. Simple, easy. As you reply back and forth to a PM chain, nested quotes stack up more and more. Not only does this get uglier and more unreadable over time, but once a PM starts getting big enough, it lags browsers when you try to write into it. I learned this almost immediately after joining this site, and since then, I have made it an automatic habit to always truncate nest-quotes, and only allow PMs I send to have a single quote of the message I am replying to. When re-reading PM RPs, this means I have to click on every other PM in the folder, opening them all in their own tabs, and then read them one at a time. That too, gets annoying. I also wanted to build off to two posts I saw in the linked Questions thread For me it's the fact i am usually behind in a RP with someone. Posting in a thread lets everyone know i just posted and some people have expressed great displeasure at my posting to a thread before responding to their RP first. Sometimes my muse simply isnt with a given RP, but ive been accused of so much based simply on slow responses to a RP... If I keep them all to PM usually that doesn't happen. Click to expand... Ah, I do know what its like to be thread stalked. It is very unpleasant...But for the most part I started letting those people know if they were going to bother me over posting order they can drop the RP with me because I refuse to be stressed about an activity thats supposed to be fun and enjoyable. Click to expand... I settled on a system to neatly avoid this problem, myself I keep a -strict- queue of RP reply-order, in that I -always- reply to RPs in the order of whichever has been waiting the longest. To demonstrate I get replies to four different RPs in this order A, B, C, and D. I reply to A. I reply to B. I reply to C. I get a reply to B. I reply to D. I get a reply to D. I get a reply to A. I reply to B. I reply to D. I get a reply to D. I reply to A. I reply to D. And so on and so forth, regardless of partner reply frequency. In so doing this, I enforce to myself that I show no favoritism to any particular RP. It also helps in that if I get writer's block on a particular RP, it forces me to overcome it before moving onto the next RP that I may not have writer's block for, rather than leaving one RP on the backburner. For me, this works pretty well Incidentally, is has also had a side-effect of basically guaranteeing that I have never been the one to ditch an RP, ever. Even if it takes me a while to respond, I always do, in the end. The only time I break this rule is when I am engaged in OOC PMs with a partner regarding my reply-in-progress for the RP before I post it, and I am waiting on an OOC answer from my partner I will carry on and reply to other RPs in that case, but the moment I get an answer OOC, that RP jumps back to the top of my queue. However, all that said, if I made it my strict policy that I do not RP in PMs, I would have missed out on some truly amazing RPs with amazing partners, who themselves had a strict rule of only-PMs. If I get a partner who has that strict rule, I will bend otherwise, I will push for threads. Also, even though it is hidden, PM RPs are treated no differently than thread-RPs in terms of my reply-queue. So. How about the rest of you, BMR? Your opinions, preferences, and habits? There are only two not-presently-active thread-RPs in all of my posting history where I am not the last poster, both are extenuating circumstances and not ditched as such. In one, after my partner replied, I sent an OOC PM asking if they might be able to edit a few things before I made a post, but said partner happened to vanish off the face of BlueMoon around that same time. The other, partner and I decided out-of-thread to just let that one go.