As much as I have enjoyed writing here, life duties unfortunately call me elsewhere. Thank you so much everyone for a wonderful experience at Sonora. It really was a pleasure stirring up friendships, drama, romance and the like with some of you over the past several years. Thank you Chairs for the sweet e-mail as well! I deeply appreciate it, and this community will be missed. Sending my best wishes to you all.
Love,
Author of the Princetons & Spencers xx
40Lily Spencer et alSaying my goodbyes.357Lily Spencer et al05
Over the last couple of years, we have generally seen increased posting levels and engagement. This has been in part to new and enthusiastic authors, but also in part due to rule changes to encourage posting.
I have always enjoyed the fact that Sonora is a hobby that can be enjoyed by a wide range of people, with varying demands on their schedules. We have no plans to change that, and continue to welcome everyone. Over the last two (IC) years, we have had posting requirements in order to access certain privileges, and these have worked well.
We would now like to tackle the case of vanishing authors/characters. As this is a collaborative community, characters' relationships become deeply entwined, and often dependent on other authors. It can cause a lot of difficulties if someone your character was friends with, running a club with, or was dating suddenly just... isn't there.
The following has been discussed and provisionally agreed by the staff. We wanted to give students a chance to give any feedback, and will also put a vote up in chatzy.
If a character is not posted for one full Sonora year:
If the author remains active, they will be given a reminder about their neglected character. They may be refused a new character at the discretion of the admins.
If the author has been inactive with all characters, their characters will:
*Become NPCs. This allows other authors to god-mod or use the characters in line with their previously established friendships and activities. E.g. Tom and Jim are running a club together, but Jim goes inactive. Tom may assume that Jim still runs the club with him, and may include descriptions of what Jim is contributing to the meetings when he posts
*Be co-op played (Tom is still active, but decides he no longer wants to run the club. His author isn’t sure how Jim would take this and how it would affect their friendship, so he asks someone to role play as Jim for one or two threads, for the purpose of moving that plot forward).
*Be put up for adoption, i.e. existing authors can elect to take over them.
Which of the above states is chosen will depend on the willingness of remaining community members to take on the character in question. In all situations, the admins will make every effort to contact the authors concerned and to have dialogue before these steps are taken, and in the event of adoption, every effort will be made to communicate with the previous author regarding character backgrounds, plot etc.
All rules will be enforced at the discretion of the admins. In the event of major life altering circumstances, authors may be given leeway on having these rules applied to them. Equally, authors who make a token post to keep 'active' status but do not participate meaningfully in the site may be held to these rules.
Authors may also ask to switch their characters to these states ahead of the IC year being completed if they no longer wish to participate.