About
This page is chiefly about the history of this website and why (and a little bit how) I built it. If you're like me and also just like knowing things about people, more about me not related to webmastery is in this section.
Purpose
Roleplayer.info aims to provide a comprehensive guide to places to roleplay online. Instead of being just a list of places to roleplay, this website includes detailed inside looks at each platform's unique culture, quirks, and best practices. In doing so, we hope to create a better, more welcoming, more connected internet roleplay community.
History
This website is, at its core, designed to help people find roleplays. I built it specifically because I was having trouble finding partners while branching out from the one website I already knew how to use. Getting into new sites was daunting and frustrating, as many of them had weird unspoken cultural rules that I didn't know about, even though I tried really hard to study what other people were doing before I did anything other than lurk.
As someone who writes primarily in fandoms, I found that the number of people I could reach through an individual platform was often limited. I slowly began to branch out from my favorite roleplay website in hopes of finding more variety. I explored mostly on Tumblr and Reddit, as I already used both platforms for other things, but quickly discovered it went far deeper than I initially thought!
And then, some time ago, the website I preferred to use went down; at the time, we (the users and, frankly, the admins) believed it to be indefinite. Since roleplaying is my main hobby, I was forced to branch out to get my proverbial fix; while I continued to procure new partners and start new plotlines, my friends began to ask me where I was finding more roleplays.
Necessity is the mother of invention, so I quickly cobbled together a simple, short, and highly unprofessional webpage with some quick blurbs about each place I used to find partners. I included some basic stuff-- a bunch of links, how to use it, what you should know, some basic notes (that were basically just "read the rules, read the rules, read the rules!!!") and some information how they differed from the site we were originally using.
And it ended up... kind of popular! I saw it passed around between numerous users, and it soon escaped containment and began to be passed around between people who had never even used the original website. It was messy and kind of condescending-- it was, after all, built assuming that you were from the first website, and had absorbed that website's culture, and I wanted to make sure that people from my website (which is, frankly, known for being a bit... weird) didn't offend people from other websites-- and so seeing it passed around like that was... I'm not gonna lie, it was... incredibly embarrassing.
But it gave me an idea. People thanked me all the time for that page, and for months I was haunted by the fact I hadn't done it better. Then I thought... why don't I do it better, but like, go hard as hell when I do? What if I rebuilt it and added even more places? Even more detailed notes? An even deeper dive? What if I compiled all my resources into one little webpage? And made it available for everyone?
In the end, I made this website. I hope for it to be a resource for more than just the original handful of people I made the original webpage for. If I help even just one person with discovering a new venue to find roleplays, and they find even just one partner, I've done good! Great, even! But I obviously hope to help many more than that.
The Actual Éinín
I'm Éinín. I'm 24 years old and I use she/they pronouns. I'm a roleplayer first and foremost, but I also enjoy lots of other things, like writing and reading, drawing, and watching esports. My favorite thing right now is a game called Overwatch, in which there is a character named Moira O'Deorain that I love very much. I have a brother who is my best friend in the whole world.
I'm really big into amateur web design. (Not development-- please don't ask me any programming questions, I will start crying.) I designed and built this website myself. In addition to this website, I also own and maintain moiraodeorain.com, a website for the character Moira O'Deorain from Overwatch and my own personal website called heyeinin.com, where I host a small number of other personal projects. I'm hoping to one day be a professional front-end developer, but it's way harder than it sounds... and therefore a process with a steep learning curve. Wish me luck!
Website Information
Roleplayer.info was built over the span of a few hours in late July 2022. It was originally designed and debuted in July 2023 with exactly three pages and nothing useful, then received a revamp in December 2022, then received another revamp in July 2023, along with some consolidation, rewritten pages, and all new pages.
This website was built in Visual Studio Code because everyone bullied me for typing every webpage I built line by line into Notepad++ until I stopped. It is hosted by Neocities and made possible by their Support Plan. Make a Neocities, you'll have so much fun!!!
Building the website was made possible by using Jekyll, a static site generator. Before that, I was updating information on every page by hand. I had external stylesheets to cover the CSS, but the actual website I updated every individual page by hand. Because I was a goober who didn't know what Jekyll was. No, I don't want to talk about it.
Credits
The code used for dark mode was adapted from a code posted on Tumblr by Flipse.
The icons used in the dark/light mode toggle and the "return to top" button are both from Bootstrap Icons.
Support
The very best way to support roleplayer.info will always be to share it! While it's entirely owned and maintained by me (and I sort through all the information I'm given and write all of the articles myself,) this is very much a group project. The more people look at it, the more people who can give me feedback, who can tell me about more places, who can help us connect even more roleplayers!
So send links to your friends! Share links with your Discord buddies! Link it on Reddit (where outside links are allowed)! Email it to your favorite roleplay partner! Post it on Facebook (maybe)! Stick the linkback button on your blog or your own roleplay website (and tell me about the roleplay website so I can add it!) Post it on Tumblr! There are probably other social media sites I don't know about that I would benefit greatly from it being posted on too! It means a lot to me! Thank you!