alright so i'm very confused, what the hell is a bumb and what is not, explain to me like I'm five please...
No worries! It took me some time to get it when I first joined here too, being a little unfamiliar of forums of this type.
So, this is a forum mainly geared for 1-on-1 RPs (though it does have group-RP sections). Given the nature of this forum specifically, people have particular desires they want for certain things in their RPs, so, people make "request threads" in one of these three boards;
Requests by Females
Requests by Males
Requests by Non-binaries
in which the person details the kind of roleplays they are looking for. (Also note that which section a request thread is posted in is
not based on your IRL gender, but the gender of whatever
characters you intend to play as.)
So, people who are actively looking around for RPs themselves will be reading request threads to see if they can find something that interests them and they will respond to.
Being a forum, however, threads are sorted by date of most recent post. So, whenever someone makes a new post in any thread, that thread is re-sorted to the very top of the list of threads--in other words, "bumping" it up to the top. This means that, when people first click on one of the boards and is taken to the first page, they will see all the req threads that have most recently gotten a post in, or "bumped". Since many people have req threads, only so many req threads can be on the first page at any given time, where statistically the most people looking to read req threads will see. The more other people bump their threads, the more your thread falls down the list.
So, because everyone wants their req thread to be seen, but there is only a finite amount of space to display them prominently and people only have a finite amount of time to read through req threads, we require rules on how often someone is allowed to "bump" their threads so that everyone can get an equally fair chance of having their req threads seen. If this place didn't have these rules, the first pages of the request boards would be dominated by a handful of people who would be constantly over-posting in their req threads to force them to be visible, while everyone else is left behind. This would not be fair for anyone!
Currently, the policy is a flat "One bump allowed in your thread no more than every 24 hours". This means that, once you post in your own req thread and "bump" it to the top of the list of threads, you are not allowed to post again until 24 hours have passed, to give everyone else a chance. With the fancy new forum software we have recently moved to, our webmaster has programmed things such that if you
try to post in your thread again before the 24-hour timer is up, your new post gets automatically merged with the previous one,
preventing your post from acting as a bump for your thread. The staff here used to rely on users to report other users who were breaking the bump-frequency rules, but this new software sets it so it's actually not
possible to break the rule anymore!
However, the current policy also covers someone posting in someone
else's request thread. Those posts also act as a bump, and this site doesn't (yet) have the programming to prevent that. So, if you see a post by someone in a request thread other than their own, please do report it!
In the past, the site staff has experimented with various other policies to govern and regulate the "limited resource" of bumping to varying amounts of success. The current system is the best tried so far.
I hope all that helped! May you have fortune in your own roleplaying endeavors!
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