With site festivities coming to a close, I wanted to do a follow-up on how the Donation Drive went. In previous years, we've left our payment open for a few days after WCOn: this was to give people a chance to grab our donation goodies if they weren't able to during the drive.
This year they were taken down with WCOn. If you are interested in donating and didn't get the opportunity, message me and I'll reopen it for you but please know this is totally optional*.
Not only did we reach our goal of $192, we sailed past it and landed past the ocean the Clans are in. In total, we received a whopping $575.76 after Paypal fees!
We wanted to take a minute to share our experiences with the community. The support and love the community has shown over the near decade WCO has existed is absolutely heart-warming, and we're grateful to have your support and dedication to this website.
Having exceeded the goal for one year of hosting by so much, we extended our usual hosting plan to 36 months.
This is discounted from shorter plans (saves around $70 total) and keeps us from repeatedly requesting money every year! Going forward, if we do Donation Drives it will be fundraisers for charities or to help pay for any additional project or feature that needs funding. It will not be for hosting until late 2025.
$20 will be going into the Cbox, to upgrade it to premium. This will give you guys a lot of cool features to help make your chat experience better! For those who aren't yet frequenting the Cbox, I highly recommend giving it a shot once this upgrade is in use!
As for the remainder of the money, well. We have $53 and not a single clue on what to do with it! We've come up with some options, but ultimately wanted to ask you, our community where it should go.
* Any additional donations will be going into this funding!
Option 1: Mentions Upgrade
The funds would go towards purchasing the premium version of our Mentions plugin, which would allow for people to mention usergroups (think, @/RiverClan instead of individual people). These usergroups would be opt into like how Alternative Roleplays are, so people who do not want to be mentioned will not be forced into it.
Option 2: Charity
The funds would go to a no-kill animal shelter or rescue. We here at Warrior Cats Online definitely aren't biased and have a kitty preference, but we'll help with other animals too!
Option 3: Development Projects
The development team has a few nifty projects in the works, and the funds would go to helping us expand our possibilities.
Though we can't guarantee anything, these are things we'd like to take a closer look at implementing. This includes, and is not limited to: continuing work on the perk/skill tree system Neptune shared earlier this year (including making it semi-automated with items account-bound), integrating characters onto profiles better (no longer just a simple list/you have to use a biography thread or character site), tagged posts ("post as Bramblewhisker" and all roleplays are nicely consolidated under that name so you can track specific roleplays), replacing our lost birthday feature with a Join Day anniversary, redoing the Open RPs to make it more user friendly, and changing our Kitty Koin system to include actual shops.
Option 4: Theme Packs
We've shared the themes being pushed out for our update, but with this option we'd create 3-5 more themes for you guys to enjoy! Donors will be able to give us palette/color ideas to work with.
Option 5: Other
We only listed what we could think of, and want your thoughts on this! If you have more ideas or just want to share, please comment below! All input is appreciated.
We are working on getting out your benefits - don't worry!
A category should be appearing very soon for our early access users and we'll be sharing more of our progress on the upcoming updates.
i Absolutely enjoyed reading the staffs messages! SO heart warming and collecting $575.76 cents is insane amount of money! Obviously some should go to the shelter!
__________________ "smashed into splinters, shards they will fall, tears of the timber, blanketing all, branches forlorn, shed golden leaves, order and form in the patterns they weave."
The staffs' messages are very wonderful to read, very heartwarming! so glad to be back here again, everyone here is amazing and wonderful and have a lot of fun talking and role-playing with some of you all
Char Site updated (10/11/22), added Blazingpaw and Goldenkit!
During most or few roleplays, I will do a flashback that was conjured in my characters' thoughts. Please do not respond to the flashback unless you have the power to read minds or smth.
Well, I sure didn't except I'd wake up and CRY TODAY. This entire announcement was so heartwarming to read, I wish I could crawl through the screen and give you all a big hug!
I'd be happy for any of the options to be put into action! My personal favorites are the mentions upgrade, development projects, and charity, but I'd like to put in a suggestion of my own. (I didn't think of it until after I voted in the polls, sorry, heh...)
If possible, an upgrade to profiles could be really convenient! Here are several things that I believe could be updated or changed:
Change "Skype Username" to "Discord Username" (or remove it all together, since we already have a discord tag section...) From what I gather, not many people use Skype anymore, so I always think its kinda odd that it's still a communication tag option.
Delete "Location" and "Date of Birth". It was recently discussed on the discord that these two things were publicly removed anyway for safety reasons, so why are they still there as options to edit? Also, I know people loved the birthday bot, so maybe there can be just a section to add your birth month and day for if you so please the birthday bot announcements? Unsure how it will be done, and I'm probably asking a lot, but y'all are wanting ideas, so...!
A way to see previous usernames would be nice. I know this has been requested before, and as someone who changes their username A LOT, I think it would be very helpful to the members that like to keep track on who it who.
Maybe some rearranging of the actual profile layout? I know this is more of a tricky ask for the developers, but I've been getting inspired by other platforms' profile designs and how simplistic they are compared to WCO. Here are a few things that might be fun to change around:
Add a banner! Referring to a profile banner, like something similar to what Twitter has going on. Unsure how you'd rearrange things to make it work, but I thoroughly enjoy the banner + profile peeking halfway over it design!
The current profile layout is actually quite nice, it gives me file management vibes with all the tabs (and i love organized layouts), but if there was a way to make it more simplistic I'd be down in a heartbeat! I know staff has been working hard to change layouts and make site navigation easier, so why not include profiles?
A feature I miss from the old site is how easy it was to see recently posted stuff. It was right there on the page, no navigation required! Nowadays you have to click the statistic tab and then click a link that brings you to a whole separate tab just to see your posts! I partly understand why it's like that, and I think its fine if you're looking to see entire post history, but it would be really nice if the recent posts were displayed on the profile again for easy glance access.
Alright...so I think thats the majority of what I can think of! If profile upgrades are not a valid option, then I completely understand, but I just wanted to throw a couple ideas your way. Thanks again for making such a wonderful community for all of us, I cannot express enough gratitude to everyone here.
this news made me so giddy and joyful, it literally made my day! i am so grateful to staff for all the effort you guys put into making WCOn a success!
thanks to neptune for the absolutely hilarious hunger games event; thank you to apricute for the rather insightful fortune telling tent (and wonderful art gifted to the donors, as well as all the behind the scenes work you do for the site!); thank you to velli for creating the game threads, and for working with birdie on the candy corn hunt; thanks to hope for hosting the trivia - i’m glad to hear you had just as much fun as we participants did; thank you to starfall for hosting ‘name that tune’ and so many wonderful streams!
thank you birdie for your phenomenal work on the staff team and your ever-friendly and patient demeanor; thanks to dino for providing art to the donors and for your wonderfully entertaining characters; thank you to shade for doing an amazing job as a chat moderator and being the absolute best medicine cat apprentice i could have asked for - working with you is truly a joy; and a massive thanks to bear for all of the work and effort you put into not only maintaining this site, but enriching it for the community. wco would not have stood for this long without any of you.
thank you to all of the wonderful streamers who helped keep WCO lively as well! though i couldn’t catch everyone’s streams, all of the ones i saw were delightful and i’ve heard nothing but amazing things about the others.
i am so proud of this community, and so glad i get to be a member of something so special.
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“and the human race is filled with passion. and medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. but poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.”
— john keating (robin williams), dead poets society
profile image credits:
background image credits found in albums | pfp - wallace and gromit
Last edited by beau; November 4th, 2022 at 07:31 PM.
Thank you again to the staff for an amazing WCOn! I think making a donation to charity now would be nice, and then perhaps we could have a features drive in 2023? I do have one idea for a future feature:
Dice roll implementation for battles and hunting. For battles, dice could be used to decide the outcome, whether a cat gets injured or dodges the attack, and possibly how severe the resulting wound is. For hunting, dice could determine whether a catch is successful. I’ve seen dice rolls successfully implemented on other written roleplay boards, so I think they could really work here.
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Fadingsun is currently RiverClan's leader. He has an open den policy. If you have any questions or concerns about RiverClan, or any plots to propose, feel free to leave me a VM or DM! Please do not take my characters' IC opinions as reflective of my own.
WCOn and Beyond
For those who aren't yet frequenting the Cbox, I highly recommend giving it a shot once this upgrade is in use!
Re: WCOn and Beyond
"smashed into splinters, shards they will fall, tears of the timber, blanketing all, branches forlorn, shed golden leaves, order and form in the patterns they weave."
