Author's Note:
I sincerely hope this in the right place. Sometimes I'm honestly not certain whether one forum would be better for what I'm trying to say or not (but that's probably my fault for reading into the ambiguity of certain terms). I even tried lurking through a few pages to see if threads had been moved, and where they're moved to, but it just doesn't seem to help me. For example, I wonder if this post should be in 'General RPol' instead of here, but I decided that it's more of something on the technical side of things (because it involves programming). Maybe that's my mistake, and if I got it wrong I seriously apologize. I will learn, given time.

With that out of the way, one of the first things I noticed about RPol is that the poster stats (number of posts, bio parts 1 and 2, etc.) to the left of each post only reflect the exact numbers and entered information at that time in history. So, if I change everything about my profile and post a reply to this thread, my original post will be a ghost of sorts of my former self.

This seems... counter-intuitive to me, as I've never been on any kind of forum which doesn't update that information automatically (maybe that's saying something about how little I get onto forums, but I feel like the two dozen or so I've been to is representative of the sample). It means that when I go to certain forums some mod posts don't have rMail enabled, which means I have to go searching for a post where they do in another forum. And while it's nice to get an idea of how someone's attitudes and quips have changed over the years, it's also a bit misleading to look at someone's post, see that they have '161' posts, and then their profile reflects over 600 posts. That's probably also a fault of mine for thinking that number of posts has anything to do with how active and influential someone might be in the community, as well as how much experience they have, but it's a fault that I'm having trouble finding the flaw in.

Now, this technically isn't a problem that needs fixing - it's probably even intentional on the part of the designers - but it seems like... it would unnecessarily bloat the programming/storage to have that kind of backlog stored for every post. Of course, this is coming from someone who only knows the bare bones of programming, and is self-taught for everything he does know, so take it with a grain of salt, neh?

Bulletin board systems are orientated toward members/users, not characters.  RPoL is the opposite and was custom built from the ground up, focussing on characters/aliases.  When a BBS records a post it can just record the unique user id of who posted the message, and when it comes time to displaying the message it can look up the user id in the corresponding database and pull up the information about the user; their name, posts, bio, etc.

RPoL, on the other hand, can't.  Characters get renamed but that doesn't mean you want all their historical posts to magically change to the new name (sometimes you might, but I'd guess that more often you would not).  Bios can change due to some event in the game, but that doesn't mean you want the bio of all historical posts to reflect what happened later.  Most importantly is that characters get deleted.  If I delete a character then I've suddenly got no record of the character name, posts, bio etc -- I won't be able to show a thing about the character when their posts are viewed.

We've got no choice, we have to save the details of the character in each post.  Theoretically I don't need to do the same in the forums, but sharing of common database structure and code makes it easier to do it that way.

In reply to jase (msg # 2):

You see, that makes perfect sense >_> I had no idea it was all tied to characters and whatnot. Thank you for the explanation ^_^ I will sleep better knowing there is sound logical reasoning behind this.