General Discussion

What is, in your opinion, the best way to organize and host your original characters and their lore?

I am thinking of using one of these websites to host everything for my Flight Rising lore, and maybe if I like using em, then my own ocs.

I recently got toyhouse codes from a friend but now there are other options I would like some opinions, because everyone I know has been using toyhouse.

I like Toyhouse due to all of the features and whatnot, but the community on there are a bit... Eh, especially on the 'General & Off-topic' forums - I actually dropped from them entirely considering it was a big trigger for my anxiety.

As far as features go though, it's really good - you can customise your character's profiles as much as you want (including using HTML), there are content warning features, worlds, an 'in-character' feature for roleplaying, there's a lot to do. There is the fact there is only one moderator on-site but apart from that it's not too bad lol.

UnVale is still a developing site but it's got potential in my eyes. Not as many features and free customisation as Toyhouse does, not to mention there are text limits on profile and even character bios. There's also no TW system or on-site forums so you do miss a lot of the community if you're not on the Discord but they're a lot nicer compared to the TH community definitely.

It's got its fair share of issues however - images get reduced in quality when you upload them, the favourites have kinda been broken for a while. I'm hoping these get fixed soon however! I heard they're about to implement a dark mode which I'm excited for. UnVale also hosts monthly events which is a fun way to engage with the site

As for Refsheet, I'd recommend this one much less than the other two. It's absolutely glitch heaven, there's not much room for development on the character profiles, the forums are dead, and there's really not much to do on-site apart from develop characters. It's pretty hard to find folk on here too. Super slow as well; rarely ever use it.

Characterhub also just recently opened so you don't need to wait on a waitlist anymore for it hh - it's similar to UnVale but it has SO many more features I really like it haha, this one also has multiple on-site events that update daily and there's a lot of engagement on the site which I think is nice

i havent used the other sites but yeah i def agree with Flufferb's points on toyhouse

its great for customisation! html lets you do a lot and if you have premium you can do even more with css! also the tabs are great for organising things like aus or even just very large galleries

but from what ive heard... yeah. the community really is not good- only one mod is really not great, especially for a site that big
i dont spend much time on the forums outside of art games but mmmmm i have not heard good things about it

Toyhouse is a really good site for its intended purpose. Just don't interact with the community.

[quote name="MaplesHaiku" date="2024-04-25 10:39:47" ] Toyhouse is a really good site for its intended purpose. Just don't interact with the community. [/quote] seconding. I keep most of my characters private and don't go on any sort of community pages on TH, I only really use it for my own organizational purposes. if I want to talk about my characters with other people, that's what Discord and the FR forums are for.

I just give my characters pages on Neocities. If you can't do HTML coding yourself, you can find premade layouts. Full HTML / CSS customization, full quality image uploading, and you can actually upload more than one image at a time without paying. That last one, along with the general lack of QOL features, is what turned me off of Toyhouse, plus Neocities appeals to my Neopets petpage sensibilities.

@MaplesHaiku @LouckyKoneko @Ombekende

Toyhouse sounds like the best for customization but has a not so nice community. I really only need somewhere nice to put all my Flight Rising lore, but I would still like to interact a little bit with others. I just use it to follow artists I like on there.

@TheEnforcer

If I'm going to learn to code I might as well make a neocities for everything I need. As an adult with a full-time job I don't really have time to mess around with code, so I have been putting off my own website even though everyone I know is recommending it. I did think neocities was css only, and I do have experience with html (albeit very rusty). I do miss coding as a hobby.

I will get around to making my own neocites for my ocs and art eventually. In the meantime, I'll try out UnVale.

@Flufferb

I'll try Characterhub as well, see if I like it better than UnVale. Thanks for warning me about Refsheet - spending time working on a character sheet and then it glitching on me sounds like a nightmare.

@Delibird
I'm not a coding person, so this explanation might be wrong, but it sounds like there might be some confusion here over what HTML and CSS are: "CSS only" isn't a meaningful thing -- CSS is just the styles that are applied to your HTML (a simple example would be font colors and backgrounds, or how with premium on Toyhouse, you can change the colors and stuff of the default layout). To grossly oversimplify, CSS is the instructions for how HTML elements display, but HTML is where the actual content (text and images and stuff) on your page comes from. Or sometimes PHP or Javascript or whatever is putting stuff on the page, but the CSS is just the stylesheet that controls what it looks like and how it behaves.

toyhouse has the best features in terms of character profile versatility, organization and interaction/privacy functions, but has a toxic community and only one single active staff member to manage and moderate the site by themself, which has resulted in the site becoming an unmoderated mess where issues don't really get solved. There was an incident recently where the admin refused to take action and remove an obviously stolen character despite the number of people reporting it.

Refsheet was suffering some financial troubles and was on the verge of shutting down recently, I'm not sure how things are now. I haven't updated my character profiles on there in a long time (about a year or so), but I remember the site being clunky and glitchy and there haven't been any noticeable improvements in the time I've had an account there.

Unvale is clunky, glitchy and character profile descriptions have a text limit of 2000 characters, so it's not really a good option if you like to write long, detailed profiles for your characters. The staff and moderators here are nice though.

Editing because I forgot about something important:- Unvale also doesn't have a blocking system or character profile privacy features yet.

@TheEnforcer

Ahhh ok ok I see.

I am also not a coding person lol

@Xela

Ourgh, another point taken off for toyhouse. Shame to hear about Refsheet.

At least UnVale is just in beta and hopefully can continue growing.