The Great RP Migration

The Beginning

On December 12, 2011, LJ's Release 88 changed the face of LJRP forever, beginning its journey into the brave new lands of DWRP. Release 88 was meant to improve LJ's comment pages. Unfortunately, its changes were widely felt to be a spectacularly poor fit for RP purposes, and thus the great migration began.

The Complaints

The complaints were immediate and numerous.

• Comment subject lines had been removed.
• You could no longer preview your post.
• Icon keywords were eliminated.
• Some people found that it didn't work on their computer.
• Some people got headaches from the layout.
• Igrick, the head of Livejournal Russia, was disrespectful of the users.

In this environment of complaints, therefore, many RPs chose to open serious discussion as to whether or not they should move.

Camp Fuck You Die

Campfuckudie is one of the largest and oldest journal RPs, founded in 2005. It was considered one of the key bellweathers of the move, and its relatively quick vote decisively for the move a week after Release 88 was seen by some as the moment that a move to DW really gained momentum.

Pan RP coordination

The journal RP community had always had some cross-communication, purely due to the number of people playing in multiple games and moving from game to game. But the migration was when a pan RP identity became (at least temporarily) formed. There was a plunk dedicated to tracking the votes and the moves. Spreadsheets were made, tracking the votes and the move. There were many, many posts on how to move. People gave away paid time. There was, temporarily, even a community for mods of all RPs to compare notes on modding.

This being the RP community, it pretty much promptly went back to normal levels of self-absorption, but hey, we tried.