Lumblr Wiki:Get Started Guide/Beginners

A full list of policies can be found here and you should make yourself familiar with them before editing. Our main policies are:
 * All users must be 13 years of age or over to make an account. This is Wikia's rule, not ours. Read more.
 * Swearing is acceptable so long as it is kept to a decent amount, but be mindful of users who are uncomfortable with swearing/discussing sexual things.
 * Do not post pornographic material or link externally to it. People as young as thirteen use this website.
 * Respect other users. Any harassment or bullying of other users could result in your account being blocked. Do not spread personal information about another user without their consent as this counts as harassment.
 * Do not vandalize pages or make minor, useless edits for the purpose of earning achievements. They will not make you more likely to be considered for an administrator position.
 * Do not create a secondary account for the purpose of avoiding limits or blocks. If discovered, you can be punished accordingly.

Character Form
As a beginner user, the only type of character you'll need to concern yourself with is creating a new character. On the Creation Box, this is the first form, and it requires you to fill out the following sections: On the Creation Box, you'll find a box which says "Start a Discussion". In the box underneath this, click in the lighter box which says "What do you want to talk about?" and type Char: Name Lastname (make sure you replace Name Lastname with your character's full name). You can then copy and paste the character form at the top of the creation box and paste it into the box which says "Post a message to the Creation Box board." Fill this form out as described above, and wait for an admin or rollback to respond.
 * Gender: Male, female and non-binary characters are all welcomed.
 * Birthday: Preferably in the format Month Day, Year e.g. January 1, 2014
 * Face claim: The celebrity being used as the image for your character. You may not be allowed to use a celebrity who is being used by someone else and I will explain later how you can find that out.
 * Family/Housemates: The people that your character lives with. They don't need to be described, just listed.
 * Address: Pick a city out of Barfield, Miduna Beach, Blackwood Mountain or Lebeaux and then pick a residential street from that city where your character can live.
 * Personality: At least one paragraph about your character which describes positive and negative parts of their personality. Should be around five lines long as a general guide, although longer is preferred.
 * History: At least two paragraphs about your character's history and how they grew up. This should describe all of their life so far, and not just skip from their birth to the present. Each paragraph should be around five lines long as a general guide, although longer is preferred.
 * Describe your character in a word: A word to sum up your character.
 * How your character would describe him or herself in a word: Same as above, but what your character would call themselves.

The admin/rollback will then either reply to the form telling you things you need to fix about the form, or they will approve it. If they tell you to fix anything, you should edit that form by clicking on a button in the bottom right hand corner of your character form which says "More" click on the button which says edit, edit the things you've been told to change and save your edits. Then, make sure to reply to the character form so that the admin/rollback knows you have edited it and they can have a look at it.

If they approve the form, they will leave a template which looks like this:

This leads us to the next part of creating a character.

Character Page
To make things easier for you, Lumblr Wiki uses a standard character page which is linked in the template used to approve your character form. Clicking that link will take you to a new page where you need to fill out the appropriate sections there. If you want to customize colors, try this website. Also, consider using font colors and background colors which can be read up against each other.

Fill in the sections required and add the categories which apply to your character. These are: Once this is done, you're all set to publish your character's page. There's still a few things to do before you start roleplaying them.

Masterlist
To make housekeeping easier, we ask all users add their characters details to this page. The details you need to add are: You can add this by editing the page in source mode and adding the following text (but filling it in with your character's details: |Name Lastname Hint: Make sure that there is a |- between your character's details and the one before and the one after.
 * Name (and a link to their page)
 * Birthday (in the format MM/DD/YYYY where 09/22/1998 is September 22 and 08/11/1998 is August 11 and not November 8.)
 * School (either the school they are currently attending or write Grad if they graduated or N/A if it doesn't apply to them)
 * Workplace (link to the city their work is located in by writing Barfield Shoe Store unless there is a page already made for their workplace; if they don't work in one of the four cities, just write N/A)
 * Address (divided into the sections No. and Street)
 * FC (the face claim being used for your character; if they are more famous by a username than their actual name, use that as their name, e.g. youtubers).
 * Portrayer (your username and a link to your user page. Hint: write to save linking to your user page.)
 * LN (this just stands for whether your character has a Lumblr Network. If you plan on making one, you can edit it to say Yes, but if you know you won't or if you're unsure, just write No. You can change this later.)
 * Birthday
 * School or Grad or N/A
 * Workplace or N/A
 * Street Number
 * Street Name, City
 * Face Claim
 * Yes or No
 * Yes or No

When you are done, click preview and if you're happy, click publish.

Along with editing the masterlist, you should also edit your character's birthday onto the appropriate birthday template (this comes linked in the approve template for you to edit). If your character goes to a school, they should be added to that page too. If they work somewhere, add them to the page of the city where they are working, or if the location has a page (e.g. Barfield High School) add them to the page instead.

Word Bubble
The easiest way to create a word bubble is by clicking here and naming your page Template:NameSpeech (If your character has a common first name, such as Jake, you may want to name it Template:Name or Template:NameBubble if a page already exists there). This will bring up the following page, which you fill out.

Fill in everything else with the details of your character, but do not replace the ! This will become useful later. When you are satisfied, click preview to make sure everything worked out well and publish it. If the picture isn't showing up properly, it's possible you may have kept the which Wikia automatically adds to pictures when you use the add photo button. Delete anything that isn't the name of the photo and the extension (usually .gif .png .PNG .jpg or .JPEG).

Character Limits
Here on Lumblr Wiki, we are aware that new users can get really excited and you'll want to create a bunch of new characters all at once. Unfortunately, due to some instances of people creating way too many characters in the past and not using any of them, we've had to put a few limits on them.

30 Character Limit
Roleplaying a lot of characters and trying to create independent plots for all of them is hard work. It can also be exhausting when you've got a lot of characters. For this reason, we've put a cap on the amount of active characters you can have at any given time, which is set at a reasonable 30. If you've created thirty and want to create more, you'll have to mark one of your characters inactive and they can no longer be roleplayed.

One-A-Day Limit
On any given day, you can make up to three permanent characters. Only one of these characters can be female, one can be male and one can be non-binary. This limit is put in place because we want users to put serious thought into the characters they are creating, and by putting a limit, you have extra time to plan out your newer characters. There's no rush to create a lot of characters and that thirty is a limit, not a target.

Gender Ratio Limit
This limit simply means that if you have more female characters than males, (or vice versa) you cannot have more than three more characters of one gender than the other. For example, if you have seven females and four males (7-4=3) you will need to either remove a female character or create another male character in order to create another female. This rule does not apply to non-binary characters.

Age Limit
Most of the characters you'll find on this wiki lie within the 10-35 years age range. While we encourage you to create a variety of characters, we've put the age limit that all characters must be five because this is a roleplaying wiki, and children under the age of five will very rarely interact with anyone who isn't their family (if they can talk yet at all). Characters should also be doing age appropriate things (e.g. a seven year old should not be running their own business, likewise, a twenty year old should not still be in high school without some good explanation).

30 Day Limit
After you create your character, you must start a roleplay with them within a week. (How to do this will be explained later.) After this, it is up to you to keep your character active by roleplaying them regularly. Characters who have not been roleplayed with for a month will be marked with a warning template which looks like this:

After starting a roleplay, you are free to remove this template from the page. If the date on the template passes and the character is not roleplayed, they will be marked inactive by an admin or rollback and they cannot be brought back for another month.

Realism Limit
While we give you a lot of freedom to create your own characters, there are a few restrictions in place. There are two main types of roleplaying you need to concern yourself with on the Lumblr Wiki when you're just getting started. These are roleplaying and open roleplaying. Both forms are essentially the same, although open is useful if you're new and have no idea who to roleplay with yet.
 * All characters must be human (no semi-humans; supernatural creatures; possessed people; robots; time-travelers etc.)
 * All characters have human conflicts and capabilities.
 * Characters doing illegal things can be caught and punished for them. They do not hold immunity from the law if they are caught.
 * Users dealing with serious issues (such as abuse, rape, assault, bullying, mental health disorders, etc.) should use tact when dealing with them. e.g. Using 'bipolar' to describe someone who is sometimes happy and sometimes sad is not needed.

Roleplaying
Just regular roleplaying requires you to go to the Roleplaying board after creating your character and their word bubble and clicking in the box which says "Start a Discussion: What do you want to talk about?" For the title of your roleplay, you should write something original which you can tell apart from the other threads (song lyrics work well for this).

After you've typed this in, the box should have opened up to a larger one which says "Post a new message to the Roleplaying board." In this box, you should describe the scenario that has been set up a little bit. For example: Bob is flying his kite in Barfield park when it gets tangled up in Mary's kite and he has to run over to untangle it.

Once you have described the set up, you can use your word bubble to create dialogue. To use your word bubble (assuming you didn't delete the part which says ) all you have to do is type:

Remember that if you named your word bubble Template:Name or Template:NameBubble, you'll have to change it where I've written NameSpeech.

When you're happy with your roleplay set up, click on the section which says Add a Topic (optional) and type the name of your character, and the name of the character you want to roleplay with. If you don't know who you want to roleplay with, read the next section on open roleplaying.

When you're done, click preview to make sure it all worked out well and click publish. If you want to make sure that the other person you're roleplaying with can find it, it's always a good idea to send them a message with a link to the thread.

Open Roleplaying
Open roleplaying is almost identical to regular roleplaying. The main difference is that you use the Open Roleplaying board and in the topic section you only add your character's name. If someone wants to reply to your thread, they should: Is a bit more complicated, and has been moved into its own separate guide, here. Should the situation arise that you want to get rid of a character for any reason, it's quite simple to do this. First, be sure to remove any links to your characters pages from location pages such as schools or workplaces, remove your character from their birthday page (here) and if they have a Lumblr Network, mark it disabled and remove them from this page.
 * Reply to the thread, continuing the RP
 * Click on the more button which appears in the bottom right hand corner of the starter and click 'Move this thread' and move it to the roleplaying board
 * Edit the topics to include their character's name.

Then, edit their page and add the following text onto the top of their page:

Remove all categories off the page and click preview to make sure it turned out right, before clicking publish. This character (unless they died) can be brought back at any time by putting a new character form through the Creation Box. On this wiki, we like to regularly use awards to celebrate great characters, users and ships. There are two ways to go about this; the Lumblr Wiki Awards and Featured Stuff. Featured stuff is voted on each month and all featured stuff receives a place on the main page, while Lumblr Wiki Awards happen once every three months, at the end of each season.

Featured Stuff
Voting for featured stuff is fairly simple. At the end of each month, the featured stuff on the main page will be updated, and a new thread will be highlighted for you to read. To vote for featured stuff, you simply copy and paste the nominations form and vote for the character, ship, quote and user that you would like featured. Nominations are tallied up at the end of the month and the winners are posted to the main page.

Lumblr Wiki Awards
Lumblr Wiki Awards are slightly more complicated than Featured Stuff because there are a lot more categories to vote for and there are multiple awards to be won for characters, users and ships. During the last month of a season (November for Fall; February for Winter; May for Spring and August for Summer) a few threads will be highlighted for you and appear in your notifications. Even if you're not very familiar with much of the wiki, your votes will still be counted, and it's a great way to get involved in the community spirit.
 * 1) A discussion thread, where users can suggest additional awards to be added to the Lumblr Wiki Awards or suggest ones to be removed.
 * 2) A nominations thread, where users can make nominations via an anonymous survey, suggesting up to three nominees per category.
 * 3) A voting thread, where users can vote from a selection of 3-5 nominees in each category which have been selected from the nominees.
 * 4) A results thread, where the winners of each award are announced.
 * Our policies change a bit around here as new things are needed and as we introduce new things. It's your responsibility to keep up to date with the policies and any changes which affect the wiki. Admins will go out of their way to make sure that information is accessible by everyone.
 * If you have an issue with another user which affects your experience on the wiki (i.e. a user harassing you, editing your pages, constantly insulting your characters) please send an admin a message and they will help come to a compromise. If you have a personal issue which extends beyond the wiki, the admins are unable to get involved.
 * Please report any trolling or vandalism to an admin or rollback the instant you see it so we can deal with the problem swiftly.
 * For some useful roleplaying resources, which can help you with inspiration and improving your writing, see here.
 * Keep up to date with wiki news and gossip (and send in your own confessions) on the Lumblr Wiki Official Tumblr.