L2 Posted:

I pretty much agree, though with a site that’s as accepting of content as FWZ, a “turn-off signatures” option seems more viable.

Moving into more FWZ related questions…what goes into writing dialogue for this site? Is it difficult to write conversations without going off-the-handle in cheesiness?

We do have a disable sigs option…that’s what causes the “male reproductive organmongler” message to appear. (I think?)

Writing NPC convos: Well, Trout created an ingenious conversation tree editor just for this purpose (there are screenshots out there) and while it takes some time to get used to, it’s very intuitive. He recently improved things by making it more keyboard-friendly and increasing its speed — previously, it would take several seconds to save each component of a conversation to our dev server.

As far as avoiding cheesiness…I don’t know, I’m sure a lot of it is pretty cheesy! I’m tough on myself. While I strive to make sure the chats are reasonably interesting, funny, realistic and well-paced, I’m never, ever satisfied. And since I’m aware of the brick wall you can hit as far as imagination and funniness, I actually think it’d be better to fly off the handle more often. I tend to restrain myself because I’m concerned about other factors, like making sure it’s coherent, that there are choices, the option to skip ahead, etc, all while trying to convey some surprising aspects of the personality of the bug****s messaging you.

Fortunately, I have Trout, Bingebot and Abdullah offering their input, because they can be truly warped sometimes.