I'm new to these forums, and to the RP aspect of E
but not to RP itself so I have some ideas.
There's another RP forum I'm on that's set up similarly to this - on the company's official forums. It's been established for a long time now, and has several threads that help keep it pretty organized, that are stickied to the top so people can get involved easier.
First and foremost - I've only found threads that are stories, or logs. I've yet to find any actual active roleplay/IC interactions that I can join. Also I noticed a complete lack of labels (IC, OOC, Private, Open, etc.) as mentioned in the rules which also makes things very hard since I have to look at each thread to see what it is, and what it's about, and if it IS roleplay (which I've yet to find), is it open, private, semi-closed, etc.
So having labels behind each title (Story, Commander Log, IC, OOC, so on and so forth) would significantly improve being able to navigate this area of the forums.
Onto stuff I've seen work in RP communities -
Skype chat, or discord chat would be fantastic if you don't already have an 'official' one set up. I don't think discord costs anything so someone could easily set that up and make a post with information on it, how to sign up, rules for the chat, etc.
Next - A basic character creation guideline. Now I get Elite Dangerous doesn't have any epic, uber crazy powers, but having a basic guideline on some stuff could help people get involved easier. It's not meant to enforce ideas or limitations, but more of a guide to help new players settle in.
I saw the 'Forum Rules' thread and I think it'd be worth expanding on. We have a 'Community Guidelines, Culture and Etiquette' thread that outlines the rules, what we expect from those who visit, how to get involved in threads, definitions of things like IC, OOC, and other terms that may be used in roleplay, etc. etc. It covers everything you'd need to know, in one spot, to help new players. It surely saves people from digging. And would make things far less confusing.
There's a thread set up so people can post their characters for review, get feedback, ideas, etc. I can see that working really well here given how mellow and nice everyone seems so far in the E
community.
Does anyone portray the Powers? It might be cool to have a thing set up that takes canon characters from the game, and opens up the potential for players to adopt the role on these forums. They could make an account for that character specifically (so as to not be confusing), and set up an IC OPEN thread for people to interact with them, or those that work for them depending on your reason for dealing with them. It should be limited to one player per role so to keep a specific lore jiving with them and not confuse people if there's more than one (with two probably different interactions and outcomes). Also given the limitation of leaders available, limiting it to 1 per RPer would probably be ideal, too.
Of course the drawback is if you end up dropping the role, it resets the interactions with the players so it's a clean slate for whoever picks it up again -- unless the new person agrees to take on the headcanon and interactions from the previous RPer. But it'd surely expand on interaction, and potential story.
Guidelines for this would be fairly straight forward I think. Check if the role is available, make an account, write up a thread for the character then post in the thread with the list, that you're taking up the role along with a link to the character's thread so people can find it easier.
Phew that was a lot. Okay I'll leave you to it :3