Esper - Beata's hot new social media service

So, contact with the outside world is limited and heavily regulated. Students can have phones, send letters, make calls, sure. But since secrecy is so important, Beata's staff make sure nothing incriminating leaks out. It's a simple security issue. If the wrong information went into the wrong ear, then who knows how the students or the school itself might be endangered?

But teenagers are teenagers, and they need their internet. In Headmaster Wright's latest and most pathetic attempt to be "hip", he has introduced a new platform exclusive to Beata students—Esper!

Basically, it's a social network that works similarly to Facebook or Myspace or whatever things whippersnappers use these days. Not Google+, obviously. Students can make posts, upload pictures and videos, or do whatever. The "website" is only lightly monitored by school faculty.

The name, Esper, is a term used for people with psychic and paranormal abilities. I thought it sounded trendy enough to be the name of a stupid social network clone.

So let's cut to the chase:
- There would be a new board in Misc. Roleplay, just for Esper. It'd be located under Journals or Character Pages.
- It would be in blog format similar to the Announcements board.
- Your characters would post whatever stupid things your characters would post.
- These posts would be canon.
- I haven't worked out all the details on how the 'site' would function, but I have a few ideas. There would be a sticky explaining the basics.

Yay? Nay? Ideas?

Yay. I'll edit ideas into this as they come to me.

Was this idea spawned as a platform to share Monty's butt pic? Do we get our own Esper handles?

Sounds like a cool idea!

It'd be so much easier to spread rumors now.
I'm up for it~
Few questions:
1) Would they be able to make private/public posts?
2) Would prefects have any power over the website?
3) Are all accounts anonymous (ie. with usernames) or would everyone register with their real name?

Jay wrote:

Was this idea spawned as a platform to share Monty's butt pic? Do we get our own Esper handles?

Yes and possibly.

Echo wrote:

It'd be so much easier to spread rumors now.
I'm up for it~
Few questions:
1) Would they be able to make private/public posts?
2) Would prefects have any power over the website?
3) Are all accounts anonymous (ie. with usernames) or would everyone register with their real name?

Echo wrote:

It'd be so much easier to spread rumors now.
I'm up for it~
Few questions:
1) Would they be able to make private/public posts?
2) Would prefects have any power over the website?
3) Are all accounts anonymous (ie. with usernames) or would everyone register with their real name?

1. In my head, your posts were public to the entire website by default, but were weighted by popularity and recency. There would also be a friend list which would give their posts more priority over others.

Example: Montare has zero friends, but you can still see his posts.
Richard is your friend, and even though his post isn't extremely popular, you still see it nearer to the top.
Jace is not your friend, but because his post is extremely popular, it's at the top of the website.
Jane posted a popular post (with lots of votes and replies) a day ago. However, because it's an older post now, it'll automatically get weighed toward the bottom to give newer posts a chance to shine.

2. No. The website would essentially be a free-for-all. There, of course, would be official "rules" to keep things polite and school appropriate, but those wouldn't really be enforced. Of course, that doesn't stop prefects from seeing your posts. And what they do from there is up to them.

3. I... don't know. I had imagined it being a social network, but something more along the lines of a Tumblr/Reddit/Whatever bastard lovechild could work too. I haven't worked out the details yet.

There'd also be limited customization for profiles. So you could change colors/theming, but couldn't go full Myspace and put on a terrible JPG skin over the whole thing. I have a couple other things in mind for features, but I should probably think through the basics before listing them all here.

If somebody would want to make a logo too btw, that would be cool.

I did a thing. I also suck at keeping things simple, sorry. //I think it looks really plain. OTL

It's a logo, it's supposed to look plain. You should extract that E as an icon or something

Jay wrote:

It's a logo, it's supposed to look plain. You should extract that E as an icon or something

Okay, I removed the E and added a smiley face. Because that looked better.

Holy catfish Echo, that's amazing.

We have our winner. Thank you so much for this.