Profiles that refer to trans characters in weird ways, such as "<Name>, who was born <Deadname>" as the first line of their backstory, misgendering their pre-transition self, or the sadly way too common "Sex: Female // Gender: Male" and similar stuff in basic info sections.
What are your pet peeves when it comes to people creating profiles for their characters? Is there a specific layout you don't like when people use? Not enough words? Too many words?? Or maybe its something as simple as people not giving their characters a profile picture lol.
Personally i get bothered when people use excessive watermarks on the images in a character's gallery, its one thing to want to protect your art, i completely understand that as an artist myself, but. plastering your image top to bottom with a huge watermark at 80% opacity is absurd to me. I cant even see the image at that point :/
I'm simply curious to see what little things people dislike seeing in a character page. Don't signal anyone out and be civil. Just because someone doesn't like something doesn't mean everyone must abide to a specific standard!
Wanna talk about aspects of a character profile you like? Check out this thread's counterpart!
I agree on the watermark thingie. Especially when the character is up for trade/sale. How are you planning to sell your character if I can barely see what it looks like ?
I also hate the misuse of warnings (that thingie you have to click "yes I read it" to see the profile), when the warning is only saying "do not steal/copy my characters". Like it's going to stop a theft it's just annoying and that's it.
I also don't like when the whole user profile has a custom CSS that moves menus around. The menus are often made very small or hard to find. Please keep the ToyHouse layout and only use CSS on the character part, not the whole website.
I also agree on pagedolls blocking content, and cropped images in galery.
gizel To make it short, it's pretty close to saying that trans women are "biologically male", that trans men are "biologically female" and that nonbinary people are "biologically" whatever gender they were assigned at birth. It's insulting, transphobic wording, not to mention that it can even be downright inaccurate depending on the character's medical transition. You can't change your chromosomes, sure, but "biological sex" isn't just chromosomes; sounds wrong to say that someone who went through HRT and SRS is still biologically their AGAB, for example. Found this, I hope it helps: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskLGBT/comments/16fb06i/comment/k00qup4/ :]
When profiles still have that Latain "lorem ipsum.." text everywhere. You would never catch me making an incomplete profile public. Or at least I'd put "coming soon" or "in progress" in the sections that aren't done yet. Idk I think it's kind of embarrassing ^^;
i feel like. this is gonna be so controversial help :'D
but i've always disliked those little trait sliders. y'know, the "introvert-extrovert", "logic-feeling", "optimistic-pessimistic", etc. i don't really mind it much if it's just a little additional thing as long as there's still a paragraph or two about this character's personality! but i've seen a few codes where it relies on these stats and i just-
uhh gonna try to explain it but. personality is very much nuanced! and it can't just simply explained by a bunch of stats. even if two characters has a same trait, they can very much express it in so many different ways! like for example, if they have lots of humor: are they witty like a stand-up comedian, or are they a goofy class clown? what kind of jokes do they do? another example would be introversion-extroversion; sure you're character can end up anywhere in that slider, but how do they express it? how would they socialize, etc honestly one's preference to socialize can be also a bit different to their demeanor [you can have a quiet extrovert! they exist all right]. and yeahh stuff like that- so when i just saw the sliders, i mostly just can't help but finding them limiting y'know? they're also pretty confusinh for me atleast to understand oop-
v ALSO XINOIZYS below brought up a point about labeling traits without further explaination and like i so agree. honestly never enjoyed "trait lists" at all, but when it's left unexplained it get's a bit more confusing ah-
i don't like layouts where there are tabs, but the buttons to view different tabs are just font awesome icons, are small, or are placed unintuitively. extra negative points if all three are true. i'm not going to spend forever clicking around a page to try to find where you've buried the majority of the information. also, any box that scrolls that contains paragraphs of content should be twice the size they are on most layouts. it becomes absurdly difficult to read tons of text when i can only see a sentence and a half at a time.
a small character summary or blurb is always deeply appreciated. being able to get a sense of the character, their story, and "hook" before diving into a monstrous backstory is helpful.
My personal pet peeve is characters with over-stimulating pages with too much going on, love the idea of customizing the page a bit ofcourse! But some people overdo it a little
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
I agree with dazey-the-goat. As someone who struggles immensely with personalities in general, I don't know what those are supposed to mean. Describing or picking up a character's personality is already difficult for me, now I have to figure out what "4/5 kindness", "2/5 intellect", etc means. On paper, it seems simple. 4/5 kindness means they lean heavily on it. What doesn't make sense is, how am I supposed to base it. 3/5 might be "neutral", but like, does that mean they can be kind, but if they see a homeless person, they're one of those people who just walk past as if they aren't there? Or does it mean that they're "kind", as in, basic human decency? 1/5 means they're a horrible human being who'd rather mock and wish someone the worst than move on with their lives because they think they're better than them, 5/5 means they're the sweetest person you'll know who adores helping anyone from small kittens who stepped in a puddle to helping the elderly with their shopping list. But it's the numbers in between that make little sense to me. It's even worse when custom codes use X/10 instead of X/5. The same goes with those ability/magic/skill bars.
- On the same topic, I really don't like when people list traits but don't expand on why they have that trait. I really like how the personality tab here looks. Not only would it help people like me immensely on how it works a little better, but it also opens your character up more, maybe even adding stuff we don't know about them in their lore.
I also don't like profile tabs. I like to see the entire character's profile, like a wiki page.
- To an extent, I can excuse a balance. Tabs are fine, if they're limited, to say, only relationships or design elements. But I much prefer if the bio, history, traits, skills, etc were all on the same page. It looks fuller.
-Layouts where all their key information and images are in separate tabs (By this I mean toyhouse tabs, not html tabs. I LOVE html tabs as it’s less overwhelming, and I don’t have to leave the page/load a separate page.) rather than in one spot with a few extra tabs for optional reads, AUs etc. It’s really annoying going to read about a cool-looking character then seeing everything is spread out onto different tabs and overall inaccessible/a general hassle.
-When the profile is reading heavy but on one block of text. No paragraphs, barely any spacing.
-Code templates being placed down when there’s no code. Lorem ipsum land, there’s no info about the character yet I’d be almost lead to believe there IS at first quick glance.
-Overkill watermarks. Like I’m talking you can’t see the character AT ALL. It’s completely consumed by the watermark. Especially if it’s tile that isn’t the default toyhouse tile. Straining on the eyes.
-Dark text on dark html/css, bright text on bright html/css.
manual bump-
another peeve: character profiles that have an avatar but no pictures in the gallery or profile at all. this character clearly has a design, where it it??? let me SEE ITTTTTTTT
When the refsheets are buried in the gallery. You can put the ref in a separate tab/gallery or in the OC's profile, but don't put it in a disorganized gallery! Especially when there are multiple images that look like refs. Don't make it more difficult for artists to draw for you!
I also dislike when people use CSS to make their themes completely black/purple/dark colors. I feel like the only one who uses light mode exclusively. Dark mode hurts my eyes, so I end up squinting at the screen whenever the CSS changes my theme.
this is so minor but it drives me slightly nuts when people have a ton of warnings on their character profiles and then... none of that content is actually present on the profile, or if it is present it's just the barest mention that doesn't really justify a warning. this is sooo common and i don't understand it. there'll be a warning for "death" for example and there's just one line like "his brother died" or worse, no mention at all. it's especially nerve-wracking when people use those icons/drawings to represent each possible trigger on their CW page and i have to scroll through dozens of them to get to the bottom. hopefully you guys know what i mean JKGDSf