Naoki's Style Guide

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Hi, my name is Empress Naoki , and welcome to my style guide. In this style guide, I have collated a bunch of my tricks, tips, opinions, and suggestions for what I think are the best practices here on TFS as they loosely relate to the concept of style. Allow me to state right off the bat: these are my suggestions. A suggestion is an idea put forth for consideration. I think you should do these things, but you’re not obligated to, and nobody will really think any less of you if you don’t. (Probably) But if you do, I think you’ll be doing the best thing. So take the following as you will.

Section The First: Character Things

So, in terms of what you’re presenting to TFS, most of it is your character(s). As such, presenting your character well is very good, very important, and you should do that. To give this some structure, let’s dissect a profile, and touch on which bits you should be concerned with, and how I think you ought to do thing. Here’s an example of a profile- my own, labeled with numbers. Correlate the numbers in the image with the numbers below it.


(click to expand)

1. Profile Avatar

Your avatar, your profile image, or simply your ‘picture’ is one of the two parts of your first impression. When people look at your character, they’re going to see this image and form their conceptions of your character based on it. People judge books by their cover all the time. As such, having a somewhat reasonable profile image is kind of important.

However, it’s not quite as simple as just using google images and choosing one if you wouldn’t like it to be. There are all sorts of sites that you might search for character images on, and I’ve linked a bunch of them in the Relevant Links section below. Here, I’m going to talk about what I think character images should usually be.

Busts! A bust, as in, a person's head, shoulders, and maybe chest. My logic here is as such: these images are not displayed in very high resolution. Avatars in chat, and to the left of each post you make are displayed as 75x75px. That’s small. If people hover over your profile to the left of a post, it enlarges to 150x150px, and that’s assuming that your profile image is a perfect square. As such, you need to display coherent information in that small of a space. The most relevant bit of information to display is usually a character’s face, as opposed to say, their feet. Feet are not important. Make your profile image a portrait, include their shoulders if you want, and maybe some of their chest.

As such, I think that an optimal profile image (for the majority of characters) is one that is square, displays the character’s face, and can be interpreted clearly as a face even at the small resolution it will be displayed as. (To make the most out of the space you have, it’s ideal for images to be squares.)

Also, it is sometimes a good idea to choose to model your character after a fictional character. For example, the character Arya Shieldheart ’s appearance is modeled after the female protagonist of Fire Emblem Fates. As one might be able to guess, there’s a fair amount of fanart for the character. Some of them would be suitable for avatars with a bit of editing, and others might be useful as a visual aid in slightly saucier situations.

However, you should probably not model your character after popular characters in fiction, lest your TFS character been seen as a ‘rip’ or ‘copy’ of them. While it’s one thing to take inspiration, directly translating someone else’s pre-established character is neither creative nor cool.

Next thing. You’ve gotta rehost and link to your avatar. Rehosting is my #1 suggestion for people, both for avatars and other embedded images, because hotlinking is a bad thing. Allow me to explain.

When choosing your avatar in the little dialogue, you technically have a few options, which are pictured here.



The proboards default avatars are awful and you should never use them. That’s not an option.

Remember how I said that images are displayed really small on the site? Yeah, well, if you upload your avatar from your computer to proboards, proboards automatically resizes it to the largest size it will be displayed at, a maximum of 150x150px. That means that if someone can’t quite make out what your avatar is and go to view the image in full size by right clicking and going to look at it, it doesn’t get any larger. This is bad, and you should not upload your image for this reason.

That leaves linking. And you would think to yourself, “That just means view the image on whatever site I found it on, and copy that link into the box, right?”

Noooooo, no. No. (Nononononono.) That’s hotlinking. (And that's bad.) Don’t do that. Instead, download the image. Then go to imgur.com. I host a lot of images, so an account is useful for me, but it’s not required. Whether you log in or not, click on the dropdown arrow next to the green “New Post” button, and click “Upload Images”. Browse your computer for the avatar that you just downloaded, and then upload it.

It will take a moment, and then take you to a page that might look something like this. Don’t worry about any of those buttons or text fields- they don’t matter. Instead, right click on your image, click “View Image” or something along those lines, and look at the link it gives you. It should look like this, but with letters and numbers in place of underscores.

https://i.imgur.com/______.jpg
Sometimes, it will say “.png” instead of “.jpg” but that’s fine. All that’s important is that it’s an “i.imgur” link and it has a file extension at the end. This means that it’s a direct link to the image, and that’s what you want. Paste that link in the box. That’s how to properly link to an image.

There are also other image hosting sites. Photobucket is one. But it’s bad, displays advertisements when people try to view your image, and sometimes doesn’t load. Tinypic is another, but it’s also bad. And there are others, you can go google it if you want, but what I’m getting at is that all of them are inferior to Imgur for various reasons.

2. Display Name

The display name is the second element of a character’s profile. It is not the same as one’s username, and it can be changed at any time. It can include capitals, spaces, and some special characters. This name ought to be your character’s name, or at least how they’re referred to. If your character’s full name is very long, you might not want to include all of it. If your character has a title that’s applicable and a major part of their character, you might want to include that, but not if it’s too long.

Really, this is just a name box, I don’t have many thoughts on it. Just make sure to change it from the default and capitalize correctly.

3. Username

This is actually the first thing that you choose when creating a character. In contrast to display name, it cannot be changed, ever. It cannot include capital letters, spaces, or any sort of special characters. In my opinion, this name should be your character’s simple name, just their most applicable name. If I had the option to, I would, in hindsight, choose simply “naoki” as my username, because titles change. You want something short, simple, and easy for people to remember alongside your display name.

If you don’t know what your character’s name is going to be, maybe hold off on creating the account until you do. It’s up to you, really, but just try to avoid situations where your username and display name aren’t at all related. That makes things confusing.

4. Profile Information

Personally, I don’t consider the profile information particularly important. Your character ought to become known not through what’s written there, but the actions they take, and such. What you want to do here, in my opinion, is put down what is immediately visible or obvious about your character.

For example! My character, Naoki, has cat ears. This is stated. She also wears the signet ring of Isra at essentially all times. This is stated. Other details, about her build, other accessories, face and such, those are also stated, because one would simply have to look at her to see such things. However, such things as her history, relationships with others, secrets, and abilities are not stated. Those have to be witnessed or learned.

Furthermore, I think that putting non-information in your profile information is not only counterproductive, but somewhat annoying. Things like, “Age: ” or, “Location: Right behind you…”. Things like that, that take up space but don’t actually tell someone reading the profile anything about the character are extraneous, and shouldn’t even be included. If you leave a field blank, it doesn’t appear.

If someone looks at your profile and it looks like it’s going to take more than a minute or so to read, odds are they won’t read it, or will skim it. As such, don’t put too much information in there.

And as one more last bit, you should put some manner of divider between each section of your profile. (Between ‘Physical Description’ and ‘Clothes and Equipment’ for example) I currently use a line of =’s. You could use an empty line or two. You could use another sort of line, or a fancy ASCII divider. It’s up to you obviously, but I just suggest making the different sections distinct. It reads better that way.

Here are the big points of the above section summarized:

Make your profile image a bust
Always rehost and link to images
Don’t make your name something stupid
Make your username something simple
Don’t write a novella in your profile information
Always rehost and link to images

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Section The Second: Relevant Links

Here are some links to tools, services, and other things that can be linked to that I find useful in browsing and utilsing TFS.

Grammarly: It’s a browser extension or program that will spell and grammar check your posts as you write them. This is my #1 suggestion in terms of tools. Install it, use it, and pay attention to which sorts of mistakes you make so you can not make them later. This has made me a better writer, and odds are it’ll do the same for you. I suggest signing up with the referral link up there, such so that you get a bit of free ‘premium’, and reading the emails they send you.

Imgur: This is what you use to host images. It just is, no questions asked. It’s the most reliable image hosting service there is, and it’s fast, free, anonymous, and all that.

Imgur Tools: Here's a nifty little list of imgur extensions, which will allow you to upload and manage images more easily than through the imgur website (which is sort of bloated with memes). My personal favorite is Metronomik Imgur Extension for Chrome, but it's a bit old, has to be installed manually, and is only for Google Chrome. Browse the list, find one that works for you.

Google Documents: As all of us have or soon will learn that TFS is not a particularly reliable site. Sometimes it has issues. Sometimes the server goes down. Things happen, and sometimes, things involve deleting your posts as they're being written. As such, I heavily suggest using some manner of Not-TFS text box to write your posts in before you write them. Grammarly can totally do this with its application, and that works fine. But I started using Documents to draft my posts in before Grammarly became a thing, so I'm somewhat attached to it. The nice thing about Documents is that it automatically saves to Google's servers (Which are very reliable), and can be accessed anywhere where you log into your google account, including on phones and such, with an app. Things like Microsoft Word or just Notepad work just as well, for the most part, and you should definitely use something to draft your posts in, but I prefer Documents, so I linked that.

Anime Characters Database: This is a resource for finding characters to model one's characters upon. The thing about characters from anime is that they tend to have at least a bit of fan art, which you could then use as I discussed up in the first section. You can sort by things like hair color, eye color, apparent age and such to find all of the characters that are somewhat like what you want. Or you could just browse to find an appearance you like.

Deviantart: This is the front page of Deviantart, which is sometimes one of the internet's darker corners, and sometimes a site that has respectable art on it. You can use it to find images for characters, settings, or whatever else. The searching is kinda bad, but that's the price one pays, sometimes.

Pintrest: This is another resource for finding character images, and in terms of simply finding images, it's better in a lot of respects. You can, after making an account, search for broad categories like, "Knight" or "Castle", and it'll go ahead and find a whole bunch of images that display the thing in question for you. Very handy.

Google Images: Yet another image source, but I don't recommend this for searching for images. Rather, I suggest it for reverse searching images. When you find a picture somewhere other than the original source (such as on pintrest), it likely won't be in the largest resolution available. By searching for an image with Google Images, it will find all instances of that image on the web, and then you can sort them by size. Choose the largest available image to rehost, so you get the clearest image.

Tineye: This is a resource that exclusively reverse image searches. That's all it does, but it does it fairly well. If Google Images fails you, try this.

Tapatalk for Android or iOS: Tapatalk is an app for one’s phone or tablet that offers an alternative way to browse and post on TFS. You’ll need to hook it up to your account, and then it will do the things. It has a dark mode, which is nice, and its interface is more phone friendly than the mobile site, in my opinion. Additionally- and this is the reason I suggest it- it can give you push notifications when a bookmarked thread is posted on, a followed user posts, you get a message and such. This is incredibly useful to me, as it provides instant notifications for those events. If you use TFS on your phone on a regular basis, or have your phone on you and would like those notifications, give it a try.

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I intend to write more of these sections later on, so stay tuned.