It’s good to see an article exposing these other types of roleplaying, and especially one as well-written as this. I think it should also be noted that forum roleplaying is just one subcategory of a larger group; usually called “freeform roleplayers”. In most of these settings, the players have a very loose (if any) ruleset, and are working together to build a story in what I like to call collaborative fiction.

Of course, this isn’t limited to forums; for example, we have an RPG Chat as well, where the story is almost purely freeform, with only loose boundaries regarding mutual player respect. For a while, Play-by-Email was popular, but I think this has died down now that the internet has evolved into the complex and diverse world that it wasn’t in the late 90s, when PBeM was probably at its peak.

And of course I must reveal some of the cutting-edge tools we’re building specifically to tailor to these types of communities. Our goal is to break away from this “post on a forum” mentality and build a custom system that enables users to automate what they had previously shoehorned into a forum topic.

All in all, great post! Looking forward to seeing more content about this!