F-List is a roleplay site where furries (and non-furries) can post requests to do RPs with each other to various online chat rooms.

I have just learned that f-list has been shadowbanning most of my public roleplay prompts (rp chat 'ads', not to be confused with the actual banner ads). For me, this happened due to the presence of a tinyurl link to an image references (some of those discord CDN urls are loooong).

I guess they have some anti-spam system that silently flags any link shortening websites, which is... well, not ideal given a 255 character limit in your status text. While perhaps I can understand the security rationale, the process of *silently* blocking people's posts means you have no idea if your rp prompts go through or not.

As it turns out, I have wasted years posting rp requests in F-List chats that were never seen by anyone. I had noticed a long while back that I was receiving drastically fewer approaches (usually not finding any RPs on f-list most times I joined and posted, even posting all day long), and I thought it was just down to me having high requirements and niche interests. While that might be true, most of my rp prompts just weren't being shown in the first place.

Such silent blocking of users is absolutely unacceptable, especially in the context of a situation where people end up just wasting hour after hour on the site only to be sending their prompts out to the void. How can anyone trust investing their time into a site when this sort of shadow blocking happens? When every time you post you have to wonder if your post is actually visible or not?

For those not familiar, the process of posting a rp prompt into the chat involves switching between different sets of tabs and manually posting your ad every ten minutes to the various relevant channels. It's time consuming, error-prone and cumbersome, and so to find out that I've spent years doing this for no purpose whatsoever is quite frustrating indeed.

I brought my concerns to the f-list admins requesting 1) they publicly notify people of this shadowbanning and apologize to those who pointlessly wasted hours and hours of time due to this, and 2) if they must auto-block posts, then to have their site automatically notify anyone whose posts/status get blocked with an explanation instead of silently blocking the post/user.

Initially the site administration trivialized this problem and accused me of lying/exaggeration, until later on admitting this has in-fact happened for years and will continue to happen for the foreseeable future. In their response, they mention that there is a sentence in the FAQ about it, and they do have plans for a new website one day in the distant future which may or may not stop shadowbanning peoples prompts. I am including the full exchange here so as to provide the administration's perspective on the issue without being filtered through my own bias.

I understand their motivations, but, as someone who has wasted countless hours due to this, I don't think continuing to shadowban posts is a good solution. I can no longer trust that my posts reliably show up on f-list. I had many fond memories of the site and the people I met there, and used to be a really big fan... so this is definitely disheartening to me. I know fighting spam is difficult, but letting users get tangled up in a spam filter and waste their time pointlessly is not the solution.

Thus, I want to find a different site to play on until they figure out their new site which may take a long while yet. So, what other RP sites do you like? Have you found any good rp sites you can recommend?

Thanks :)