★ Create A Clan Fanclub V.3 ★

[Arya22]

If I ever name my cats with Canon names, it is completely unintentional. (except for Fireheart/star, I admit I don't know real warrior cats names. XD)

[lameloserlexi]

I'm writing my post for Howlingclan, and I love how I've made some of my cats develop to become hipsters- Like Blackscars and Waspface. I just love it X3

I'm making Sootstar call the clans and I'm so tempted to just put "First thing's first, I'm the realest." Like, Sootstar. Lay off the Iggy.

[Dinolil1]

If Sootstar does that, I will love 'em and their clan forever and ever!

(TBH If Sootstar does do that, Fritillarystar's totally going to gabble about how she's met with the spirits and then probably be very embarrassed when just about every leader has seen Starclan!)

[ossa di cervo]

Question! Do you guys find it easier to read posts that have dialogue color coded? Regardless of spacing. Or do they grab your attention more/turn you off?

[Dinolil1]

Question! Do you guys find it easier to read posts that have dialogue color coded? Regardless of spacing. Or do they grab your attention more/turn you off?

I tend to prefer to colour code it. It's mostly to do with my way and style of writing!

[hazilnut]

@color coding

Personally I color code my writing! It helps me tell who's talking at a glance, and since my style tends not to attach dialogue tags to every sentence it's very useful! Though I'll admit neon hues and large swatches of colored dialogue hurt my eyes a bit, but I feel like color coding is more feasible than starting a new paragraph every time someone new starts talking- can you imagine how long a post would be?

[vampiress_fox]

@Zmija: i personally do not care either way, but i color code mine for two reasons. the first so that i know where the dialogue is and where it isn't because i have the bad habit of putting half-dozen sentences of dialogue interspersed into a paragraph of description, and the second is so that i know who is talking no matter what the situation.

as an after thought, a third reason i do it is so that i know which two cats are having a conversation together so i do not get confused.

[Chamrosh]

@Zmija
I'm just going to take a really different take here.
I've got no issue adding colours as tags, and I do it myself to show ranks (not individuals!) in principle.
There are four potential limits towards colours though, and they all make it really hard to read, at least for me personally.

1) I'm kind of slightly colour-blind. It's a bit hard to explain exactly, because I don't know exactly what it is, but I'm pretty sure it's psychological. I can see red, but the intensity of it seems to be just frankly incorrect, so I can't tell reliably between different shades of purple (especially against blues...), oranges and reds. This is an issue because, with a lot of cats, a lot of the shades end up being the same, simply because of the number of new colours that have to be made. And I cannot tell them apart without messing around on paint or something, which I don't want to do to have to read every single paragraph. I mean, that's probably just an issue for me here, but it is hard to read.
2) Again with the running out of colours, but eventually you have to use really pale colours. The background colour is (stating the obvious, but it's needed for the point!) a sort of pale yellow-green colour. A lot of the paler tones you see are pale yellow, and that's entirely impossible to read without highlighting (at least for me, I don't know if that's typically). Thing is, highlighting turns everything white, so there's no point using colour at all if you're relying on someone to highlight in order to be able to read. I wouldn't think it's an issue if you could highlight a background colour for text without the reader having to do it themselves, which would also give a much larger variety of possible combinations without even having to use pale colours. Unfortunately, we can't highlight like that, so by using pale colours you invalidate yourself using colours at all, and that's just how highlighting with a mouse works. Plus the fact that on phones you can't easily highlight, so it can't be read at all...
3) When colours are used as a way to stop having to say who's speaking at all. I can't remember exactly what shade everyone is for however many posts in a row, and I don't want to have to keep scrolling down to see which cats are which between every line of text. It's fine to have colours as the main thing, as it helps quite a bit in keeping track of which cat is which once a conversation is started (and I honestly think just my doing ranks probably helps a bit with that on a far easier level), but it is pretty disorienting without some sort of "[speech] Cat A said to Cat B" beforehand, so that readers can work out from there the colours of the individuals without scrolling. It only has to be said which cat is which once, as long as the colours are easily discernible from each other.
4) Personally I always find it hard to read when people don't press enter between different lines of speech. Sure, it means my posts are pretty long, but I can essentially just write in script format and then add in the occasional bit of action, which is actually easier than having to always say "[speech] Cat A said, and Cat B said [speech]" because I can just skip the middle bit once I've actually established which cats are present. Don't hit enter until Cat A is done speaking (at least for a few minutes) and there's no confusion at all. This is made much more confusing with similar colours (especially similar colours bad for colour-blindness!) and pale colours, as I can't even tell who's speaking within the paragraph.
It's also worth noting, that if you want ambiguity in your posts, using full coding is a bad idea. Given I'm going for mystery in the future, me coding in individual cats' colours would defeat that idea. If, for instance, I don't want it to be clear that Lobeliafur is gossiping about Harrierpelt being a bit too tetchy about not being able to have kits, then me setting Lobeliafur's colour to one thing means that it either has to be clear regardless or I have one bit of speech which just looks really off.
That's not a general concern, only if you're like me and occasionally like giving people more info than any of the individual characters could know, without making it clear what the reader knows. Mind games are the most fun games, after all.

Basically, I don't mind the use of colour for individual cats, as long as these things are born in mind. I have a little chart I use which has a series of all the "html safe" colours, basically the ones that can be displayed accurately pretty much anywhere, and they're all easy to tell apart, so I'd stick to them. They all have a format like AABBCC, and all look different, so I'd just pick between them personally.
There's a couple pale ones, but there's still a lot of options for what you can use, and to be honest, just plugging in any of the characters (a-f, 0-9) into that format should get you a unique colour.
I think Hickoryclan is currently the best example I can quickly find of how I think using colours fully works best, although Beechclan is also pretty close.

I might do an experimental post at some point entirely in script format to see if that's just generally easier to read even, because actually writing something like:
"Heronstar: I wonder what we should call these kits!
Chubtail: We suggested Saxifragekit last time, so should we use that?"
might be the easiest way of maintaining absolute clarity in who's speaking. It wouldn't even matter if you picked a slightly awkward colour for the cat, because just the name could be coloured, and thus the dialogue is still clear even with really similar colours or really pale colours. I'll probably end up doing that anyway when I get round to Gustclan having murders and stuff, just simply because of wanting to be able to avoid the biases and unreliable narratives that are needed to tell something in prose from a suspect's point of view without the audience knowing whether they're guilty (The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie is a good example of how much has to be done, where every thought has to be checked for if it seems too innocent or too guilty, and it's only because of how good a writer Christie was that it's not glaringly obvious).
That's my alternate suggestion for if you have too many cats to have everyone have easy colours but want to keep using unique colours for everyone, anyway.

[Katrione]

@Zjima

Color coding draws my attention, especially if all the colors go well together. The only reason I don't do it is because i'm too lazy to write the color codes in everytime XD

[lameloserlexi]

@Color Coding

I usually don't, simply because the whole post is from only one cat's point of view, so they mainly talk. Plus, I make sure it's easy to know who's talking when. I tried color coding my posts at one point, but it really wasn't for me because it made the whole coding for that part way too complicated- Mainly why I dumbed-down my coding and made it easy for me to pick out each parts.