I suggest we revamp our activity checks.

Having them run from first-Saturday to first-Saturday sometimes means there isn't a full month between checks, but rather 3 weeks — and to be perfectly honest, I've demonstrated during the past few checks that asking me to post each character once during that period is just not realistic with my activity :P #gradschoolwoes

It's also frustrating because I never know if I'm going to lose someone, because I don't remember the date of every AC to be able to check against their most recent post and I don't want to do spreadsheets. I know some people have them and love them, but for me that's a waste of time when I could be posting and I just don't have enough time to start with :P

But I don't think I'm the only one — I keep seeing threads in Charmer's Chit Chat implying that everyone is kind of struggling with these. I just don't feel like our activity requirements align with our actual community activity at this stage of our life.

It's particularly a problem because of the post-AC penalty. For instance: times being what they are, sometimes I can only get on Charming once a week, on weekends. So say that I lose a character in a Saturday AC. I can't post to reactivate them on Sunday when I'm online, so I have to wait until the following weekend to request it — and because admin reactions aren't instantaneous I might have to wait until the next weekend to post that character. Which might be my only chance to do so before the next AC, so if I have homework/plans/whatever on even one weekend in a month, it's not really feasible for me to reactivate a character I lost in the previous AC.

Suggestions:

• Activity checks as currently run, but every other month (bonus: less work for staff, too!)
  
• If there's a way to run activity checks based on whether or not a character has any active threads instead of post count, I feel like that would help a lot - but I'm not sure whether that's an unfeasible logistical ask
  
• Counting by calendar month instead of Saturday-to-Saturday (would help me know where I stood and would get rid of the surprise!short months - IDRC when the deactivations happen so those could still be on the first Saturday to keep staff workload the same - and we already do this for posting wizard so I feel it's logistically possible)
  
• Examining whether the post-AC penalty is still necessary.
  

And yeah, I know I could have an absence up for my entire grad school career and it would help some if I kept requesting passes. But in my mind, that's just not what that thread is for. This isn't a dramatic change in my activity level — this is my activity level for the foreseeable future. So I guess the alternative is to just keep cutting down my characters, but I've already gone from 10 to 7 to 5 and like tbh I'm not confident in my ability to keep up with 5 under the current system.