Character biographies

[SteampunkWolfdog]

To me, a character's bio is like a snapshot of them and their life so far that other players can read to see if they fancy roleplaying with you, be nosey at, ect.
I try to write at least something in my characters' bios whether it's a few paragraphs or a couple of sentences. However, I have noticed after nosing around a bit, that a lot of people don't write anything in their character bios and I wonder why that is. I can think of two possible reasons; the first being the fact that you're restricted to the amount that you are allowed to write in the biography which can be irritating for people who have characters with a lot of history. But that doesn't mean you can't write anything - just summarise it, or condense it down to bullet points, or write the bio somewhere like the 'Characters' section on the forum and link people to it.
The second reason could be that they don't want to give any information about their character in a bio and would rather people stop by and have a chat with them or roleplay with them to get to know the characters.

What I want to know is:-
 - how and why people choose to not write bios
 - people that do write bios, how do you write it and what sort of character info do you put.

I'm really interested in what people think about them, so please, enlighten me.  

[Soakitup]

I think that bios are a really good idea, if you're looking for an RP and someone would like to know more about your character then bam, it's right there and you don't have to type it out every time. You can just say "It's all in my bio!".
I haven't written anything in my bio yet because I'm still getting used to the game and my character doesn't have any history/special things about it yet. But I'm getting there.

[Nemena]

I've been curious about this, too!

My profiles are generally a few paragraphs describing their appearance and mannerisms; I tend not to include histories after people began taking that OOC information into the realm of IC. Either that or a brief history, but I'd rather people found out that information through interaction as opposed to simply scrolling through a biography. I-... Just aim to describe anything that's not on the model presented to other players whilst giving them a brief glimpse into the character's personality.

The characters I'm not intending to roleplay seriously or long-term generally have short biographies, or none at all.

[Lady_Alizarin]

I am one of those people who likes to write a bio for my major roleplaying characters. After I create the character, I will spend several minutes thinking of a history for them to put in the bio. If not, I will just put basic info about them; name, age, gender, status, species, breed, etc etc. Sometimes my characters bios are influenced from RPs they have been in. If my character was part of an RP that had a major turning point/effect in their life, I will write it down.

I think some people don't write bios for their characters probably because the character they are on is only for a short-term, temporary RP... but that's just a guess. Or maybe they haven't come up with a story for that character yet and are still building it up.

Here is my list of major characters that show an example of how I write their bios. Since I have limited space on the bio sheet in the game, I often times make them shorter.
http://www.feral-heart.com/index.php?option=com_jfusion&Itemid=2&jfile=index.php&topic=23685.0

[KibaWolf73]

I do write bios, but only for my main characters. They tend to range from a short paragraph to a TL;DR. But my FH is getting funky with me and deletes the bio next day. It became such a pain to see all my work deleted thanks to a glitch, that I kind of stopped to write TL;DR bios.

[FeralFireHeart]

Well, basically the main reason why people don't write bios is 'cause they probably expect no one will read it.
 To be honest, I don't write bios for my characters, but I do write short snappy phrases for 'em, like: ~I DESIRE FIRE~ and that's it.
I personally hate it when people write masses and masses about their little black wolf "who was abandoned by its parents" or somethin' like dat.
Who knowz, maybe that's why there's a restriction on the amount you can write
I don't think most people like to spend their time in FH, reading about someone else's char....... unless your a curious Doctor~

[Tearless]

I personally love going around reading random peoples' bios, though as the good Doctor has said, there's a sad lack of them. XD I imagine it's because people assume no one will read it, or they just don't have anything to write yet (sometimes it's hard to know a character before RPing with them a little). As someone who frequently bumps into the character limit when making character bios, though, I can't be sure about that.

As for what I put in them, I usually list gender, species, (because frequently neither is immediately evident with my chars XD)  and preset link if I have one, then a paragraph or two covering history and personality. I doubt many of them are ever read, but I have fun writing them, so it's not really a loss.

[Feareh]

I personally like to read other people's bios. It shows other people's creativity in lots of ways. Some of my characters have little bios to them, but not like a whole descriptive page