Thread: my.lotro.com Help for Kinships

With all the exciting possibilities for players at my.lotro.com it can be a bit overwhelming for Kinship leaders to get a grip on all they can do with their new tools. Hopefully this thread will help get you pointed in the right direction so you can start taking advantage of my.lotro.com and all it has to offer!

A note before we start: All of this is geared towards Kinships but much of it also applies to individuals. Many of the tools described are also available on your personal pages.


Who Gets what?
The three main Kinship ranks have corresponding ‘ranks’ on your kinship blog. These are created when your Kinship data is pulled from the game servers. Members with the following ranks, or their equivalents, will receive the following my.lotro.com roles.

Leader = Admin
Officer = Editor
Member & Recruit = Contributor

Admin – The admin has complete control over all aspects of the Kinship blog. Admins can edit, approve, remove, post, or change the date/time stamp of any posts in the blog. You may also change the kinship profile and avatar.

The Admin can also change the permissions of any member of the kin in the Kinship Admin panel. You can add additional administrators, or take away posting rights on a per player basis.

Only Admins can see the full player list or add events to the Kinship Calendar. If a player has made their player name private, they will appear as anonymous and their characters will be listed immediately beneath. If they have made both their player name and character names private they will show as anonymous with no characters listed.

Editor – Can edit, post, and approve posts of other members of the kinship. Editors can also edit the Kinship Profile information and avatar as well as approve or disapprove comments. Editors Cannot see the user list, add or edit items on the calendar, or change user permissions.
Contributor – Can write and post to the kinship blog but must have their posts approved by either an Editor or an Administrator.

There are two additional roles that an administrator can assign to a member. These are unused by our current system, but you are free to use them if you like.

Subscriber – has no permissions. Can only read the blog

Author – Can write, edit, and approve their own articles, but not those of others.

Note: The permissions reside with the player account, not the character. So if you have characters in multiple kinships you will see multiple tabs in your administration panel. Each will have the appropriate permissions for your role in that kinship.

Kinship Admins can change the role of any member, or add new players who are not in your kin to your Kinship’s my.lotro.com page. Keep in mind any changes you make are not reflected in game. So changing a member to an Editor will not change them from member to officer in game.

However, the game is always authoritative. So promoting or demoting a member in game will change his role on my.lotro.com even if you have assigned them a different role, such as admin, via the Kinship administration panel. Additionally, when a member leaves your kinship all their permissions are removed from your Kinship’s my.lotro.com blog.

Admins can add any member of the my.lotro.com community to their blog permissions and assign them any level of access. This could be useful if two kinships have an alliance and wish to allow officers to cross post to each other’s my.lotro.com pages. Be aware, once you grant a member editor level permissions, they have the ability to add anything they want to your page! If you grant someone Admin rights, they can do anything you can do. Be very careful assigning editor and admin level rights!

RSS Widgets are available. If you run your own private forums you can add your forum’s RSS output to the widget and have your latest forum topics appear on your my.lotro.com page! This also works with the officialLOTRO forums as well. You can have multiple RSS feeds on your page if you wish.

Text widgets can be added to your page. These are handy for making link lists, contact information, or other fairly static information available to your members.

That should get you started. Enjoy!

Leader = Admin
Officer = Editor
Member & Recruit = Contributor

Admin – The admin has complete control over all aspects of the Kinship blog. Admins can edit, approve, remove, post, or change the date/time stamp of any posts in the blog. You may also change the kinship profile and avatar.

The Admin can also change the permissions of any member of the kin in the Kinship Admin panel. You can add additional administrators, or take away posting rights on a per player basis.

Only Admins can see the full player list or add events to the Kinship Calendar. If a player has made their player name private, they will appear as anonymous and their characters will be listed immediately beneath. If they have made both their player name and character names private they will show as anonymous with no characters listed.

Editor – Can edit, post, and approve posts of other members of the kinship. Editors can also edit the Kinship Profile information and avatar as well as approve or disapprove comments. Editors Cannot see the user list, add or edit items on the calendar, or change user permissions.

Too restrictive in regards to the calendar.

Allow the kin leader to grant permissions to any kin member he/she wishes to add items to the event calendar, without having to grant full admin rights to that member for the entire site.

We do this on our Guild Portal site, and it works out rather well (for our kin) for getting short notice events posted for Raid Events, Book runs, Trait hunts, etc. We have regular members that schedule events, not just officers or the kin leader.

Does the event calendar support signups for members throw their name into the hat to be part of the scheduled events?

This I like. With a small kinship, we've never found it worthwhile to bother attempting to set up a kinship page. I like that this does most of the work for us, and gives us options and features that we probably never would have bothered with if we had done one on our own. Thanks!

Now to get the others to use it when it's out of beta.

Originally Posted by Strongbow

Too restrictive in regards to the calendar.

Allow the kin leader to grant permissions to any kin member he/she wishes to add items to the event calendar, without having to grant full admin rights to that member for the entire site.

We do this on our Guild Portal site, and it works out rather well (for our kin) for getting short notice events posted for Raid Events, Book runs, Trait hunts, etc. We have regular members that schedule events, not just officers or the kin leader.

Does the event calendar support signups for members throw their name into the hat to be part of the scheduled events?

At the moment the calendar is simply a calendar. You can post notices and events. There is no larger function. Though adding something like a raid calendar with signups might be something to consider in a future update.

The calendar permissions are also a great idea.

We have some really exciting plans for my.lotro.com! What you're looking at right now is really just the tip of the iceberg.

Will there be an XML or AJAX/JSON interface to my.lotro? I am trying to create a kinship/guild hosting service (for all games) and would like to be able to interface with it as something other than an external offsite link. Guild Cicle has a super set of the features you have and would like to integrate with your site (especially the roster).

Though adding something like a raid calendar with signups might be something to consider in a future update.

This feature - along with a few others related to kin and event management - is what would make it possible to use my.lotro instead.com of the website for which we currently pay $100 a year.

Important to us would be the ability to

* allow members to create normal events
* allow officers to create special events
* ability to flag an event as open to the public, to allied kins, or to kin members only
* allow the respective populations to sign up
* have some attendance recording (we try to make sure that people who did not get to go somewhere last time have top priority this time)
* minimally have dkp earned /spent tracking
* ideally let kins choose from a couple of common models for dkp tracking and perform calculations for then.
* allow players to submit an application for kin membership.

As we currently pay for a site with these features, we would not mind paying Turbine instead -- especially if the tracking systems had hooks into the game.

nice. question for turbine though...

how extensive is the plan for this site? that is, what features are you looking to implement and is there any sort of timeline to when they might get done?
i ask because i'm going to soon get started on a kin website, but was wondering how much might overlap with what is (or will be) available on my.lotro.com. i suppose with the RSS feeds most of the kin site could be posted on the site.

so how extensive will the hooks be in game? will things done in my.lotro ever be visable in game? like can an officer/leader change the MotD? (or schedule a MotD!!!) or other things? like will the calendar events remind players in game that something is about to happen?

just thinking out loud

i know you probably can't answer most or any of this i'm just rather curious because it opens up a world of possibilities.

I'd rather that my kinship's roster be not available to the public. Is there any way to implement that?

Originally Posted by Sapience

We have some really exciting plans for my.lotro.com! What you're looking at right now is really just the tip of the iceberg.

That quote is from a year ago. How much more of this iceberg has been exposed since then?

yeah, Sapience, throw us a frigging bone?!

Originally Posted by Sapience

At the moment the calendar is simply a calendar. You can post notices and events. There is no larger function. Though adding something like a raid calendar with signups might be something to consider in a future update.

The calendar permissions are also a great idea.

Ah, you mean sort of like:This suggestion: LINK

If you do go this route, two things from the perspectives of a Kinship leader and also one who maintains an increasingly capable website for it.

1. See if they can bolt-on a sign-up system that "validates" the quest, instance requirements against the my.lotro.com API. One feature that all of us would love to see, is something that keeps level or class inappropriate members from mistakenly signing up.

2. Much as I know Turbine has a desire to see us all focus our efforts here at my.lotro.com, the fact remains that many of us maintain rather good websites of our own. Making it possible to wrap things within our own site would make it more likely we would use some of these things.

Originally Posted by Sapience

With all the exciting possibilities for players at my.lotro.com it can be a bit overwhelming for Kinship leaders to get a grip on all they can do with their new tools. Hopefully this thread will help get you pointed in the right direction so you can start taking advantage of my.lotro.com and all it has to offer!

That sure sounds awesome. I can hardly wait until my kinship no longer says it's been DISBANDED so I can use some of these features.

Originally Posted by lortherin

That sure sounds awesome. I can hardly wait until my kinship no longer says it's been DISBANDED so I can use some of these features.

And I'm guessing that you already sent in the bug report so that Duwis and his group can be actually aware of your specific problem so they're better able to address it? And you didn't forget that it's all beta, meaning that there are still a good number of glitches in how the database works and interacts that they are slowly (yes it takes time) working out...

Originally Posted by Sapience

Admins can add any member of the my.lotro.com community to their blog permissions and assign them any level of access. This could be useful if two kinships have an alliance and wish to allow officers to cross post to each other’s my.lotro.com pages. Be aware, once you grant a member editor level permissions, they have the ability to add anything they want to your page! If you grant someone Admin rights, they can do anything you can do. Be very careful assigning editor and admin level rights!

I'm having a devil of a time trying to figure out how to do this bit here. How, exactly, does one add users manually/explicitly?

Originally Posted by sirwillow

And I'm guessing that you already sent in the bug report so that Duwis and his group can be actually aware of your specific problem so they're better able to address it?

My kinship is having the same trouble. We HAD a page, which then inexplicably disappeared. Now, it says we have disbanded... but we haven't. How do I report this problem, other than posting it here?

Originally Posted by Sapience

We have some really exciting plans for my.lotro.com! What you're looking at right now is really just the tip of the iceberg.

I'll believe it when I see it.

I am still looking for help regarding my kinship Friends of Frodo on Vilya our page does not exist since the new format came in.

We are a very large kinship and I would greatly appreciate any help getting it restored.

thank you in advance
Magentica Leader Friends of Frodo

Originally Posted by Ouchiewawa

I am still looking for help regarding my kinship Friends of Frodo on Vilya our page does not exist since the new format came in.

We are a very large kinship and I would greatly appreciate any help getting it restored.

thank you in advance
Magentica Leader Friends of Frodo

So, I talked to Frodo, and he doesn't recall having any friends under your name. But, he said the more the merrier and restored your kinship page. There is still an issue with your kinship log we are trying to track down, so the page is there but still a bit broken.

We're working on it; we'll update you when we know more.

Originally Posted by Duwis

So, I talked to Frodo, and he doesn't recall having any friends under your name. But, he said the more the merrier and restored your kinship page. There is still an issue with your kinship log we are trying to track down, so the page is there but still a bit broken.

We're working on it; we'll update you when we know more.

Thank you for finding us

I completely understand Frodo not know us - thought I'd enlighten



Some things are meant to be, just as Frodo was meant to bear the ring, so would others find their roles equally important. As Frodo set out from the Shire he was not alone and as his journey progressed so would many new journeys begin. His story was carried on the wind and Frodo would touch the lives of many and earn support from many more. These unsung heros, were not written about or recorded, but their roles in Middle earth would become just as important as they would up arms to defend that which was good in the World.

Now these great warriors of all races and classes are banning together, uniting in one cause….

These are the tales of the Friends of Frodo:

Members of the Friends of Frodo kinship are brave and just, they know they cannot help Frodo bear the Ring, but at the same time realise they can play a role just as important. They can defend those who cannot defend themselves, they can help rid Middle earth of Orcs and Goblins, evil spiders and abominations of Nature, deliver food to the hungry and supplies to the needy.

As members we all have bonded together for one cause, we help each other, defend each other, and fight together. No battle is too big, nor is a battle too small. No need is unworthy. We take up arms from Archet to The Mines of Moria across Marshes and Frozen lands alike.

Join us now to open the gateways of exploration and defend the rights of all creatures alike in Middle Earth.

I'm new to all of this. When your talking about kinship's, do you mean one's that people can join?

can we get our Kinship page restored as well?

Thorns of telperion on Windfola.

All i get when i try to visit it is The Page you are looking for was not found

Originally Posted by Duwis

So, I talked to Frodo, and he doesn't recall having any friends under your name. But, he said the more the merrier and restored your kinship page. There is still an issue with your kinship log we are trying to track down, so the page is there but still a bit broken.

We're working on it; we'll update you when we know more.

Jeese... he doesn't remember them after they all walked around Riven comforting him for that book quest.... What a snob!

Originally Posted by TarPalantir

can we get our Kinship page restored as well?

Thorns of telperion on Windfola.

All i get when i try to visit it is The Page you are looking for was not found

Fixed with the caveat listed previously a few times in this thread.

I have been unable to create a new kinship site in the lorebook. Any help would be appreciated!

My original post:
http://forums.lotro.com/showthread.p...ge-for-kinship

Is it possible to get the website for Southern Defenders - Elendilmir restored.

We are getting the same message as others that the page cannot be found.

Originally Posted by relphick

Is it possible to get the website for Southern Defenders - Elendilmir restored.

We are getting the same message as others that the page cannot be found.

Not any more; page found. Enjoy!

the web page for the brotherhood from vilya dose not show up sence the new format. can we get that fixed i have links from it to my kin web page. thanks.

Originally Posted by thundersky87

the web page for the brotherhood from vilya dose not show up sence the new format. can we get that fixed i have links from it to my kin web page. thanks.

Fixed; enjoy!

My kinship page for Hungry Hobbits on Landroval is been broken, I think since the move to F2P. Could I get it restored, please? Thank you!

Originally Posted by Flitterby

My kinship page for Hungry Hobbits on Landroval is been broken, I think since the move to F2P. Could I get it restored, please? Thank you!

Fixed; enjoy!

Happy Little Boozers on Vilya also has a broken kin page. Can it be fixed?

Originally Posted by Acacia

Happy Little Boozers on Vilya also has a broken kin page. Can it be fixed?

It can and has. Enjoy.

Same problem has Voces de Ainulindalë on Silverlode. I really hope it can be fixed soon

Originally Posted by dusken

Same problem has Voces de Ainulindalë on Silverlode. I really hope it can be fixed soon

It can and has been fixed. Enjoy.

Originally Posted by Duwis

It can and has been fixed. Enjoy.

Thanks a lot, Duwis! We have been waiting for this for centuries!
We really appreciate it ^^

Wylfred here, kinship leader of Knight of the White Council on the Arkenstone server, and I'm having issues with the Kinship page on the my.lotro.com site.
1. As others mentioned the Kinship avatar, when I try to update it, simply turns to black (not working) and why is it asking to crop the file for 150x150 and then the 50x50 and that interface has no crop selection ability. why not just ask for two separate files of 150x150 and 50x50.

2. the Kinship roster is not updating properly. some people left the Kinship and still show up there. Some Officers have been demoted and still show up as officers. also the Kinship count (total members is highly inaccurate sometimes displaying 357 most of the time displaying 385 and both are wrong as we now have over 400 members.

3. The Kinship Log is highly inaccurate. it only shows like 1% of total activity, like from my characters and only one other member, and even that is from activity about a week ago. and it's also reporting totally wrong information, like that my Minstrel Maith has raised her jewelcrafting to tier 6 (totally wrong it was cooking to tier 6). And also, if I try to View Full list on Kinship log I get "Error: The page you are looking for was not found. "

4. on the admin side if I try to use QuickPress, 90% of the time it will eat my post and send it into oblivion regardless if I try to save a draft, it never does. absolutely have to use the "New Post"

5 is there any way to change the format of Kinship Roster list (as we have lots of alts officers and I'd rather have a custom list order for the officers ( or at least by sort by rank then level) as sorting alphabetically is just dumb, as it shows very low level alts.

well those are the main issues offhand if I notice more stuff I'll keep posting here as it seems to be the place to get things fixed.

My kin's my.lotro.com page hasnt been updated. We've had several new members and several people level. it shows my Rune-keeper as a lvl 50 when he is now 52...

Originally Posted by Wylfred_Avatar

Wylfred here, kinship leader of Knight of the White Council on the Arkenstone server, and I'm having issues with the Kinship page on the my.lotro.com site.
1. As others mentioned the Kinship avatar, when I try to update it, simply turns to black (not working) and why is it asking to crop the file for 150x150 and then the 50x50 and that interface has no crop selection ability. why not just ask for two separate files of 150x150 and 50x50.

2. the Kinship roster is not updating properly. some people left the Kinship and still show up there. Some Officers have been demoted and still show up as officers. also the Kinship count (total members is highly inaccurate sometimes displaying 357 most of the time displaying 385 and both are wrong as we now have over 400 members.

3. The Kinship Log is highly inaccurate. it only shows like 1% of total activity, like from my characters and only one other member, and even that is from activity about a week ago. and it's also reporting totally wrong information, like that my Minstrel Maith has raised her jewelcrafting to tier 6 (totally wrong it was cooking to tier 6). And also, if I try to View Full list on Kinship log I get "Error: The page you are looking for was not found. "

4. on the admin side if I try to use QuickPress, 90% of the time it will eat my post and send it into oblivion regardless if I try to save a draft, it never does. absolutely have to use the "New Post"

5 is there any way to change the format of Kinship Roster list (as we have lots of alts officers and I'd rather have a custom list order for the officers ( or at least by sort by rank then level) as sorting alphabetically is just dumb, as it shows very low level alts.

well those are the main issues offhand if I notice more stuff I'll keep posting here as it seems to be the place to get things fixed.

Having these same issues with the Carpe Jugulum (Silverlode) kinship page - no kinship avatar despite it looking like I've uploaded one (and the same cropping interface non-functionality). And I'd second the motion for a customizable roster for kinships whose ranks are filled with altoholics!

Hello, Valiant Defenders' kinship page is not working. Please help us!

The kinship Comatose of Brandywine has had its my lotro site down for over a year and a half displaying ERROR! This user has elected to delete their account and the content is no longer available. Please fix this when you can, thank you.