The best roleplay servers are not the ones with the most scripts. They are the ones with the most consistent people. Whitelisting is the only lever most owners have over that, and most whitelist forms are terrible at pulling the signal out.
For applicants: a character is not a backstory dump. Staff are reading for whether you can hold a person steady under pressure. Give them a motivation, a limitation and a relationship. Three sentences with those beats read better than three pages of history.
Answer the failure questions honestly. "What would your character do if they were losing a fight they started?" is not a trick — it is checking whether you can lose gracefully. Applicants who write that their character always wins are telling on themselves.
For staff: ask fewer questions and read them harder. A four-question form you actually discuss beats a twenty-question form you skim. And interview. Fifteen minutes on voice reveals more than any essay.
Publish your standards. The single most common complaint about whitelists is not strictness — it is inconsistency. Write the bar down, apply it the same way twice, and appeals stop being a source of drama.