All The Tropes Wiki Project, Part X

[Bob Schroeck]

And now I'm picturing Pavel Chekov asking about "nuclear wassals"... <g>

Heh.  I just added one to my master file which I should copy over to the page, if only for giggle value -- I found a fic where the author used "kiwi" for "kawaii".  I could almost see it as a spellchecker barf except I'd expect a checker to recommend "Hawaii".

[Bob Schroeck]

Oh, I forgot to note last night -- I completely cleared the "Pages Needing Restoration" page yesterday, and have consequently deleted it after making appropriate edits to the pages which up to now have linked to it.

[robkelk]

Hurray! One task off the to-do list!

[LulzKiller]

In a sense that's end of an era. We're finally moving towards maintainence/growth versus repair.

[robkelk]

And now I'm picturing Pavel Chekov asking about "nuclear wassals"... <g>

Heh.  I just added one to my master file which I should copy over to the page, if only for giggle value -- I found a fic where the author used "kiwi" for "kawaii".  I could almost see it as a spellchecker barf except I'd expect a checker to recommend "Hawaii".

Maybe the author thinks New Zealanders as a group are cute?

[Bob Schroeck]

<rimshot>

The author struck me as not being a native English speaker, and it could well be one of those weird phonological things.

[Morganite]

So this is weird.

https://allthetropes.org/wiki/File:SugarsDelight.png

We've got size and metadata information for the file... but don't have the file itself?

Are there other images we supposedly have but don't actually have?

-Morgan.

[Bob Schroeck]

Yeah, we get that with some (many? most? all?) of the files that got lost in the Orain->Miraheze restoration. Only thing to do is track down the original contributor (or if it was a TVT image, the Wayback Machine).

[Bob Schroeck]

Looking to see if we have a trope...  For the moment I'm calling it "Tongue-Wagging", likely to be a subtrope of any of a couple other tongue tropes.  Basically it's when a villain or other unpleasant type "telegraphs" that he's unpleasant by an unusual extension or manipulation of his tongue.  I'm thinking Tyrian in RWBY, Gene Simmons' "demon" character in KISS, along those lines.  It's not just having a long tongue, or one that hangs out.

Does that ring a bell?

[Morganite]

Sounds related to/maybe a supertrope of Licking the Blade.

-Morgan.

[Bob Schroeck]

Oh, yeah, definitely a sister trope at least.

[robkelk]

I'm tempted to give DocColress a two-day vacation from the wiki... Am I over-reacting?

The post that set off my alarm is the highlighted one in this thread:
https://allthetropes.org/w/index.php?tit...1q1gfdwfbm

[Bob Schroeck]

If he's right that DustinAR is a ban evader, maybe. But yeah, Doc's getting a bit heavy-handed there.

[Morganite]

Can I just object to the arbitrary subpage limit thing? Subpages are cheap. If a series has enough examples that separating them out would facilitate organization, "we've got too many subpages" seems like a pretty weak reason not to do it.

Permission?

Looking at DocColress's contribs page, and how many of those are to Complete Monstor or referencing it... they seem like maybe they could use a vacation, is all I'm saying.

-Morgan.

[robkelk]

Thanks for the opinions, Bob and Morgan.

I'm not going to issue a tempban yet, but I have asked Doc a couple of questions.

[Morganite]

Upon further investigation, Lady Satsuki was banned about two years ago. If DustinAR is supposed to be the latest in a chain of ban-evasion accounts, where are the rest of the links?

(DustinAR, incidentally, has progressed to Atually Blocked now.)

Eyebrow-raising: The page DustinAR temporarily blipped out... a sizable chunk of it's current text was originally written by Lady Satsuki.

(Also, her name DustinAR is a shot at a TV Tropes users, AustinDR, showcasing her not so secret disdain for TV Tropes and it's users.)

[Citation Needed]

Because it looks like pattern matching gone wild to me.

-Morgan. Not so secret disdain for TV Tropes? What site do you think you are on?

[Labster]

Oh wow, I didn't know about the 115 subpage limit. I would have made it 128 subpages, of course, so we can index them in 7 bytes. OK no sorry that's dumb, and there are no limits, just principles of good organization.

Despite the fact I've had it explained to me, I still don't understand the obsession with Complete Monster. But I guess it would be worse without DocColress watching. It's like Complete Monster is a little subwiki within our wiki, and Doc is the admin of that section. Not a walled garden, because it has links around to the rest of the wiki, but definitely its own thing. Complete Monster attracts an audience all its own (unique area on the spectrum?), and we only really notice it when something weird like this happens.

[Morganite]

As a side note, the video games page has a few Persona examples that should probably be removed, since they're on the subpage for Shin Megami Tensei.

-Morgan.

[LulzKiller]

What's this about a subpage limit?

Austin did seem to be a bit weird when I looked as well, but Geth was telling him/her to sort it out.

None of us not named Doc admin-wise really give two shits about CM, and the longer it is that way, the more the status quo of how we currently have it will stay. I also don't know how many of these IP's and users on CM are purely there as a proxy war between them and Doc, or how many truly do care about who is seen as a CM.

I and Geth are more familiar with how certain tropes can cause autistic shitflinging, and the problem is it is quite a subjective standard with need for reigning in at times, unless we really want to enforce the "playing it straight need not apply" as seen on the main page and really just cause a deforestation fire.

Most of the time I just find it to be the junk I have to mentally block out of the recent changes when actually seeing what's happened during ATT.

[robkelk]

I just made an executive decision.

We enabled boilerplates on the freebie wiki today. It took less than two hours for somebody to ask how to use them. I just edited that wiki's MediaWiki:Newarticletext to give quick-and-dirty instructions... and then edited MediaWiki:Newarticletext on ATT to suggest using boilerplates there as well.

If there was a technical reason that MediaWiki:Newarticletext was blank on ATT, go ahead and re-blank the page.

---

Now for a tricky question: Is there any way to pass the contents of an InputBox (or some other text-entry method) to a DPL list?

We already have DynamicPageList3 installed. If we can use it to let people search for pages with more than one category, we could open up the range of services we offer. ("Want a list of horror anime made in the 1990s? Want a list of rom-coms that aired on Fox? Want to know which books are banned on TV Tropes? We can make those lists for you!")

[GethN7]

I just made an executive decision.

We enabled boilerplates on the freebie wiki today. It took less than two hours for somebody to ask how to use them. I just edited that wiki's MediaWiki:Newarticletext to give quick-and-dirty instructions... and then edited MediaWiki:Newarticletext on ATT to suggest using boilerplates there as well.

If there was a technical reason that MediaWiki:Newarticletext was blank on ATT, go ahead and re-blank the page.

---

Now for a tricky question: Is there any way to pass the contents of an InputBox (or some other text-entry method) to a DPL list?

We already have DynamicPageList3 installed. If we can use it to let people search for pages with more than one category, we could open up the range of services we offer. ("Want a list of horror anime made in the 1990s? Want a list of rom-coms that aired on Fox? Want to know which books are banned on TV Tropes? We can make those lists for you!")

First Rob, thanks, that's a good idea you had.

As for the CM thing, bit of background.

The Complete Monster trope wars hails all the way back to the TV Tropes autism wars over that trope. People who raged over the people who qualifies and got banned went to the Villains wiki on Wikia to continue the battle, but honestly, they'd really like to do so on a troping wiki because, y'know, it's where they all did all this to begin with, and since they are outcast from TVT, we got eyed as their replacements.

Doc is the sanest person I found willing to attempt keeping a lid on that nonsense, and has the good sense to tag in someone like me when they are about to lose it, and so far they've basically had my personal stamp of approval on dealing with these matters most of the time.

If any of you guys notice Doc is about to go nova on some stubborn idiot, more often than not they are either some jackass unwilling to accept no means no or a sock of some douche who went by the name Lady Satsuki once who has some idiotic grudge against authority of any sort who is outcast from TVT and Wikia and basically keeps trying to start stupid crap for reasons that lower my IQ just thinking about them.

If anyone sees this, if I'm not around, please throw Doc a rope, poor sod is essentially wrangling this crap by themselves a lot, and they have shown a lot of restraint in not going on spittle flecked rants IMO, though I wouldn't blame Doc if he did every so often.

Tip: You can tell is LS sock if they start wanting to arbitrarily delete stuff and move crap around to "reduce" the amount of CM pages for cvague reasons.

[Tennie]

Here's something that's been annoying me lately:

Normally, with MediaWiki, the standard for potholing goes like this: "[[Link|pothole]]", which produces "pothole".  Note the single vertical line ("|") in the link.  However, something that I've noticed a lot is that a lot of potholes contain a vertical line at the beginning, i.e. "|pothole".  Checking the source reveals that, instead of a single vertical line separating the link from the pothole, there are two vertical lines, i.e. "[[Link||pothole]]".

In another potholing goof-up, I've encountered potholes that were structured as such: "{{[[Link]] pothole}}".  Note the curly brackets instead of square brackets.

Considering the fairly large number of both types of screwed-up potholes that I've encountered thus far, I'm willing to bet that trying to fix them manually would get tedious very quickly.  Therefore, I recommend that either a bot be created specifically for fixing flawed potholes, or an already existing bot be upgraded to have this capability.  I'll let you decide how to proceed.

Thank you.

[Bob Schroeck]

Yeah, the double vertical bar appears to have been a bot-caused error, probably during a mass trope-renaming event. I've been meaning to use the global search-and-replace page to take care of it, but I keep forgetting to do so.

The other... well, that appears to be a very old conversion glitch dating back to the initial scrape. I'm sure we can come up with a regex to identify and correct it, but regex -- and indeed, botting in general -- are not my strong suits.

[Tennie]

Is anyone else here getting a "503 Backend fetch failed" warning when trying to access ATT?  Because at this moment I certainly am.

[Bob Schroeck]

Yeah, me too. I actually got it at about 9:30 this morning, and just came back to it now, five hours later, and got it again (still?)

Just tried a few things -- Meta.miraheze.org is also throwing a 503, as is Rob's wiki. This is a farm-wide thing.