All The Tropes Wiki Project
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All The Tropes Wiki Project
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Although my sympathies go out to Evan for his loss, the completion of the Wiki software is great news. Have you any idea how soon the site will go up for beta?
-- Bob --------- Then the horns kicked in... ...and my shoes began to squeak.
I'm still here, ready and able to assist.
So three days ago, Evan says he's going to make me a wiki today. Now, I know that "today" means "this week" due to past performance, but I was pretty excited. And then, well, this happened.
So Evan has a broken dominant (right) arm that he broke in a fall. They made a splint out of hardcover gaming books, and got it wrapped up by the Emergency Room. Hopefully when he gets a hard cast so he'll be able to type -- although he seems to be pretty fast one-handed anyway. Though it has been a truly bad month for him. Though I do worry about the single point of failure thing here. Hopefully, we'll grow out of it with the development phase. But thanks to everyone for sticking with me. -- ∇×V 
Ouch.
If I may make a suggestion, which has probably already occurred to you, when the site goes live, there should be a fairly prominent message explaining that articles should not be copy/pasted from TV Tropes. It will be really tempting for new users, who are unfamiliar with how TV Tropes changed their license right after the data used for this project was gathered, to start adding material straight from TV Tropes. ----- Stand between the Silver Crystal and the Golden Sea. "Youngsters these days just have no appreciation for the magnificence of the legendary cucumber." --Krityan Elder, Tales of Vesperia.
That's a good suggestion, and I was planning on putting something to that effect in the site registration process.
But there are times where it might be okay to copy and paste: Any content that's older than July 2012, via Archive.org is clearly okay. There are some places where we may be able to copy over some data that isn't really subject to copyright. For example, I suspect that a bare list of tropes used in a work does not actually count as a creative work on its own. Or it may be so trivial of a portion of a creative work that it would qualify as a fair use. If you paste a lot of sentences from CC-BY-SA-NC, it's obviously over the line, but copyright law has substantial gray areas. While we can try to minimize infringement, ultimately we'll just have to wait for DMCA takedown notices to come in to see what happens. I have this sort of perverse fascination with what would actually happen if there was a lawsuit over this. Headline: Website sues forked site for using free data on another site with a slightly different free license which is the license it used to use, for violating the noncommercial clause when it is more obviously noncommercial than the original site. I wonder if they could even possibly show damages? Would I pull a Crazy Ivan and try to get their license invalidated, because they have never asked any users for a license explicitly? That would invalidate our dataset too, but hey, Pyrrhic victory. And even if I got sued and lost, they'd still have to wait in line behind my massive amount of student loans before they ever got paid, because the government always gets its money first. Well, until I actually get around to incorporation, that is. -- ∇×V
Ten days until Evan gets a cast he can type with. For now it's a combination of hunt-and-peck and left-handed mousework which I am told is very not fun.
It's been so long, that it's hard to remember why I started this process in the first place. And then, a friend of mine shared this link, which showed why the anime Popotan was banned on TVT. TV Tropes is supposed to be a website for fans, right? But there are no fans in that thread. Well, one did try to post, but his post got blanked by a moderator for posting in a censorship board thread. And, although the work is only about as ecchi as Mahou Sensei Negima, they banned it without ever once inviting discussion from the fans. Once again, it's clear: I will fight for freedom; I will fight for fandom. -- ∇×V
People seem to have some awfully peculiar ideas about what exactly TV Tropes is supposed to be. However, there actually was some input from fans at some point in the process. (Including, uh, me.*) It just wasn't in that thread.
*Although I only watched the series after it came up there. Which, if you think about it, is kind of an interesting way for it to go. I'd suggest having the big disclaimer be something along the lines of "Do not copy things from TV Tropes. For more information, see (link)." And then the linked page could explain which things actually are allowed to copy, and why, etc. What's theoretically a fail safe design. -Morgan.
Just checking in again - any news?
The new is we're still working on it, but progress remains slow due to Evan's arm still healing. He can type, but still more slowly than usual, and he's still working through a backlog of work. He still can't lift a glass, but the typing is apparently good exercise according to the doctors.
I got a part-time job, so I've had less time to pay attention here, so sorry about the wait. I'll pay more attention when there's more things going on, of course. -- ∇×V
Hi, how are things going on? You have some interesting project going on there. Now I have a question: What else are you planning to implement? A nice GUI would be an improvement, definitely, and an easier wiki syntax too. But somehow, I think that something special is still missing there... Otherwise, just go on. Some competition may be healthy for us tropers.
I noticed this in the commentary for today's Darths and Droids:
Quote:(We couldn't find a TV Trope for this, so you're spared a link.)Looks like a candidate for the first addition to this project... Any idea on an ETA? -- Rob Kelk "Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of the same sovereign, servants of the same law." - Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012
Oh, I do want to get around to this, eventually. Well, I've gotten pulled off into other things for the time being. A lot of coding, working on a compiler, and then starting a blog about it. Not wiki related, but fun. Obviously, if I had the wiki code, I'd be working on that, but apparently there's still some trade secret type stuff entangled into the open source part.
In retrospect, I'm not sure if I should have gone with my buddy Evan. But the offer of free hosting and free software writing was awfully tempting... It's not exactly like I can afford to pay someone to host it myself right now. But I get the feeling that things are getting better for both of us. Evan's arm healed, but apparently the injury revealed a cancer which was a bit of a scare, but it turned out to not malignant. My work on Perl 6 has gotten me a free ticket to YAPC:NA (Yet Another Perl Conference North America -- "Yet Another" is a Perl internal trope), and hopefully I'll be able to find some work at the job fair there. What I have: Essentially a data set ready to go, in a format that I am told has been implemented. What this means is that I have a parser, and so I can change to another wiki software with some trivial modifications, if need be (and for questionable values of "trivial"). So if things really fail to start going the right way soon, I'll see if I can start working on some some other path. -- ∇×V
That's cool to hear!!
Well, it's time for another update on a project that I thought would be done a year ago, but is still in development. Not that I'm doing any worse than a lot of software Kickstarters, and y'all haven't paid me anything. The current status hasn't changed a whole lot, but we do have a bleeding-edge site up, and we're on to layout issues and working on a graphic design. Once the edge bleeds a bit less, I'll probably post it up here.
One of the things that I've learned over the past year is that I didn't really know how to do top-level management. It's easy to criticize other people's styles, but hard to do oneself. Evan and I have finally gotten around to setting up weekly phone meetings, and that seems to speed both of us along. The YAPC:NA conference I mentioned earlier did in fact get me a full-time programming job, which has made things a lot more secure for me. It's also robbing me of my round tuits, and replacing them with cash. So while I have less time to work on this, hopefully being more organized will help to make up the difference. The conference itself was a blast. I even got to have dinner with the Larry Wall of my sig quote, where we discussed programming, Japanese gesture communication, and his T-Shirt with Lum on it. The other thing I'd like to note is the Tropes Mirror Wiki, which is on Wikia. They have a compatible license, so any edits you make over there can be turned over to ATT. I'm in touch with the current leadership over there, and I consider them to be relatively sane. Definitely saner than Fast Eddie, who believes the copying CC-SA content from TV Tropes is plagiarism, stealing, and all-around morally wrong. Start reading after the midpoint. (Just for clarity -- this is definitely not me, just people I am in contact with. I have much to little time to mess around with tvtropes.org these days ... especially when I have a local copy of the TVT data to reference.) Anyway, if you want to feel like writing on the Tropes Mirror Wiki, I'm totally down with that. I'm not so sure about uploading all of the content -- Wikia is kind of annoying about advertising, controlling content, and not allowing communities to move away. -- ∇×V
Glad to hear things are still moving along - I swear, I think that TVTropes is slowly deleting more and more entries that they find objectionable. Maybe it's my imagination.
In any case, I still stand ready to help.
I've read this thread and the others that were related to it, and I want to say that while I'll still browse TVT, I also want to see ATT become a viable competitor. With that said, there are issues that are likely to crop up as ATT forms and grows. I want to bring them up and inspire some useful discussion in the hopes that we can nip those problems and/or prepare to properly deal with those problems once they start cropping up.
As a warning, this will be something of an essay that will attempt to put TVT's current problems into context, and should inspire some ideas about how ATT and its administration could avoid/work around similar issues should they crop up here too. Much of this is based on research I made into the roots of TVT's issues and controversies, and my interpretations of my findings. As another warning, this narrative involves not just TVT but other sites as well. I am merely trying to give context to why TVT is currently in the state that it's in, and any importation/exportation of inter-site drama is completely unintentional on my part. Let's start by winding the clock back a few years: The Second Google Incident and its fallout could be viewed as the culmination of a number of different factors, not just within TVT, but also coming from outside it. I first encountered TVT in early January of 2008, only a couple of weeks or so before the Great Crash. The efforts of numerous tropers who tried to rebuild lost pages however they could (from saved pages, from the Wayback Machine, and from scratch) was quite inspiring for me; I found that it would be worthwhile for me to join such a wonderfully dedicated community, and thus I became a troper later in the year. I started out as a mere mostly-anonymous contributor, but within a year or so I decided to Get Known, which I did, and joined the forums in late 2009. I remained blissfully unaware of certain, rather seedy undercurrents in the community, but those same sections would later play a role in the crisis of 2012. The first hints, for me, probably would've been the First Google Incident in the fall of 2010. However, at that time I was feeling that, since TVT had weathered other crises such as the Crash just fine, it would also weather this one and come out quite fine. Things seemed so settle back down to normal (or what could pass for normal on a site like TVT) like I had hoped they would. In retrospect, I likely should have treated the First Incident as being a harbinger of the trials and controversies that were to visit TVT within the next several years. In actuality, I ignored such warnings, even managing to remain rather blaise during and after the Second Incident. It wasn't until the past few months, as I was browsing the internet like I usually do (a similar action was what led me to TVT in the first place) that I was to eventually remove those Pollyanna-like blinders and realize just what had happened to TVT and its reputation over at least the previous couple of years. Let's start off with the Something Awful forums. Some of us may know this site from such things as the Let's Plays of various video games and things like that. At the same time, though, the site and its members ("goons") are also quite well known for mocking things that they feel deserve mockery (it's pretty much in tone with their motto: "The internet makes you stupid"). Most such mock threads are usually posted in the "Post Your Favorite" ("PYF") section of the forums. Well, starting in early 2011 they did a series of such threads with TVT being the subject/target for mockery. The links for the threads are posted below in chronological order, for your perusal: Thread #1 (Archived) Thread #2 (Archived) Thread #3 (No sign of it on Google, likely disappeared into those parts of the SA archive that require becoming a member and paying a special fee to access) Thread #4 (Archived) Thread #5 (As of this post, current thread, but currently hidden behind SA's paywall). You don't necessarily need to read the threads in their entirety. Myself, I skipped to random pages, but that was still enough to give an idea of their--rather dim--views on the site and its community as a whole. Also bear in mind that not all goons would agree with the mindset displayed by the particular goons in these threads; the participants are (for the most part) a (sometimes vocal) minority. The first thread started off well enough, with some goons saying that they actually liked the site; but once they started discovering that TVT's community had a rather seedy underbelly they decided to invade the site in the hopes of "improving" it. This lead that thread to be shut down; the later threads made it clear that future invasions should not be conducted. However, these threads also revealed that plenty of the stuff posted in certain sections of TVT (especially Troper Tales and the forums) could easily give the site and its community an unsavory reputation (note the emoticon that they use to denote TVT and its community). Even today they are still at it: if you were to lurk in the currently-running "Shit_that_didn't_happen.txt" thread--at least when the paywall is down--you would notice that a large amount of the stories posted there were from the Troper Tales archive. It's practically low-hanging fruit and makes for easy trollbait; the damage it was doing to TVT and its community was the major factor in TVT's jettisoning of the TT section.). Now, Fast Eddie at first seemed to simply brush it off as simply the antics of a relatively minor group on a site with a fairly large userbase. However, there are hints that some of what the goons were saying seemed to be starting to get under FE's skin and making him nervous about his site's reputation. What didn't help matters was that at least several other tropers had stumbled upon the SA threads, thought that at least some of the criticisms were legit (in my view, some were indeed legit, though not all; I'll get to that later). At least a few of those tropers apparently decided to join those threads so they could comment on how, in their eyes, TVT was flawed. Then the Second Google Incident went off. The seedy underbelly of the TVT community, which had been festering for years, was suddenly brought to light brought to light. Some tropers (notably some of the veterans, such as Anne Beeche--Bob Schroeck might or might not remember her) decided to leave TVT and head for areas--such as SA--where they could criticize TVT for failings real and perceived. All in all, it was a terrible time. One of the more notorious (in my view) incidents that came out of this debacle was when one of the members of the 5P group found himself being worn down by constantly having to analyze works to see if there was too much porn/pedophilia-pandering/other objectionable stuff in them to be worthy of having TVT articles on them. He left, needing a place to vent (something that I could actually sympathize with), and made the--rather poor, in retrospect--choice of going onto the SA thread. Once FE found out, that member was banned and his troper page replaced with the words "SA Traitor", the latter lasting only a short time before being removed once cooler heads prevailed. As for the SA threads that helped drive FE to the breaking point: they became so loaded with former tropers complaining about their former community's failings that the mods eventually stepped in and locked them; they also put up a moratorium that lasted for about a year, and the current thread is determined to keep from repeating the same mistakes that dragged the previous threads down. At this stage, it should be mentioned: SA has a history of being against pedophilia and related philias/fetishes, to the point where being an admitted pedophile is grounds for banning. Trying to make a distinction between pedophilia and its related philias (e.g. ephebophilia) will lead to you being looked at as a pedo anyway (as an aside, a certain infamous anime that features pedophilia--and whose title includes the words "jikan", "kodomo", and "no", though not in that order--is referred to simply as "The Anime That Must Not Be Named", or "That Anime" for short). Indeed, one of their more famous actions in recent times is what they did in reaction to the fact that Reddit was hosting some quite creepy subreddits. Once they found this out, while in the midst of a Reddit mocking thread, they were understandably horrified. When they tried to get the site's admins to shut down those subreddits, they were rebuffed, with the admins claiming that it would go against free speech to shut them down; this pissed them off even further. The final icing on the cake was the revelation that the creator/moderator of many of the creepy subreddits, a man with the screenname "violentacrez", was a relatively close friend of many of the admins. The goons took matters into their own hands and unleased a media blitz intended to call attention to these facts. The creepy subreddits were shut down only after these media blitzes, which the goons called "Pedogeddons", and violentacrez's identity was eventually revealed, ending his reign of disgustingness. Now, these relate to the TVT threads because in those threads evidence (from the horses' mouths to boot) were laid bare for all to see that among TVT's seedier parts of its community were a bunch of pedophiles and pedo-apologists. It seems that the 5P was formed at least partly in response to this unsavory revelation. Now, there were a number of other things that went on that I couldn't properly summarize (and besides, I feel that this essay is getting long enough already--it took me several hours to type this on Notepad, just in case certain problems come up), but this is essentially one of the major issues that helped cripple TVT and could potentially face ATT. Now, from that narrative, I've made a relatively brief summary of possible solutions to at least some of these problems: --Put in some Terms of Service whose reading should be mandatory for all users. The TOS must make it clear that, although we do not intend to enforce censorship on a level similar to what TVT is currently doing, we also have certain standards that, although being relatibely loose, should still be followed in order to keep the administration from cracking down like they did over on TVT. --Do not allow Troper Tales and Fetish Fuel to be hosted on ATT. These made for extremely easy trollbait in the past, and newer entries could likely continue such a bad reputation. ---Alternatively, keep TT, but put down some rules--preferrably a reasonable number of equally reasonable rules--regarding how such tales should be formatted (e.g. nothing that comes off as too creepy, unbelievable, emo-like, and whatnot), and have a team of mods do a regular purging of those entries that violate those rules. (Of course, when TVT was hosting TT, the mods did no less than three major purges of such entries, but eventually gave it up as hopeless. I would recommend that, should we go with the option of hosting TT, we should create a mod team that has more stamina and willpower and is able to better handle such an admittedly Sisyphean task.) --Have a mod team that is good at recognizing whether or not certain entries, in any article, violate the TOS; such a team could be useful in settling potential edit wars and the like. --Personally, I feel that the "No Lewdness, No Prudishness" stance currently taken by TVT is a good move, but the execution as it currently stands leaves quite a lot to be desired. At the very least, we should try to find ways to better execute a similar stance. These ideas are what came out of my brain, but at the same time I am also willing to listen to other, alternative suggestions. I firmly believe that with some well-done conversations we could hammer out a way for ATT to become a viable competitor, instead of becoming a cesspit that even TVT would mock.
I'm kind of torn.
On the one hand, I find that particular branch of the SA forums to be among the worst dregs of humanity. So doing things they wouldn't like would be something near a civic duty. On the other hand, while Troper Tales and Fetish Fuel are both a lot of fun, I kind of feel like they aren't really our job. So why would you attach a blender to the side of your car? There would have to be some compelling problem with the other hosts for that material, and even then it would probably be best addressed separately from this project. So I suppose I'll just have to be content with making a trope page for Hiiragi Shougakkou Renai Kurabu... once we have an actual wiki. -Morgan, always thought that Kodomo no Jikan was a lot weirder than that...
I always found Troper Tales and Fetish Fuel entertaining. I like the notion of being a comprehensive guide to everything about entertainment.
Though if I recall correctly, the mushed format of Troper Tales was kind of a pain to read.
Here's the thing:
I don't want to see ATT's administration be eventually faced with the same problem that confronted the administrations of Reddit and TVT last year: a large section of rather unsavory types, hidden within the overall community, that hadn't been properly handled for so long that it required outside intervention (whether from SA, Google, some other source(s), or a combination) in order to force the admins to finally do something about them. Keep in mind the differing reactions between Reddit and TVT: the former only banned its creepier sections after a series of SA-led media blitzes, and even then only because the sections were harming the site's reputation (rather than the fact that hosting such material on a large, relatively mainstream site such as Reddit is wrong on legal, moral, and many other levels). The latter, on the other hand, overreacted, which led to the current trend of censoring things that might piss off those who help fund the site (regardless of whether or not it actually is worthy of getting all up in arms about). My solution is basic: try to head these problems off at the pass by making sure that the more unsavory types that would otherwise infest ATT's community are properly handled, in such a way that we don't end up actually overreacting while still preventing them from doing damage to the community and its reputation. Of course, this will most likely be far easier said than done, but I'm convinced that it is still possible to pull it off with a sufficiently dedicated administration. Now, there are some other potential issues that I also want to discuss. Let me start with one: We here know about the recent infusion of those who want TVT to be a more formal source of literary information, despite the fact that TVT was explicitly originally set up to be essentially a more informal counterpart to Wikipedia. At least part of this could be viewed as a response to perhaps hopeful literary-analysis types coming onto the site expecting some measure of literary analysis and suchlike, only to be confronted with the whole "informality" concept having been put into action (which must've undoubtedly offended more than a few senses). ATT would do well to put into its TOS that informality is an integral part of the site's focus, and that those who have major objections to that concept should realize that ATT isn't really for them, and to find some other place that better suits them. In fact, we could try to find such sites and (if such sites are available) offer links to those sites in the TOS. Of course, that's one idea, and I'd be willing to hear out any other ideas (even should I personally disagree with any of them). 
Hello everyone, I'm Geth N7, the administrator of the Tropes Mirror Wiki on Wikia, and first off, I want to say I support the All The Tropes project.
In fact, a little background. Me and Brent Laabs have emailed each other for awhile now, and not only does he have my eternal thanks for making that torrent of TV Tropes available to everyone, he even donated some of his knowledge of Perl to me so I could start mass converting pages for the Tropes Mirror Wiki. As I understand it, Brent has mentioned me on this thread, and I'd just like to add a few of my own thoughts on things: * Troper Tales/Fetish Fuel pages are, frankly, more trouble than they are worth. Okay, some of the more inoffensive Tropers Tales weren't bad, but some were just questionable, and the Fetish Fuel.....yeesh, that was a cesspit. I could really live without them if I had to. Besides, I have some of them archived on the TMW, and after reading some of them, I am currently contemplating their removal. * I'm a big fan of community consensus. TV Tropes is essentially a dictatorship of one man and his subordinates, not a community, and frankly, I'd love to have most of the people here as fellow tropers on a troping wiki, and I value the input of my community highly and try to help the newbies whenever I can. * As many may know, I tried to extend an olive branch to Fast Eddie, and here is why: The Tropes Mirror Wiki was originally run by a bunch of bitter ex-tropers who created the site to spite Fast Eddie. I had and still have many differences with Fast Eddie, but I still wanted to let him know that despite those differences, I hoped our communities could be civil to each other, and I even reported a troll to him to show good faith. His response was to be angry I was hosting content licensed under CC BY SA that was originally on his website, and then he told me to leave and never return. I admit I was hurt and offended, but I decided to turn the other cheek, go back to the Tropes Mirror Wiki and continue to attempt cleaning it up, and even though I'm sure Fast Eddie doesn't care, I have continued to remove any content that was illegally imported from after June 2012 since I respect copyright laws (something my predecessors on the Tropes Mirror Wiki apparently did not). * From what I gather, many people are hesitant of joining Wikia because they feel Wikia would constrain their creativity and impose censorship: Having been there for awhile, the worst censorship they have imposed so far has been to ban any NSFW pictures, which I find eminently reasonable, but otherwise, they have not objected to any other content. ** Regardless, I believe many here would like to host a wiki on a non Wikia affiliated service without any fear of pressure from advertising sponsors or any censorship whatsoever besides what would obviously be illegal, and I support that and would be willing to help with that if everyone here would be willing to work on MediaWiki centered wiki, which I have a lot of experience with. I would also be willing to work with any other wiki service, but MediaWiki is my specialty. * I support the informality TV Tropes originally strived for. The SA mock threads (which I've read) seem to feel the website should be a totally serious resource for writers, and while I can understand their POV to an extent, I favor the informal approach TV Tropes originally had. ** On a related note, while I agree the Troper Tales/Fetish Fuel pages deserved to die (in that respect the Goons and I agree), I am utterly opposed to every other opinion they have had about the troping community and don't care about what opinions they hold of the TMW, if any. * I am utterly opposed to censorship of certain works and tropes because they might be possibly offensive. Even if advertisers were not an issue on Wikia (and they aren't), I would desert Wikia in a heartbeat if they stopped me from merely hosting pages on adult works. They are just as much a work as something like King Lear or Sesame Street, and to their credit, Wikia has given me no trouble in that regard. As for certain trope pages being cut for offensiveness, that's ridiculous. While I support not being lewd for the sake of it, the mere existence of a lewd topic doesn't mean it shouldn't be discussed, especially if has a bearing on other tropes and works. ....well, that was a big wall of text, but those are my two cents on the matter, and I look forward to seeing everyone else's opinions.
I've been turning the whole Fetish Fuel/Troper Tales issue over and over in my head for some months now. My thoughts on that were always mixed, but after much consideration, I'm going to have to come down on the side of excluding it from the wiki. TT was a good idea -- where do tropes show up in the real world? -- and I certainly contributed my share, but it's a gateway to stuff we don't want. The wiki should be there for the works and the elements that create them. There are more than enough other places on the Net for people to post their confessions and fantasies and turn-ons. They don't belong on a site about the structure of fiction.
-- Bob --------- Then the horns kicked in... ...and my shoes began to squeak.
My view:
First, just because most of the English-speaking world has laws that let anyone say anything that they can defend in court doesn't mean someone else has to provide a venue for that speech. Second, how do these pages enhance the purpose of the site - the Tropes? If they don't add to the tropes in some way, don't include them. -- Rob Kelk "Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of the same sovereign, servants of the same law." - Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012
Well, looks like I've been summoned.
It's been a bit of an adjustment to working full-time; even if I do get to telecommute, I have to rebalance my life and my projects. So it's taken me quite a while to get a ATT-shaped tuit. Now that I have, I have to take stock of my plans. So I guess that new wiki software idea turned out to be pie-in-the-sky. I was warned Evan might be unreliable to work with from the beginning -- and maybe he would have gotten it done without the injury -- but it's been far too long now. And in fact, I don't really have all that much time to run a site like this on my own. So I've been talking to GethN7, and he persuaded me to use MediaWiki. I'm not entranced with the software, but it is reliable, extensible, and well known to end users. So I'm now reconverting the pages over to MediaWiki markup, which is a fairly easy task if you already have a parser written. We're looking at orain.org as a non-profit wiki farm, so no one has to worry about technical aspects outside of site design. I don't have an ETA now that the plan has changed, but I do know I'll have more free time over the next couple of weeks. Might as well talk on the recent items in thread here: Fetish Fuel was embarrassing on a lot of levels. If I was thinking about applying for a 501(c)3 tax exemption, I'd put down ATT for a educational exemption. So how was it educational to know what random people find attractive in random television? I suppose understanding fetishization of media could make for several interesting sociology studies. But really that's a weak reason for us to support it. It was mostly just weird, and not educational. I'm not saying we should base our morality off of tax law, but just saying that the tiny gains aren't worth the hassle of upkeep. Troper Tales was also embarrassing. Does having comparisons to real life events (or fictional versions thereof) have any educational value? I'd argue yes, because the tropes have to come from somewhere. But oy, the quality. Let's pull up a random page (TroperTales/YouDoNOTWantToKnow): Quote:* I overheard a conversation in class between my teacher and two teenage boys. The boys had been laughing about something, but had not explicitly said what.--> '''Teacher''': What are you laughing about?--> '''Boy 1''': You don't want to know.--> '''Teacher''': Try me.--> '''Boy 2''': *whispers it to her*--> '''Teacher''': Wow, holy crap. You're right. I ''didn't'' want to know that.--> '''Me''': I have a rule. I'm generally a curious person, but if teenage boys say I don't want to know, I ''trust them''. Quote:* This trope, along with NoodleIncident, and the FlatWhat are a part of ["MmmKay" this troper's] ''breakfast''.The first one is okay, maybe the best example on a questionable page. Notably, it's actually a tale. The second is ugh  . There's a lot more of the second type. My first inclination is to agree with Bob. But in general I want to err on the permissive side -- probably from a combination of Postel's Law and being "a buttload more informal".How would y'all feel about these ground rules on Troper Tales?:
Not as bannable rules or anything, but just to give mods an excuse to go in and clean up every once in a while. -- ∇×V GethN7 Wrote:The SA mock threads (which I've read) seem to feel the website should be a totally serious resource for writers, and while I can understand their POV to an extent, I favor the informal approach TV Tropes originally had. I've noticed that there were TVT-related threads on some other sites (e.g. Spacebattles) where the original poster and/or several other posters in such threads had more or less similar attitudes in regards to TVT: they saw the informal nature of TVT as a threat--a direct one, even--to creative writing in general. Of course, their complaints took different natures, but this was the general vibe I was getting from them. Make of that what you will. I'd personally prefer a relatively informal place to be in, thank you very much (But that's just me. And a lot of other people on these particular forums, apparently.). vorticity Wrote:How would y'all feel about these ground rules on Troper Tales? I had similar ideas in the "proposals" section of my post on the previous page. Of course, in my view it would still have to require round-the-clock monitoring by mods/admins in order to make sure that those rules aren't breached, and allow for them to correct such problems, identify the violators, and let them know about what changes were made and why. This is a very basic concept for now, but I suppose that this could work (With modifications to the concept as necessary.). Now, on the other hand, if the "new and improved" Troper Tales still manages to descend into a morass of exaggerated/outright made-up stories, creepy stories, and the like, then we'll just have to burn the whole Troper Tales shebang down and let the community know Why They Can't Have Nice Things. But this is just me trying to be ready to deal with for certain scenarios. Tennie Wrote:I'd personally prefer a relatively informal place to be in, thank you very muchOf course, in my view it would still have to require round-the-clockUhm... I don't quite know where to start with that. It is just information on a page -- it's not like any harm comes from these things sitting around a day or a week. Things can be reverted easily enough too. But part of this project is attempt to get away from the rules culture at TVT. I'm trying to make a bazaar, not a cathedral here. If you don't know what I'm talking about, read at least the introduction of The Cathedral and the Bazaar -- and the whole thing if you're at all interested in software development. It's very good. My view of what we want is "be informal and informative". I realize these seem like diametric propositions, but the true way is in the dialectic. I just want to find the sweet spot between Stop Having Fun Guys and Tragedy of the Commons. I think that's somewhere left of TVT's 5P and off to the right of Linus Torvalds' management by perkele. Tennie Wrote:--Put in some Terms of Service whose reading should be mandatoryThere will be solid rules -- you'll agree to a short, non-legalese terms of service on signup. I have a draft set of rules for moderators which is actually longer, because it turns out that those in authority need limits more than the proles ...er users. But I hope to be able to be able to involve the users in any discussions on rules, because it's ultimately their site. Heck, the users should even be able to replace their administrators. Tennie Wrote:--Have a mod team that is good at recognizing whether or not certainCorrectly-enforced written rules are better than unwritten, arbitrarily-enforced rules. I think I got it. I agree with the No Lewdness/No Prudishness policy -- though I hate the name. Tennie Wrote:I firmlyI firmly believe that we shouldn't judge our self-worth based on others. Goons mock people. It's what they do. TVT has a very strong group of yes-men who will mock us no matter what we do. But yes, I like compromise. After all, I'm a Lutheran. All I did was post some theses on a wiki page, and somehow I was excommunicated from TVT. So now I'm leading a revolution, setting up a new site that will become the moderate alternative. -- ∇×V |
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