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I hate to embrace schadenfreude, but I just got an email from a troper who found an announcement of newly-purged content on TVT's news page yesterday. I didn't recognize the page name, so I had to do some digging to find it -- turns out that the oh-so-moral (coughcoughcough) folks at the TVT forum were running some kind of sex discussion thread under the name "The Nunnery" and apparently trying to keep it under Google Ads' radar. But once you let the world know you approve of censorship, you open your doors to the people who want to censor more than you, and one of those folks apparently took offense at The Nunnery and reported it to Google, who pulled their ads for a month over it.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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Yeah, once TVT showed that all you have to do is report it to their source of funding? There's no way they're going to get out of it without having to effectively accept a serious cut in that funding, or increased risks of other things like malware-delivering ads.
At some point, I'm expecting there will be a tipping point... it might be that TVT will be forced to eliminate something that no one can accept, or Google will finally be forced to go, "we can't keep getting reports about you guys, we're done."
--
"You know how parents tell you everything's going to fine, but you know they're lying to make you feel better? Everything's going to be fine." - The Doctor
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The thing is, ATT is doing just fine without a corporate leash advertising revenue -- occasional downtime excluded -- so the only reason I can imagine that TVT is so hot for a revenue stream is that someone is lining their pockets with it somewhere, and doesn't want to lose his cash cow. Otherwise, I don't see how a cut in funding could really hurt them.
As for a tipping point... ATT is getting several new members a day these days, and a fair number of the ones who bother to make a user page say things along the lines of "I used hang out at TV Tropes until..." followed by their censorship incident of choice. As for the ones who stay there, well, as I said to the troper who emailed me, it's a foregone conclusion that TV Tropes is going to censor itself down to a site for kindergarteners sooner or later. If it's not the censorship itself that'll drive the serious folks away, it'll be the inability to have an unbannable discussion about anything more grown-up or controversial than the Teletubbies.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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Bob Schroeck Wrote:The thing is, ATT is doing just fine without a corporate leash advertising revenue -- occasional downtime excluded -- so the only reason I can imagine that TVT is so hot for a revenue stream is that someone is lining their pockets with it somewhere, and doesn't want to lose his cash cow. Otherwise, I don't see how a cut in funding could really hurt them.
As for a tipping point... ATT is getting several new members a day these days, and a fair number of the ones who bother to make a user page say things along the lines of "I used hang out at TV Tropes until..." followed by their censorship incident of choice. As for the ones who stay there, well, as I said to the troper who emailed me, it's a foregone conclusion that TV Tropes is going to censor itself down to a site for kindergarteners sooner or later. If it's not the censorship itself that'll drive the serious folks away, it'll be the inability to have an unbannable discussion about anything more grown-up or controversial than the Teletubbies.
In related news, our Wikia based version of ATT is in the process of being put together, asnd even though Wikia has ads, they are fully aware of our current content both on what will soon be the old Troper Mirror Wiki (which will be merged into the new ATT Wikia) and the Orain based ATT, and the Wikia staff has no complaints whatsoever and has yet to recieve a single advertiser complaint about anything on the Tropes Mirror Wiki.
Anything that might have been an issue in the past was handled amicably and Wikia has generally been about as chill as Orain regarding what content can be presented.
As for TVT getting "The Nunnery" removed, not surprised at all. As Bob said, once you start approving of censorship (at least past what you are obligated to do legally) , you only invite more.
As for the effect that had on their advertising, again, no surprise. Despite it's obstensible status as a nonprofit, TV Tropes seems to be using advertisement money to generate an income stream, and every time Google has ever complained, steps were taken to preserve that income. Disk space and bandwidth are really cheap these days, and as I've learned via the Orain staff, it costs them not very much to support a wikifarm service without ads, and as long as you log into the Wikia version 99.99% of all the ads vanish anyway.
In short, I don't believe the ads are so much essential to the site funding as they are providing a revenue stream to the owner of TV Tropes, and since we don't have the same to be said for us or Wikia (the latter picks up the tab and is pretty chill about our content standards), that means we don't have to worry about profits clouding our objectivity and integrity, which I wanted to be the case from day one.
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From the sound of it, this may as well be the beginning of the end for a site that I'd once enjoyed. In this case, though, at least there's already an alternative (our very own All The Tropes) already available to replace it.
If any mods of TVT decide to abandon ship, we could probably do well to recruit them (assuming that they're willing to work with our way of doing things as opposed to TVT's way). We don't necessarily need to make them mods; perhaps they'll decide that it would be better for them to remain as mere users. We could let them decide on that.
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Whatever you do, don't try to recruit anyone. Last thing we need is getting accused of "poaching" or something. Let the Cold War stay cold.
Besides, as I've noted, we're already getting TVT folks on their own account.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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The Nunnery, ka? I think I can improve on that.
I keep getting into situations where people don't really know how to behave in the absence of moderator direction. It's starting to get like Stockholm Syndrome over there. Are people just unable to understand freedom? Wake up sheeple and start editing!
-- ∇×V
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vorticity Wrote:The Nunnery, ka? I think I can improve on that. Speaking of Hamlet... The play includes a soliloquy about how nobody knows what happens after death - delivered after the person speaking it (and others) has seen his father's ghost. Does this fall under Fridge Logic, or is there a better trope for it?
--
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
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Bob Schroeck Wrote:Whatever you do, don't try to recruit anyone. Last thing we need is getting accused of "poaching" or something. Let the Cold War stay cold.
Let me rephrase that: when I said "recruit", I meant, "if they leave and decide to join us instead, take them up on their offers". No need to be active in recruitment; just sit back, let the chips fall where they may, and go from there.
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If a mod from TVT recognizably joins ATT, I would first be wary, and wait to see how they behave as a basic wiki citizen for at least a couple weeks before offering them any greater level of power. If a mod from TVT joins ATT unrecognizably and informs us he's a (former) mod -- I'd be doubly wary.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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Bob Schroeck Wrote:If a mod from TVT recognizably joins ATT, I would first be wary, and wait to see how they behave as a basic wiki citizen for at least a couple weeks before offering them any greater level of power. If a mod from TVT joins ATT unrecognizably and informs us he's a (former) mod -- I'd be doubly wary.
I was thinking something similar myself, but for some reason couldn't think of how to word it (man I sure hate when I can't think of how to properly word something, only to come up with it when I don't have immediate access to the internet, and by the time that I do I've forgotten the wording I came up with. Ugh!).
Now, if they state that they only intend to be mere users, I suppose that they should mostly be fine. Just help them get adjusted to the way we run thing vis a vis TVT, and they should hopefully be good to go!
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Is ATT in need of mods at the moment? Is the workload too much for the current mod team?
--
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
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Oh, you know how it is running a wiki; busy, busy, busy.
Actually we need admins, programmers, and content creators more than mods.
-- ∇×V
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Hell, it'd be great if we actually had something to moderate!
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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vorticity Wrote:Oh, you know how it is running a wiki; busy, busy, busy.
Actually we need admins, programmers, and content creators more than mods. There's the answer to that concern - "We're full up on mods right now. Do you know how to program?"
--
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
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So here's something weird I've noticed: Every category has itself as a subcategory (except for unused categories), and every page has itself as a category.
(Thankfully we avoid a Russel's Paradox implosion)
---
The Master said: "It is all in vain! I have never yet seen a man who can perceive his own faults and bring the charge home against himself."
>Analects: Book V, Chaper XXVI
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I just noticed we didn't have appropriate boilerplate templates for Creator subpages. This has been fixed, please let me know if there are any problems with the new templates.
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At almost precisely on the stroke of 9 AM EDT, just as I was saving an edited page, the wiki went belly-up again. Not just ATT, all of Orain.
EDIT: And it's back with a global "we'll be unstable for a little while" notice from Orain management.
-- Bob
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Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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I don't know if Orain could use some new servers or if it needs more than just that (or not even that), but whatever it is they could certainly benefit from some infrastructure improvement on their end.
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The recent downtime was expected. They were fixing some broken site script, and that required some changes that could have affected editing,
Specifically, Cloudfront (which caches Orain content) has some overly restrictive bginx setting that were making certain site scripting crap out, and this was done to rectify that.
To be exact, one of those items is our Navigation Popups gadget, which I requested they fix.
Some more hiccups are to be expected, but this was expected by yours truly, my apologies for not giving better prior notice.
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Almost all of the issues they've been having are workflow rather than infrastructure (read people problems). Yes, a test server would be nice, but other than that it's mostly fixing things, and the fixing the resultant fix.
Anyway, we have a nice Slashdot story today that mentions us, albeit indirectly. We're not alone in copyright issues, apparently. And based on the stats on our blog, it seems like most at ./ really don't RTFA. It does tie into our situation -- Wikia is willing to change the global copyright use just like TVT is. It may be doing so more legally, but it's still on the shady side. If occasional downtime is the price to pay for ideals, I guess I can live with it. It still sucks, though.
I've been away from the wiki lately because I spent the weekend at Kublacon, playing 6 RPGs in 3 days. I ended up staying one day longer than I had planned because I missed the train back to SoCal, but I think that ended up being fortuitous anyway. I met some new people, and got a lot of needed exercise walking back and forth to that train station.
-- ∇×V
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Orain just updated to MediaWiki 1.23, had to remove the SideBarMenu extension (it kinda sucked anyway, no big loss), and I had to submit some patches to make the Monaco skin work in 1.23, but otherwise it's finished now.
Let us know if there are problems.
Also, I have a blog now:
http://gethn7.blogspot.com/
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Quote:Let us know if there are problems.
The threading plug-in for forums and user pages seems to be broken now.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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Bob Schroeck Wrote:Quote:Let us know if there are problems.
The threading plug-in for forums and user pages seems to be broken now.
We're aware, and this should normalize in a few days. Thanks to the Cloudfront caching, all the upgrades are still having to deal with all the old crap in the cache needing to be cleared out, and once the cache refreshes itself, we should have the CSS/threading errors cleared up.
MW 1.23 had a major typography overhaul since MW 1.22, so a lot of formatting is bound to be a little screwy until the cache updates, but nothing overly critical should be broken, but do let me know if things don't clear up soon or anything else is messed up.
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Okay, cool.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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