All The Tropes Wiki Project, Part VII

[TvT Rivals]

OK, @Tv Trivals then: did you know you can edit your account name in forum settings?

Been there, done that. Good thing it worked - sometimes yuku's software can be a problem. Just look at your profile, under "My communities": "Drunkard's Walk" has a backslash that shouldn't be there.

I'm not "into" CSS, but I either read or code CSS almost every day of my life. Left to my own devices I tend to create "programmer interfaces".

Great! So, do you like CSS Zen Garden? Maybe we can revive the idea of using different CSS for different media/genres/whatever. - Of course, you'll be credited for it, on our "Special Thanks" page (linked from every wiki page), and on paper as well, if you wish to. Least we can do.

Do you like having money? Do you dislike having money taken from you? If so, you may want to consult a lawyer or change the logo.

We will change the logo (very probably, and we have an idea too), but we'll also check out alternatives.

Can you ensure that censorship will be limited enough so as not to infringe academic freedom?

Since our wiki is built upon a real DB, we can rate all the pages, whether they are good clean family fun or hentai guro. Tropers can use their settings to decide which pages they want to see. If you don't want to see the real bad stuff, you'll get a 404 when you go there by mistake. Oh, and people will have to make an account before they can read up about bad stuff. Good enough?

Does the business model ensure the privacy of users, or is it going to be blasting advertising at people?

We will use at least some advertising (more for lurkers, less for active tropers). This wiki was a lot of work (understatement), we'd like to get something back from it. But we definitely don't want to sell user data. Also, we consider making a deal with tropers: No ads for some money per year.

Furthermore, as said: Many pages still lack images, laconics and quotes. If you use the space where an image should be for a well-visible ad, maybe the people will be motivated to replace the ad by some fitting image ASAP. But if you put those pages on an index, tropers still won't do anything.

Can you create a moderation culture based on rules, not on how offensive it is to moderators?

Rules are fine, as long as the ruleslawyering doesn't start. We are still working on writing them down, but we have a concept outlined.

Can we work towards making this a content creation wiki, not a content classification wiki?

We'd definitely like to make it the former, with a bit of the latter. The question is of course, how? Other wikis also started with good intentions and turned sour later. PPR wasn't helpful in that regard either.

OK, for the questions part:

Is your code open source? Can I look at your repo? Every part of the ATT infrastructure is OSS.

Open Source is great, but in our special case, there's a problem: Our software is highly specialized - it's great for a troping wiki, but not for much else. The only ones who could put it to use are us - and the TV Tropes crew. Just the folks we don't want to schlep for free for. You understand our problem?

Is this an entirely new wiki software, or have you hacked it on to something else? Are you parsing wikicode or are you doing a WSIWYG editor?

1. It's entirely new. Only the LAMP stack is old, so to speak. 2. It's done with a parser for a kind of BBCode, as you can see on the new screenshots. WYSIWYG would be too much, but then again, Wikipedia is also struggling with their WYSIWYG editor.

Is this a class page-model wiki, or are you doing more of an trope/example model like what TVT was talking about, where trope/example would be added to both pages at the same time via aggregation of examples?

The latter. This allows us to sort example list (and other lists too), or pick one single example from the DB, if you know the combination of the trope and the work (or some other page). And much more.

Can you tell us anything about your team or yourself?

As said, we are a bunch of tropers (or ex-tropers) from North America and Europe. We've been there for years, but later, the wiki lost its fun. We were willing to help the leaders, but whenever we approached them, the result wasn't pretty. Then we learned that you had made the site rip, and downloaded it. And since we have experience with internet security, databases, scripts, wikibots and webdesign, we thought we could do this. And now we're close to launch.

I also want to say that you are giving me ideas. Lots of ideas.

Sounds good. Can you tell us more about them? PMs are OK too. If you want to keep them, that's also fine, you never know whether some lawyer will turn this into a lawsuit because you mentioned your idea in a public space.

PS: Check your message box.
 

[Black Aeronaut]

TvT Rivals wrote:
Rules are fine, as long as the ruleslawyering doesn't start. We are still working on writing them down, but we have a concept outlined. 

This might help a bit.
http://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/help/rules/

Sufficient Velocity forked from Space Battles over a crisis of faith in the Admins after some bad shit went down.  These rules were hammered out because of that bad shit.  Things have gotten better at SB, but the fork remains because SV just picked up that much momentum.  (Probably didn't help that the 'server' SB was on - really just an old PC in a locked closet - nearly died right after they forked.)

[Labster]

We will use at least some advertising (more for lurkers, less for active
tropers). ... But we definitely don't want to sell user
data.

Are there advertising networks out there that don't collect user data, or are you planning on doing direct sales?  I guess the good news is that ATT doesn't have to worry about its competitors providing a better user experience.

We've been there for years, but later, the wiki lost its fun. ... Then we learned that you had made the site rip, and downloaded it.

Tell me about it.  I have really done any troping in years.  The programming part keeps me interested though.  As for the site rip ... I was a much worse programmer back then.  I apologize about the quality of the dataset, with all of its duplicate pages and such.  I have improved much since that day, but still know nothing.  (Also, CSS Zen Garden looks fun, but also overdesigned for real websites.)

but then again, Wikipedia is also struggling with their WYSIWYG editor.

Less so than you'd think based on the press.  It was pretty shaky at launch, but it's improved quite a lot since then.  The real issue is that forcing change onto Wikipedians will always result in chaos.

Open Source is great, but in our special case, there's a problem: Our
software is highly specialized - it's great for a troping wiki, but not
for much else. The only ones who could put it to use are us - and the TV
Tropes crew. Just the folks we don't want to schlep for free for. You
understand our problem?

I do see your issues, but I reject the premise that it would only be useful for a troping wiki.  The central idea of the Portland Pattern Repository is so close to troping wikis that you can basically replace the word "software" with "entertainment" in the purpose and it makes sense.
I also reject the idea that software can automatically be used for free if it's open source.  I mean, look at Unix.  That's like the classic example.  It took some 30 years until we got a FOSS alternative to Unix and you're not really concerned *that* far down the road, are you?  There are legitimate reasons to keep your application closed-source, but at this point it seems like a matter of taste.

Since our wiki is built upon a real DB, we can rate all the pages,
whether they are good clean family fun or hentai guro. Tropers can use
their settings to decide which pages they want to see. If you don't want
to see the real bad stuff, you'll get a 404 when you go there by
mistake. Oh, and people will have to make an account before they can
read up about bad stuff. Good enough?

Actually, that's elegant.  I worry about the edit wars on what acceptable concepts are, but this is at the core a good idea.  Also don't send 404 on a valid request for a resource that exists -- 403 would be a better status but 200 would also work with a warning page.
Most of the ideas I'm coming up with involve forcing Mediawiki to do things that it really wasn't designed to do.  I have the core of an idea/implementation to enable Pmwiki traces (a.k.a TVT index footers) into a Mediawiki footer.  I'm not really sure if people even want that feature, but it's something that could be toggled.  I think that if I was truly clever with Javascript, I might be able to come up with something that mimics your example sorting thing.  No new ideas, I'm afraid.
-- ∇×V

[TvT Rivals]

And the new gallery is up. With one bonus picture. Read up about fun headings, work information, and most important, the filter mechanism!

@Black Aeronaut: Uh, so many rules... but yeah, we'll need something like that. Thanks for the link.

vorticity's questions/comments will have to wait a bit. [sincerityMode=on]Which definitely doesn't mean that they're bad or wrong.

[Ankhani]

On a minor note, "406 Not Acceptable" seems like the most suitable return for a user (accidentally) querying a page which they have explicitly opted out of viewing. "The requested resource is capable of generating only content not acceptable according to the Accept headers sent in the request."
204 No Content is a close second, but I would stick to a 4xx code to make it clear this is not a normal return and is specific to the client.
---

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

[Labster]

406 would not be standards compliant. 

Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, br

Now I told them I'll accept */* (anything) at the end.  But imagine that it wasn't there, and I had requested a .jpg file.  The server would throw an error saying "sorry, I can't give you an text/html resource because your URL asked for an image/jpeg file".  That is a 406 Not Acceptable.
Access controls have nothing to do with accepts headers, and are thus more appropriate to 403 Forbidden, which is about access controls.  204 would be acceptable if you want to actually return 0 bytes of content.  Which is to say not really acceptable.  303 See Other is actually also OK, as it would be a good redirect to a "safe" page.  A modification of 450 Blocked by Windows Parental Controls would also be a good idea.
-- ∇×V

[Ankhani]

My experience in programing has nothing to do with HTTP. So, as you can see, I don't know what I'm talking about, beyond superficial details.
---

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

[TvT Rivals]

First: 403, or maybe 303 is probably the best solution.

Second: New gallery is up.

Third: Tomorrow, we'll have been here for exactly a week. That's a good time for a longer post about what our plans for the community are. And who we, the future wiki administration, are. vorticity is peppering us with questions already.

[TvT Rivals]

Since you keep wondering who we are (especially vorticity), we decided to list up a bit about us. But since we prefer to keep our privacy, we don't include personal data. Or we anonymized them a bit by throwing our jobs and interests into a pool. Now try to seperate us into individuals again...

Our names: Secret. We prefer not to tell anyone. If you still manage to find out with the data we gave you, then we're probably not good enough to care for the security of a big website (which may attract crackers, trolls and haters) anyway.

Our friends, family, s/o etc: Secret, for twice the reason.

Our addresses: Planet Earth (northern hemisphere), System Sol, Milky Way Galaxy, Local Group, Universe, Multiverse.

Our phone numbers: Secret.

Our sexes: Male (No girls on the internet? Yeah, sometimes it is true.). Sometimes feeling a little that being a lesbian might be cool.

Our ages: From precocious youngsters over not-over-the-hill-yet mid-agers to young at heart oldies. Between 1000 weeks and 1000 months. (Decimal system.)

Our MBTI: Rather on the introverted side. Other than that, all over the place.

Our political beliefs: Have read quite a bit about political ideologies (mostly Communism/Socialism and Anarchism/Libertarianism), political history and political systems. These days, mostly pretty disillusioned. And by that, we mean ALL parties from the extreme left to the extreme right.

Our religious background: Mixed, very mixed. In no case dogmatic, so don't be afraid. Somehow, the various religions all have a point, somewhere. - Know about Discordianism too, even used it for at least one RL decision. So don't hold back with the Illuminati references.

Our education: Minimum: Finished college. Studied computer science, computer linguistics, mathematics and political science. Sometimes finished it too. Highest level of education: Started studying for a PhD.

Our jobs in the past: Programmer / web designer at various state institutions (including, but not exclusively, research centers). Assistant / sysadmin / webmaster at various colleges / universities. Oversaw tests and held lectures there too. Independent programmer/database expert/internet security guy. Seen a bit of the start-up scene too. Most interesting job, maybe: Intern in a small firm dealing with fans of celebrities.

Our abilities: Programming in C, C++, Java, Perl 5, Python (not in that order). Also, AJAX, Javascript, JQuery, for good measure. Databases, those using SQL and the object-oriented ones. HTML/CSS. UML and OCL (but don't think too highly of them). Wikibots. SEO. Content Management Systems. How to prevent website attacks, e.g. SQL injections. Some areas from AI, like neural networks, evolutionary algorithms, various tree searches, constraint programming and game theory. A bit about game programming. Extreme Programming - it's cool. Have accounts on sourceforge and github, but didn't create anything widely used. Take/took our informations from slashdot, Stack Overflow (and related sites), Coding Horror, Joel on Software and various security experts. Don't ask us to program anything in BASIC, COBOL or PHP.

People we'd put on our wiki's "Special Thanks" page: The demigods of the computer world - James Gosling, Brian Kernighan, Dennis Ritchie, Richard M. Stallman, Bjarne Stroustrup, Ken Thompson, Linus Torvalds, Guido van Rossum, Larry Wall (not in that order). And Michael Widenius, for MySQL and MariaDB. And since this is about troping: Fast Eddie (not the assholish one - the old one, who kickstarted a very fascinating, very funny wiki, which we still should be grateful for. Yes, it was a long time ago, but he was a good guy once, just like Saruman.) and vorticity for providing the Tv Tropes site rip (yes, we are that broad-minded).

Media we like:
(First: As administrators we have to be fair and impartial, so we don't want to state too openly what we like most. Don't want to give the tropers the opportunity to suck up to us.)

Advertising: Commercials are, well, commercial and only there to get our money. Doesn't prevent some of them to be entertaining, though. Ever seen a compilation of funny international ads?

Anime, Manga etc: Prefer the former, for having more color and needing less place on the shelf. Not as deep into it as some of you reading here, but still saw several very good ones we'd recommend. - And learned a lot about those we didn't watch on Tv Tropes. Even read a non-fiction manga once.

Comedy: Like all kinds of jokes. British humor, Chinese humor, Jewish humor, Russian humor and many more. Know century-old humor that has survived the tests of time and jokes that will be old in a week. Know jokes about all kinds of topics (especially computers). Have seen the one or other stand-up comedian (also political ones) in our respective country on stage.

Comics: From some of the oldest ones over Disney classics to modern stuff: Superheroes, OEL Manga, Franco-Belgian, Alternative ones and some others.

Fanfics: Read a few based on media we like very much. Also found some of the 10% that are worth it. Not deep into it, but know what terms like Slash and Shipping mean. Once had some published on the internet, but rather consider them Old Shame now.

Films: Tried to rival Tarantino in watching movies for some time. Thought about going to film school and becoming a scriptwriter, but decided against it after seeing that they're the Butt Monkey of Hollywood. Watching blockbusters and indie movies alike. Left thousands of bucks at movie theaters and haven't stopped yet. Visited several film studios on more than one continent.

Literature: Classics for children (e.g. old Kid Detective stories). Classics from before 1900. Well-aged Speculative Fiction (Tolkien, PTerry, Asimov and others) and Pulp. Bestsellers from today. Often been in libraries in several countries. Have on average several hundred books at home. Wouldn't mind to have many more.

Live-Action TV: Let's just say: What Hollywood and western Europe have to offer. In recent years, there has been quite some good stuff.

Magazines: Read too many to mention, about all kinds of topics. MAD too (but it used to be better in the past).

Music: Like all main genres, as long as they're well done: Classical, Country, Filk, Folk, Metal, Pop, Rap, Rock... Visited several live concerts. Learned to play the piano.

Oral Tradition: Started with fairy tales (from the western world and other places) and later dug into mythology (western, classical and more).

Play-by-Post Games: Tried them out, both by paper and on internet fora, but never got the hang of them. Still think they might be done in a cool way, but can't tell how exactly.

Pro Wrestling: Have seen at least one live show. With a cool local hero, evil heels, tag teams and some really mean moves. A belt was at stake too. Doesn't hurt to know about this topic.

Radio: We'll pass on this. Sometimes have radio music running in the background.

Tabletop Games: Visited many RPG cons, also often GMed there and in private groups. Know that there are many more Tabletop RPGs than D&D, V:tM, GURPS and Shadowrun. Contributed stuff to RPGamer websites and magazines. Tried to invent our own, but didn't finish it. Didn't play WH40k, but find the world fascinating somehow.
Also have experience with Eurogames, Munchkin, War Games, online poker and classic card games like Euchre and Rummy.

Theatre: Started with school plays (acted in at least one too). Seen classics, including the bard's plays, on stage. More modern artists, like Brecht, too. Also been in a real opera at least once. Ditto for musicals. Oh, and circuses (old and new ones) too.

Toys: Plushies, LEGO and such, caleidoscopes, puzzles in 2D and 3D, model building, toy robots.

Video Games: Oldest experience (speaking for all of us): Some game with Snoopy on a C64. Played VGs on more than one console, handheld and big ones. And of course on PC, cell phone and web browsers. Genres played: 4X, Adventures, Fighting games, FPS, Puzzle games, RPGs, Shmups, Simulations, Strategy/Tactics.

Webcomics: Loved this medium since we got aware of it. Will tell our grandchildren one day how we witnessed the birth of a new medium.

Web Original: Troping Wikis! (OK, that was too easy.) Responsible for more than a hundred new pages, more than a thousand new examples and ten thousands of edits. Now let's see further: More than one account at WP. Once, admin at a wikia wiki with many thousand pages and many users. Read stuff on Facebook, Twitter, reddit, voat, and tumblr. Spent too much time on YouTube. Had our own domain as early as the last millennium (not anymore). Moderator at a big internet forum (as in, millions of posts).
Other than that: Read many lolcat comics, SCP items, Polandball webcomics, Alternate Histories, and at least one Slenderman vlog. And much more.

Western Animation: Oh yes. Seen everything from b/w classics over Disney/WB works to deranged modern stuff. Traditional animation and CGI. Many European and some non-western works too. Been in Disneyland too. Definitely know that not all animation is for kids.

Our other geeky interests: 3D printing (Manager in a FabLab). Architecture. Artificial Intelligence. Astronomy. Chaos theory. Cryptography. Cybernetics. Dinosaurs. Douglas Hofstadter. Drones. Einstein's physics. Fractals. Maps. Riddles. Sport statistics. World records.

Our other interests: Betting on events in sports and politics. Bodypainting (just as spectators, neither as artists nor models). Cycling. The gym. Hiking. Shooting airguns. Swimming.

In short: We think we might be qualified to run a troping wiki competently. If you still have doubts, feel free to make up a quiz (some dozen to a hundred questions would be fair, we think) with answers that aren't easy to google. Troping is Serious Business after all. But if you want to include questions about NSFW or other embarrassing stuff, let's do this per PM. Also, please try to leave out personal opinions.

More about what we want (especially when we're talking about community building) tomorrow.

[TvT Rivals]

No replies at all? Ok, we guess you're still busy pondering about what we wrote yesterday. Take your time, here's more as we promised yesterday.

Oh, BTW: Since we just read on the ATT forum that you want to bring back the Title Bin: We also liked that feature and brought this back a while ago. We guess you don't mind if we send you the old files (before we converted it to our wiki code), as soon as we find them.

OK, now about how we want to make things different than Tv Tropes did.

First: The big question - Content Creation Wiki or Content Classification Wiki? vorticity mentioned this already. We're not sure whether we understood him correctly, but we think it's like this: "creation" refers to new wiki pages about tropes, works, creators etc. and especially examples, whereas "classification" includes the boring maintenance: Correcting "villian" to "villain", adding a missing comma, or alphabetizing lists.

(Other than that we can't imagine which creation you're talking about. Creating works? Maybe someone out there was inspired by Tv Tropes to make a great work, but so far, we've only seen that vlog Echo Chamber, that ARG "The Wall Will Fall" and a lot of forum roleplays. No, we don't think you mean that.)

About our own experience: We liked to go to our watchlist(s) and get excited whenever a page was changed, hoping for a new example from media, an interesting tidbit or at least some funny snark. But all too often, instead we got boring stuff like removed ZCEs or the ubiquitous namespace changes. Tv Tropes started to suck when those moments happened more and more often.

At least we hope that our software can get rid of the boring stuff like adding namespaces (because they're automagically there) and alphabetizing lists. Those tropers who like classification and maintenance will be busy enough with typos and ZCEs.

Other than that: Not sure how we can prevent the wiki crossing the line from "content creation" to "content classification". If troper X creates an example (e.g. Palpatine being the Big Bad of SW), then troper Y can rearrange this example, elaborate it, correct it, but can't re-create it because it's already there. (Duh.) But we think you shouldn't worry, there are more than enough un-troped works out there, and more than enough works with missing tropes.

Second: Bringing back the fun Tv Tropes was in old days. (Some of us have been around since before the Great Crash.) Take the titles, for example. SPOON may be right that some trope names were hard to understand, but they were fun and made you curious what's behind a title. "Parker Lewis Ferris Bueller" sounds better than "High School Hustler", and even totally obscure titles like "Flaming Cobra Sugar Cellar" were interesting.

We understand the point of FoRKS and would like to bring to old experience back. Maybe something like "FoRKS Friday"? Each Friday, the titles of some renamed pages are changed back to their old names for a day. A cron job on the server should suffice for this.

Fortunately, our software makes changing page titles easier. You don't have to change all the wicks by hand, and even if you do, our "Related pages" show a) how many wicks are coming from one page and b) in which part of the page they are.

(That's just the start of it. You guys have been on Tv Tropes for a long time, you should remember how things were when troping was pure fun. Esp. Looney Toons. In fact, we'd like to hear a story how things were on Tv Tropes in these days. In short: Suggestions are welcome.)

Third: What are the basic rules? At first, we think we should consider the difference between what we call "laws" (like "don't use the wiki for trading crack") and "rules" (like "don't use the word 'recently' in examples"). Leaving that aside, we were quite happy with the old Troping Code. Though we'd change "don't be a dick" to "don't be an asshole". Criticizing people should be allowed; snarking about works like Twilight, Eragon and Sonichu was fun; and not every insult is ban-worthy. (Calling people "asshole" for nothing is still not cool, but the appropriate punishment should be more like "no editing/posting for a week".) Also, we really don't see a problem with calling RL people like Hitler (or Stalin) Complete Monsters. That's why we want to change "No Real Life Examples Please" to "Be Careful With Real Life Examples Please" in general.

Then, there's the point of honesty. Without this, nothing will work. Just say how things are. Just as we do when we say "Brent, your openness about who you are and what you do is fine, but we prefer to stay anonymous for the moment."

Means: People are allowed to like guro hentai, but they're not allowed to claim that it was fine for six-year-old girls. Tropers may express their opinions, but they may not lie about facts. If you attack other tropers, or claim they attacked you, better bring some good proof along. As we told vorticity about how one of us was banned from Tv Tropes because of a fight with another troper: We can't stand these people who evade truth no matter how wrong they are.

Fourth: The old question how to get a better "signal-to-noise" ratio. Tv Tropes is trying something with removing Zero Context Examples, that's a start. We let the software deal with ZCEs and also introduce some new measurements to tell the difference between well-written pages and those which are... not.

* The SLI (Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness Index): Calculates an index based on the length of the used words and the length of sentences. Doesn't automatically mean the example's good, but we have way more empty examples or one-word examples than examples that sound intellectual but are without meaning.
* The Bad Writing Index: For works. Simply the percentage of tropes on the Bad Writing Index. We guess that measurement will say something about how well-written one work is.
* The Trope Rarity Index: Many works have lists that consist of the most common tropes like "The Hero", "Big Bad" and "Badass", while cool and interesting tropes are neglected. So we give every trope a point value for rarity which becomes smaller as the number of wicks for that trope grows. The TRI is the average of the rarity value of the used tropes in a work. A higher TRI hints that the tropers who made that page have a bigger trope vocabulary. Just like some people have a vocabulary of 25,000 words, and some only know 500.
* Average Content Score: The percentage of examples that aren't Zero Context Examples. The more, the better.

Now these are mathematical measurements, but fun can't be measured like that. But since our software is example-based, we could introduce something like value measurements: Whenever a troper posts an "Awesome Moment", you may give your vote whether you think it's indeed awesome or not. So we'll have an easy measurement for the popularity of examples and such.

Furthermore, since your signal may be another troper's noise: That's what the filter table is good for. You don't like e.g. Radio series? Switch the filter for Radio to "No", and the software won't display any pages or examples from radio series anymore. Works just like with works that are too naughty for your taste. - And just to make sure you don't forget that this is a kind of echo chamber, the software will also display something like "42 of 123 examples filtered out" on pages you look at.

Fifth: How to build up the new community? You (Brent, Bob, Rob & Geth) are some great tropers who have done a lot of (and for) troping; and that's in fact the reason we contacted you, because a wiki needs tropers like you. But we also need some more people if we don't want our wiki to stay a small clubhouse. Unfortunately, the internet has changed a lot since Tv Tropes started (or WP, or the Eternal September). At that time, many people didn't have internet yet, wikis attracted only true geeks and troping was only for an even smaller subset. But today, there are thousands of experienced trolls, and even more people ready to join new websites. Remember what happened when reddit was down and people wanted to use voat instead, but voat couldn't handle the sudden traffic? Talk about drinking from the firehose. Yeah, we have no solution for that either, at least for now.

So what's our plan? We prefer organic growth of our wiki. That's why we'll make it invitation-only for the beginning. You'll get some 64-letter registration codes as soon as our wiki's online, enter it, and start editing. Then, you'll also have five registration tokens, which means you can send such a token of code to some other troper you know and trust, so they can join the wiki too. If they don't want to, you'll get your token back. Do the math: We start with five tropers, who invite up to 25 more, who invite 125, and so on.

This also means: If some new troper really creates havoc, we can also tell which troper is responsible for inviting such a tool/troll/spammer/whatever.

Sixth: Community strengthening. Many tropers out there are frustrated because they work hard for some wiki page, and nobody seems to notice, and if someone does, it's either a mod criticizing they did something wrong or another troper starting an edit war. Discussion pages are rarely used, and the fora tend to exist independently from the wiki. So much about Tv Tropes.

What do we do in a different way?
* First, our fora work with tagged threads. (A thread may have more than one tag.) And only existing wiki pages are allowed as tags. When you're on a wiki page that has forum discussions, you'll get a link to a page with all the threads tagged with this page. Discussion pages and fora are united, so to speak.
* Second: Tropers have watchlists, and many tropers like to list on their troper pages which pages they made and/or like. It's reasonable to think that tropers will have these pages on their watchlist too. But on most wikis, you can't see what people are watching, or which people watch a certain page. That's why we include the watchlist in the troper page. See? Whenever you put a page on your watchlist, you'll also add it as a quasi-example to your troper page. This means: Tropers can see who else likes the pages they made, and can connect with these other tropers.
* Third: Scientists say communities cross a line when their size grows beyond the magic number of 150, because most humans can't remember more than 150 different people. We expect that we'll have to deal with this problem too. What's the solution? Organize the wiki community around fandoms. As soon as a page has three tropers who are fans, they may start to moderate themselves. (If they grow beyond 150, they'll have to.) Of course, you're by no means restricted from joining more than one fandom. We wouldn't have it like that either. Just keep in mind that if you tick off a fandom, they also have the right to exclude you or something like that.

Finally: Some tidbit about wiki code we had promised to tell vorticity about:

On most wikis, bold code is done by using ''', and italics are ''. So far, so good. Unfortunately the inventors of that code didn't consider the Bold Inflation and the consistent use of italics for work titles. As a result, there are some example sentences where wikis (both MediaWiki and PmWiki) fail. Take these:

''StarTrekTOS'''s Kirk is a kosher ham. '''Cause Shatner is Jewish, geddit?'' (Should look like: Star Trek TOS's Kirk is a kosher ham. 'Cause Shatner is Jewish, geddit?)

''It's over '''NINE THOUSAND!!!''' (breaks device)'' (Should look like: It's over NINE THOUSAND!!! (breaks device))

Notice something? Both use the same apostrophe pattern (2-3-3-2), but the resulting formatting should be different. So unless we'd be willing to blow up our wiki parser by adding a sophisticated AI that can recognize leading and trailing apostrophes (hint: we weren't), that problem would stay with us. Try it out, on whichever wiki you like - one of these sentences has to be parsed incorrectly.

That's why we decided to use a modified BBCode, with tags like [ B ] and [ I ].

The advantage (for you, not for us): Code from our wiki can be translated to MediaWiki code without any ambiguity, whereas that wasn't the case when we translated the site rip. Or when we want to import ATT changes.
 

[Labster]

Content Creation WikiContent Classification Wiki
You need to read the classics to understand culture, and wikis are no different.  The key here is whether or not there's space to experiment or create.

PTerry

Shibboleth accepted. Your status is now "one of us".

Once had some [ fanfic ] published on the internet, but rather consider them Old Shame now.

To those of you who haven't written (or programmed): this is what creation is like.  Even God had to flood the whole place and start over.

Also have experience with ... Munchkin

I'm so sorry.  Accept my condolences.  No really, Munchkin is a terrible game (with a few good jokes buried in it).

Our sexes: Male (No girls on the internet? Yeah, sometimes it is true.).
Sometimes feeling a little that being a lesbian might be cool.

...

No replies at all? Ok, we guess you're still busy pondering about what we wrote yesterday.

...

Leaving that aside, we were quite happy with the old Troping Code.

I was actually going to ask your opinion on this yesterday, but how do you feel about my version of The Tropers' Code?  Note that it is actually policy on ATT, and a recognition that things are a really matter of degrees.  And admins have been known to reverse other admins decisions, and we all get along.  It's quite lovely.

We understand the point of FoRKS and would like to bring to old
experience back. Maybe something like "FoRKS Friday"? Each Friday, the
titles of some renamed pages are changed back to their old names for a
day. A cron job on the server should suffice for this.

Heh amusing.  More to the point, how would you handle the distinction between pages like "The Hero" and "The Heroine" where one doesn't necessarily mean the other?  Would it be possible to use "Nakama" on an Anime page and "True Companions" on a Literature page?

You don't like e.g. Radio series? Switch the filter for Radio to "No",
and the software won't display any pages or examples from radio series
anymore.

I hope you're not using radio buttons to do this   I think this is a good demonstration of the type of power that comes with a well structured system.  I truly see a lot of advantages to doing so.  The problem is that you will lose expressiveness in exchange for this power.  Questions like the one in the block above are really trying to get at the heart of how much you have done to preserve expressiveness while increasing clarity and power.  This question is one I think about a lot as Perl programmer.
On a side note, what language are you using for the core wiki code?  I assume you're using MariaDB on the backend because you mentioned Monty, but on the other hand why are you writing a new app that doesn't target PostgreSQL?  I say this as someone who uses MariaDB and Percona daily for hysterical raisins historical reasons.  (Fun fact: did you know that MySQL REGEXP only knows about byte-sized characters, despite the fact that people have been complaining about lack of Unicode support here since 2004?)

This also means: If some new troper really creates havoc, we can also
tell which troper is responsible for inviting such a
tool/troll/spammer/whatever.

You can only blame yourselves for inviting me.  I am a troll par excellence.  Here is me trolling philosophers about the nature of trolling and still being the top-ranked reply.
-- ∇×V

[robkelk]

No replies at all?

Work was extremely busy yesterday.

...

Second: Bringing back the fun Tv Tropes was in old days. (Some of us have been around since before the Great Crash.) Take the titles, for example. SPOON may be right that some trope names were hard to understand, but they were fun and made you curious what's behind a title. "Parker Lewis Ferris Bueller" sounds better than "High School Hustler", and even totally obscure titles like "Flaming Cobra Sugar Cellar" were interesting.

We understand the point of FoRKS and would like to bring to old experience back. Maybe something like "FoRKS Friday"? Each Friday, the titles of some renamed pages are changed back to their old names for a day. A cron job on the server should suffice for this.

...

The "fun" names only work if you already know the context, though. Unless you have some idea who this Parker L. F. Bueller person is, naming a trope after him isn't going to tell you anything about the trope. (Similarly, I discovered earlier this month that "No Sell" had nothing at all to do with an in-game merchant refusing to do business with you, so we changed the name.)

EDIT: Oh, and "Highschool Hustler" has that Added Alliterative Appeal.

One really nice thing about MediaWiki is that the redirect capability lets us use the cute name, the informative name, and the industry-standard name for the same article, all at the same time.
--
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

[Bob Schroeck]

No replies at all?

Likewise, it's been a crazy couple of days. I'll probably post about it some time later this morning.

You guys have been on Tv Tropes for a long time, you should remember how things were when troping was pure fun. Esp. Looney Toons. In fact, we'd like to hear a story how things were on Tv Tropes in these days.

Wild and freewheeling. I kinda liked it that way, but I also appreciate that the stricter structure imposed later was kind of necessary. The much stricter structure imposed much later, not so much so. Let me think for a while and see what I can remember.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[TvT Rivals]

@Bob: We'd appreciate that. The early time of Tv Tropes is somewhat hidden in the fog of history.

You need to read the classics to understand culture, and wikis are no different.  The key here is whether or not there's space to experiment or create.

 

A wiki for creators of media where creativity isn't allowed is a kind of contradiction in itself...

Shibboleth accepted. Your status is now "one of us".

Glad to hear that. :-)

No really, Munchkin is a terrible game (with a few good jokes buried in it).

We don't comment on that. The Administration of the future troping wiki has to stay neutral.

I was actually going to ask your opinion on this yesterday, but how do you feel about my version of The Tropers' Code?  Note that it is actually policy on ATT, and a recognition that things are a really matter of degrees.  And admins have been known to reverse other admins decisions, and we all get along.  It's quite lovely.

Peculiar... except for the last point, we'd call this rather a page for "What is the purpose of the wiki?", not "What are the rules of the wiki?"

We'll have to write a page about that too. Some ideas are there, but it's not finished yet. We know that we like troping very much, but if you ask us to nail it down... we disagree among us about that. We'll see.

More to the point, how would you handle the distinction between pages like "The Hero" and "The Heroine" where one doesn't necessarily mean the other?  Would it be possible to use "Nakama" on an Anime page and "True Companions" on a Literature page?

Other than Tv Tropes, we allow Potholes at the beginning of examples. Does that answer your question?

(Also, we allow strikethrough markup, colored text and bigger font size. And we want to keep it like that.)

Furthermore, other than in PmWiki, our parser can handle markup (like B, I, Strike, Spoiler, Color...) in potholes.

I think this is a good demonstration of the type of power that comes with a well structured system.  I truly see a lot of advantages to doing so.  The problem is that you will lose expressiveness in exchange for this power.  Questions like the one in the block above are really trying to get at the heart of how much you have done to preserve expressiveness while increasing clarity and power.  This question is one I think about a lot as Perl programmer.

The software doesn't put many restrictions on examples. They have to be shorter than 4 kiB, that's all. And you may add more than one example for a certain trope-work combination.

On a side note, what language are you using for the core wiki code?

Read carefully what we wrote, there's a hint hidden in it.

but on the other hand why are you writing a new app that doesn't target PostgreSQL?

We'll have to see. As long as we are the only ones using the software (we don't plan to sell it), we use our time for other stuff. Other than that, nothing against PostgreSQL. Just wasn't our first choice.

(Fun fact: did you know that MySQL REGEXP only knows about byte-sized characters, despite the fact that people have been complaining about lack of Unicode support here since 2004?)

Good thing we rarely use that function, then.

You can only blame yourselves for inviting me.  I am a troll par excellence.  Here is me trolling philosophers about the nature of trolling and still being the top-ranked reply.

The link on top doesn't work. At least right now.

Other than that, we weren't talking about trolls like you or Eris. Rather about the "YOU ALL SUCK" kind of trolls that came later.

Also, you're not really invited yet until you'll get the mail with the 64-letter-and-number code you need for registering. - j/k, you'll get it, just nitpicking.

We have a beta tester BTW who likes to argue on fora very much. Some hairy UNIX admin who likes anime. You'll get along very well.

Did you get our mail with the attachment (the custom titles for pages)?

Other than that, we're off for the weekend. Have to dig deep into the wiki. CU!

[Labster]

Did you get our mail with the attachment (the custom titles for pages)?

Yup!  At the time, I had no idea how to harvest it.  I have a whole 4MB file of me attempting to rename page titles on translation to the new wiki syntax.  I only really got half of what we needed, and had to bot a lot more fixes after launch.  I'm sure we'll have to figure out someone to go through it.

As long as we are the only ones using the software (we don't plan to sell it), we use our time for other stuff.

That's too bad, I was thinking of buying it.  Totally serious here.

Read carefully what we wrote, there's a hint hidden in it.

And if you keep teasing me like this, I'm rapidly going to become disinterested.  I asked because I saw your "hints" and could not figure them out.

We don't comment on that. The Administration of the future troping wiki has to stay neutral.

This line, more than anything else you've said, makes me think you're unsuited to run a troping wiki.  Good luck on trying to run a fan site without passion.  Hint: there is a difference between having favorites and playing favorites.
-- ∇×V

[GethN7]

Ladies and gentlemen, I have a regrettable announcement regarding my ability to discharge my duties on All The Tropes for the next couple of days.

The data on my HDD suffered a massive case of going pear shaped and I basically lost everything I had save for a few minor items, and so I'll be spending the next couple of days sifting through the ashes and trying to restore everything to working order. Unfortunately, this means I will be pretty scarce in the meantime, for which I apologize.

If I'm needed for anything critical, don't hesitate to contact me here or by email, or any other area I usually frequent, I will check on that as regularly as I can.

[Bob Schroeck]

Not a problem, Geth. We'll hold down the fort while you recover.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[robkelk]

What Bob said. Get your gear back into shape, restore from your last backup, and we'll see you later.
--
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

[Bob Schroeck]

...And our favorite geek-with-a-grudge is back, this time under the name Argonaut. I stumbled upon his handiwork less than 20 minutes after he started his latest round of vandalism, locked him out and reverted or deleted everything he did within five. I fully expect he'll try again before the day is out, though, so I'll be checking the recent changes page frequently.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[Bob Schroeck]

How'd I miss those, Rob? Thanks for catching them.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[robkelk]

No worries. (I caught them by looking at the user contributions list, and reverting any page that was still marked as the current version.)
--
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

[robkelk]

Did some cleaning up of Overman King Gainer/Characters (because people are not tropes), and discovered that Anime News Network lists credits for non-Japanese, non-English dubs of anime. So I added them in while I was at it.

Is this something we want to encourage, or should I leave it as a one-off thing?

@TvTropes Rivals: How are you handling cast credits on Characters sub-pages? They don't always have links.
--
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

[DHBirr]

Maybe this is a mark of gross and insufferable ignorance, especially if it's already been addressed here, but is there any significance to the way some of the links on ATT are blue and some are green?  I haven't been able to discern a pattern....
-----
Big Brother is watching you.  And damn, you are so bloody BORING.

[Bob Schroeck]

Green links are pages in the Trope category; blue is anything else. Some redirects have the category so they show up as green in trope lists.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[TvT Rivals]

Hi guys, we're back!

The latest task took us a bit longer than we expected (not the first time that happens...), but now we've added the lacking tables to the DB and the functions to the script(s).

What that task was about? Some tricky section of the wiki: The Fanfic Recommendations. First, they are a mix of facts about fiction and discussions; second, they were pretty jumbled, even more so than the rest of the wiki. But now we cleaned them up, and they are ready for import. Hopefully we can finish this on the weekend. You'll get screenshots as soon as we've done this.

Besides, we also did some minor fixes and imports. You know how it is, the last 10% tend to take up to 90% of the time...

About the ATT link colors:
If you had a way to tell the difference for categories for tropes and other categories, this could be fixed. (Our two cents.)

It's not a bad idea to tell links to tropes and other links apart. At the moment, we have to rely on tooltips for this. If you wanted to mark links to other page types too, you'd need a different concept - but which?