All The Tropes Wiki Project, Part XXIX

[robkelk]

Google to kill off URL shortener once and for all

Special:LinkSearch says we only have 10 of these as of the time of this posting. Easy enough to fix manually.

EDIT, 47 minutes later: And done. Only one dead link, amazingly enough. OTOH, one link to a Wikipedia page.

RE-EDIT: And they were all from before the TVTropes fork. Perhaps somebody might mention the news article to them, so that they aren't taken by surprise in a year. The links were on:

• Homestuck/Funny
  
• Metro 2033 (video game)
  
• Mooks
  
• Penny and Aggie/Recap/Bussed Out (dead link, but found in the Wayback Machine)
  
• Penny and Aggie/Recap/Campaign Trail
  
• Penny and Aggie/Recap/Parent's Nightmare
  
• Pokémon
  
• Vocaloid/Nightmare Fuel
  
• Your Normal Is Our Taboo (two links)
  

[Labster]

Three years from now: Google introduces new URL shortener.

[robkelk]

Only after they figure out how to monetize it. Can't give anything away for free - think of the stockholders!

(Fair disclosure: I'm one of those stockholders.)

[robkelk]

It's a Sisyphean task... Every time I fix a Lint Error, the scanner finds at least a half-dozen more.

I know the scanner's still finding missing end tags. It's annoying when fixing all of the errors that are on the list, plus more that I notice while I'm on the page, just reveals more errors on the page. And fixing those reveals still more... <sigh>

It would be really nice if the to-be-fixed counter would go down instead of up when I fix something. The freaking count's almost doubled in the last three weeks.

Anybody know how much longer the scanner's going to be going through the database?

EDIT: And "clearing Lint Errors" obviously isn't a one-person job.

[Labster]

I mean, it's been a one-person job so far, going through the output of a scanner darkly.

My guess is that the linter doesn't check all of the pages sequentially, but only when the wiki reparses them for another reason. So when someone loads a new page, or links need to be refreshed, and so on.

[robkelk]

Aargh... I know we have a trope for this one. I even remember that the page quote is from Terry Pratchett. (Not one of his books, the man himself.) But I don't remember what we call it...

And, no, it isn't Small Reference Pools or The Zeroth Law of Trope Examples.

Irregular Webcomic! #5242

[Bob Schroeck]

Aargh... I know we have a trope for this one. I even remember that the page quote is from Terry Pratchett. (Not one of his books, the man himself.) But I don't remember what we call it...

Older Than They Think

[robkelk]

Thanks, Bob.

[Bob Schroeck]

No prob.

[robkelk]

I'm happy that people are agreed that we shouldn't use link shorteners... because I just discovered two that have been hiding a link monetization service since before we forked from TVT. Banning the silly things outright because of their already-proven use in hiding the existence of advertising on the wiki.

[GethN7]

Want a good laugh? A Nazi apologist we banned awhile back was whining about us on Reddit, and I of course told them we are not changing our minds:

https://www.reddit.com/r/tvtropes/commen...ternative/

https://archive.is/MFuJt

[Labster]

Good lord how is that old thread not locked.

[robkelk]

I'm happy that people are agreed that we shouldn't use link shorteners... because I just discovered two that have been hiding a link monetization service since before we forked from TVT. Banning the silly things outright because of their already-proven use in hiding the existence of advertising on the wiki.

Related to this, I just got rid of the last of the tinyurl.com links. I lost track of how many of them had been monetized -- maybe one-tenth of the total.

And I have no idea who was getting the money from clickthroughs from ATT, so we can't go after them to pay the money plus interest to Orain/Miraheze/Wikitide.

On the other hand, there were a lot more obfuscated Wikipedia links than there were obfuscated monetized links.

[Bob Schroeck]

Dontcha just love would-be vandals who are too stupid to realize what the Moderation extension does, or even that we're using it? They're practically self-disposing!

[robkelk]

Special:Lint errors tells me that there is a Missing "sub" end tag in Template:Mbox. I don't know how to debug an "invoke".

I suspect some pseudo-HTML needs to be replaced with CSS, but I have no idea what or where... Could an actual programmer fix this, please?

[Bob Schroeck]

So. I'd like second opinions on this queued edit to the page Flashpoint (comics), made by our newest favorite editor, Mussharraf Hossen Shoikot. I find it hard to accept that changing the tense on a single verb is sufficient to merit the removal of the "outdated" and "cleanup" templates from the page.

[robkelk]

So. I'd like second opinions on this queued edit to the page Flashpoint (comics), made by our newest favorite editor, Mussharraf Hossen Shoikot. I find it hard to accept that changing the tense on a single verb is sufficient to merit the removal of the "outdated" and "cleanup" templates from the page.

If it was that easy to fix, I would have fixed it myself instead of putting the cleanup banners on the page.

EDIT: Some of the trope descriptions still look like they're based on publicity pre-release materials.

[Bob Schroeck]

Thank you, Rob.

[robkelk]

No worries, Bob.

---

I haven't done this in so long that I had to look up how to do it... maybe we're a little frugal with our barnstars. This one was definitely earned.

[Bob Schroeck]

Oh, agreed, definitely. MilkmanConspiracy is the best new automodded user we've had in a very long time.

[robkelk]

I am so tempted to add this to the Style Guide as an example of why we don't sort entries alphabetically... but then I'd have to apologize to Steve Jackson for the completely unwarranted implied comparison:

"If you liked ''The Fantasy Trip'', try ''F.A.T.A.L.''. They're both tabletop RPGs that start with the letter 'F'."

[robkelk]

Regarding this question and answer, do we want to break our "no links to TV Tropes" rule in order to provide context to the page dedication?

[Bob Schroeck]

I don't want to sound harsh, but I think not, and we should probably remove the dedication as well.

[robkelk]

Upon consideration, I agree. We don't do page dedications anywhere else, after all.

[GethN7]

Upon consideration, I agree. We don't do page dedications anywhere else, after all.

Same. We have proper attribution in page histories, so I'd remove that, it's irrelevant to copyright.