All The Tropes Wiki Project, Part VII

[TvT Rivals]

Vorticity: We need not only the reviews namespace still fixed, but we also need an alternate new user message template that works with Flow. I'm still busy trying to rebuild, so could you please look into this ASAP?

Reviews namespace? In case you're thinking about importing old reviews, we have them. (Those before July 2012, that is, of course.) Do you want them?

[TvT Rivals]

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.

Ouch.

But you shall get your answer: We are checking out alternatives. It says a lot about Google Ads when you can't find any disadvantages on their WP page... anyway, if we add ads to the wiki, we'll try to make it as safe as possible. Talking about both the added code and the anonymity of our users. If necessary, we'll write our own software for that too.

BTW, you know what's paradoxical? You guys kept the old license that'd allow you to make money - but you chose not to. Fast Eddie went to a shameless level with advertising - and changed the license to non-commercial. Even if the unauthorized license change hadn't been a problem, that's wrong somehow.

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.)

1. You mean you haven't? That's kinda sad to hear... no, we had some other users in mind who spoilt our troping experience. Maybe one day we can chat about this.
2. Eh, we had to check for double examples anyway. (Work and character pages; main pages and subpages; Fridge Logic and Headscratchers...)
3. About CSS Garden: True - but it still makes a nice inspiration.

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.

How are they handling their thousands of templates? That would be the most interesting question to solve.

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.

Well, if you have a suggestion, or know someone who'd pay good money for a modified version of our wiki software, feel free to tell us. But for the moment, we haven't thought about it. Yes, we are no salescritters.

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.

Thanks for the praise! But yes, we do think that a fiction wiki where people can choose to filter out pages based on their amount of sex or violence does have a killer feature. - About the edit wars, we can worry after the launch.

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.

jQuery is a great language, but this stretches things too much. If all wiki pages had the standard structure Quote / intro text / example caption / examples / stinger, it'd work. Since this isn't the case, a script would mess up too often and confuse lists in the intro text for proper example lists.

Yeah, we had to check many pages manually, and are still finding some errors now and then, but it was the only way.

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.

We can imagine that. We never throw our old stuff away.

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.

Now if you hadn't told us you liked trolling so much... ;-) But yeah: For concrete financial offers, by you or other people, please use PMs or mail.

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.

Hey, it's a script language commonly used in LAMP, and PHP is right out. - Would it make a difference to you if we used Python instead of Perl? Or Perl 5 instead of Perl 6, or Python 2 instead of 3?

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.

Well, if we had no passion about this, we wouldn't have started this wiki thing at all.

And we do plan to use it for our ideas too - at the moment, we have several hundred kiB of new trope examples we plan to add. Not to mention our interest in the question how to write great fiction.

But as said, as admins we have to stay neutral. That's why we'll join the wiki later, as soon as there's a small userbase. Using our old screen names. (Apropos screen names: On our wiki, you can choose a login that's different from your screen name. That means additional security, since someone who knows that our screen name is "The Administration" still won't know our login name.)

[robkelk]

Category lists aren't being updated when categories are added, both on ATT and the freebie wiki. I've filed a bug report on the Stewards' Noticeboard at Meta.

EDIT: The jobqueue had stopped running. It's running again, so we should be back to normal once the backlog clears.

In an unrelated item, it was a pleasure working with you on the new "Red Hot Chilli Pipers" page, Bob.
--
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

[TvT Rivals]

Hi guys,

Fanfic Recs will take a bit longer - we found a lot of doubles and had to fix that problem first. At least, we are a bit closer.

(About our avatar: Tv Tropes can forbid us using the lampshade for our wiki, but they shouldn't be able to forbid using it as this. Hopefully.)

BTW: Your article about Text Formatting on ATT still has many artifacts from Tv Tropes.

CU tomorrow!

[GethN7]

Hi guys,

Fanfic Recs will take a bit longer - we found a lot of doubles and had to fix that problem first. At least, we are a bit closer.

(About our avatar: Tv Tropes can forbid us using the lampshade for our wiki, but they shouldn't be able to forbid using it as this. Hopefully.)

BTW: Your article about Text Formatting on ATT still has many artifacts from Tv Tropes.

CU tomorrow!

Thanks for the heads up.

[Bob Schroeck]

robkelk wrote:

---

In an unrelated item, it was a pleasure working with you on the new "Red Hot Chilli Pipers" page, Bob.

Likewise, Rob.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[Dartz]

I thought that said TV Trivials for a second.
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

[Bob Schroeck]

.. and Categories are not being updated again. Put a notice up on the Steward's board about it.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[TvT Rivals]

Uhh... unfortunately it'll take one day more. We had to think up something to sort out SW FFRs "before the original trilogy" and "during it". Other than that, we're ready to import all the files.

So, CU tomorrow!

[Bob Schroeck]

BTW: Your article about Text Formatting on ATT still has many artifacts from Tv Tropes.

If it's the page I think you're referring to, that's a fossil that I actually marked for deletion last night. We kept a lot of admin pages from TVT at first, with "historical" notices on them, but I'm in the process of slowly converting or clearing them out. That's actually the next one to come up on my radar.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[TvT Rivals]

@Bob: Yeah, we have that work ahead of us too.

Other than that: It took us a bit longer than planned, but the Fanfic Recs are done. Over 9000 (no really) are in the DB now. Another step done.

Here's a screenshot as proof: http://allthetropes.wikia.com/wiki/User ... he_seventh

If you want to check, feel free to ask for specific screenshots - as in, "I would like to see how the third FFR for Tron looks in your wiki".

[TvT Rivals]

@Bob: One question - did you have to delete all subpages of Text Formatting manually? Would be more practical of MW had a feature to smash all of 'em in one step.

Our software is getting along well, we can add new fanfic recs now. Or edit them. (Screenshot is up on wikia.)

Also, we're on reddit and voat now. Geth, you may have noticed. - Any subreddits / subverses (besides about media and troping) you'd like to recommend?

[Bob Schroeck]

Text Formatting didn't have any subpages. Or did you mean pages linking to it? If so, yeah, I had to manually fix those. I didn't have to, I could have always left redlinks, but that would not have been being a good wiki citizen.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[GethN7]

@Bob: One question - did you have to delete all subpages of Text Formatting manually? Would be more practical of MW had a feature to smash all of 'em in one step.

Our software is getting along well, we can add new fanfic recs now. Or edit them. (Screenshot is up on wikia.)

Also, we're on reddit and voat now. Geth, you may have noticed. - Any subreddits / subverses (besides about media and troping) you'd like to recommend?

Link me plz.

And my recommendaed list is actually pretty small, I don't post much outside the gamergate related subreddit/verses.

[TvT Rivals]

@Bob: OK, "subpages" was the wrong word. The other entities we meant were some redirects and Category pages.

@Geth: We are at
http://www.reddit.com/user/TvT-Rivals/
http://voat.co/user/TvT-Rivals
respectively.

Other than that: We're experimenting with several things - a fade-out for the menus on top, alphabetical sorting for categories (you remember how indexes worked on Tv Tropes?), and we added a few thousand discussions threads (from fanfic recs). On the weekend, we want to tackle the reviews (we downloaded and reformatted them - those from before July 2012, of course).

Also, we give you a list of interesting (whether in a positive or negative way) stuff we discovered on Tv Tropes throughout the years. Maybe this will help you to know us better.

* Instrument of God
* Ace Attorney, Portal, Dwarf Fortress, Eversion, I Wanna Be The Guy
* Cerebus the Aardvark, Deadpool, Kick-Ass, What happened to the man of tomorrow?, Scott Pilgrim, The Dark Knight Comics, Squirrel Girl, ASSBAR, One More Day...
* House of Leaves, Accelerando, Aubrey-Maturin, The Dresden Files, Thursday Next, The Malazan Book Of The Fallen
* Warhammer 40k, especially Ciaphas Cain
* The Prestige, Primer, Triangle, Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter
* Life on Mars, Ashes to Ashes, Gene Hunt
* Details about Doctor Who, Red Dwarf, Buffy, Firefly, The Office, The Big Bang Theory, Heroes, lonelygirl15 and many other Series
* Blank It, Princess Planet, QC, mezzacotta, C6, Oglaf, Terror Island, 8-bit Theater, P&A, Ma3, and lots of other Webcomics. Stickman and Cube, TMI, Angband - Tales from the Pit, Dinosaur Comics, Hipster Hitler, Palindramas, Triangle and Robert, 1/0, Shredded Moose, monospace, The non-Adventures of Wonderella
* SailorNothing, SlenderManMythos, SCP Foundation, Dr. Horrible, John dies at the End, Shinji and WH40k, Red vs Blue, Homestuck, Pokegirls, Skippy's List and other Web Originals.
* Angels in America, Hedwig and the angry inch, Whateley Universe, Glee, Blur the Lines, RENT, Avenue Q, REPO the Genetic Opera, all the stuff by Jennifer Diane Reitz
* Homestar Runner, That Guy with the Glasses & Co, Limyaael's Fantasy Rants, the concept of Abridged Series, Let's Plays, and other Websites
* Grave of the Fireflies, Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt, Death Note, Project A-ko, Haruhi Suzumiya, Hetalia, many other Anime
* United States of Tara, the St. Elsewhere Theory (you know which one)
* Avatar the last Airbender, Kim Possible
* Urinetown, Spamalot
* If on a winter's night a traveler
* Many shout-outs, e.g. the Bumblebee Man
* Marienbad My Love, Rah and the Muggles, all the stuff by Uwe Boll, Heil Honey, I'm Home!, Celebrian, My Immortal, Hogwarts Exposed, Cloud mows the lawn, American Kitsune by David Gonterman, and of course CWC.
* 9 (the Film)
* I'm a Mac and I'm a PC
* Incompetence, the novel
* Sarah Silverman

* Uncanny Valley and many other kinds of Horror, like Exit Mundi
* Deconstruction, as they define it
* Lots about Wrestling
* Lots about Zombie stuff - Marvel Zombies, World War Z, Price and Prejudice and Zombies...
* Some interesting and funny details about science and history
* Many interesting Websites
* Really weird animation series, like Chowder, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Adventure Time...

As said: We don't say we like or dislike this. We discovered it there, and for some reason remember about it.

[GethN7]

@Bob: OK, "subpages" was the wrong word. The other entities we meant were some redirects and Category pages.

@Geth: We are at
http://www.reddit.com/user/TvT-Rivals/
http://voat.co/user/TvT-Rivals
respectively.

Other than that: We're experimenting with several things - a fade-out for the menus on top, alphabetical sorting for categories (you remember how indexes worked on Tv Tropes?), and we added a few thousand discussions threads (from fanfic recs). On the weekend, we want to tackle the reviews (we downloaded and reformatted them - those from before July 2012, of course).

Also, we give you a list of interesting (whether in a positive or negative way) stuff we discovered on Tv Tropes throughout the years. Maybe this will help you to know us better.

* Instrument of God
* Ace Attorney, Portal, Dwarf Fortress, Eversion, I Wanna Be The Guy
* Cerebus the Aardvark, Deadpool, Kick-Ass, What happened to the man of tomorrow?, Scott Pilgrim, The Dark Knight Comics, Squirrel Girl, ASSBAR, One More Day...
* House of Leaves, Accelerando, Aubrey-Maturin, The Dresden Files, Thursday Next, The Malazan Book Of The Fallen
* Warhammer 40k, especially Ciaphas Cain
* The Prestige, Primer, Triangle, Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter
* Life on Mars, Ashes to Ashes, Gene Hunt
* Details about Doctor Who, Red Dwarf, Buffy, Firefly, The Office, The Big Bang Theory, Heroes, lonelygirl15 and many other Series
* Blank It, Princess Planet, QC, mezzacotta, C6, Oglaf, Terror Island, 8-bit Theater, P&A, Ma3, and lots of other Webcomics. Stickman and Cube, TMI, Angband - Tales from the Pit, Dinosaur Comics, Hipster Hitler, Palindramas, Triangle and Robert, 1/0, Shredded Moose, monospace, The non-Adventures of Wonderella
* SailorNothing, SlenderManMythos, SCP Foundation, Dr. Horrible, John dies at the End, Shinji and WH40k, Red vs Blue, Homestuck, Pokegirls, Skippy's List and other Web Originals.
* Angels in America, Hedwig and the angry inch, Whateley Universe, Glee, Blur the Lines, RENT, Avenue Q, REPO the Genetic Opera, all the stuff by Jennifer Diane Reitz
* Homestar Runner, That Guy with the Glasses & Co, Limyaael's Fantasy Rants, the concept of Abridged Series, Let's Plays, and other Websites
* Grave of the Fireflies, Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt, Death Note, Project A-ko, Haruhi Suzumiya, Hetalia, many other Anime
* United States of Tara, the St. Elsewhere Theory (you know which one)
* Avatar the last Airbender, Kim Possible
* Urinetown, Spamalot
* If on a winter's night a traveler
* Many shout-outs, e.g. the Bumblebee Man
* Marienbad My Love, Rah and the Muggles, all the stuff by Uwe Boll, Heil Honey, I'm Home!, Celebrian, My Immortal, Hogwarts Exposed, Cloud mows the lawn, American Kitsune by David Gonterman, and of course CWC.
* 9 (the Film)
* I'm a Mac and I'm a PC
* Incompetence, the novel
* Sarah Silverman

* Uncanny Valley and many other kinds of Horror, like Exit Mundi
* Deconstruction, as they define it
* Lots about Wrestling
* Lots about Zombie stuff - Marvel Zombies, World War Z, Price and Prejudice and Zombies...
* Some interesting and funny details about science and history
* Many interesting Websites
* Really weird animation series, like Chowder, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Adventure Time...

As said: We don't say we like or dislike this. We discovered it there, and for some reason remember about it.

 

Thanks for the links!

Oh yeah, once you guys set up shop, you can do something on our site you can't do on TV Tropes.

Make a page for yourselves.

I mean it, we are not afraid of you guys giving an overview of yourself and the tropes your site adheres to (pursuant to the our policies on YMMV items not being posted by creators of the media in question).

[robkelk]

Looks like we've got an IP-hopper randomly deleting parts of pages. Geth blocked an address two hours ago, and I just blocked a different address a couple of minutes ago. (In both cases, 6-month blocks.)

Everybody, keep your eyes open.
--
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]

Okay, I've just gotten done with a whole lot of work turning old TVT policy/instructions/etc. pages into ATT pages.  I have cleared out almost everything that used to live in the Main namespace under "About/", leaving only "About/The Second Google Incident" and "About/The Situation" for the moment.  And those two are something I want to query folks on.  I'm thinking it might be better to move them to a "History" section instead of "About", along with the Timeline page and anything else that makes sense.  Oh, and I'm thinking of writing a page for "The Great Hack", as well.  Thoughts, opinions, suggestions?
Next I'm attacking the Administrivia page.  I've started tweaking it as a side effect of moving so many "About" pages into the "All The Tropes" namespace, but I also need to go through all the pages listed there and check the ones I haven't already revised.  Does anyone know of anything in specific from that domain that should be added, removed, or revised?
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[GethN7]

Okay, I've just gotten done with a whole lot of work turning old TVT policy/instructions/etc. pages into ATT pages.  I have cleared out almost everything that used to live in the Main namespace under "About/", leaving only "About/The Second Google Incident" and "About/The Situation" for the moment.  And those two are something I want to query folks on.  I'm thinking it might be better to move them to a "History" section instead of "About", along with the Timeline page and anything else that makes sense.  Oh, and I'm thinking of writing a page for "The Great Hack", as well.  Thoughts, opinions, suggestions?

Next I'm attacking the Administrivia page.  I've started tweaking it as a side effect of moving so many "About" pages into the "All The Tropes" namespace, but I also need to go through all the pages listed there and check the ones I haven't already revised.  Does anyone know of anything in specific from that domain that should be added, removed, or revised?

An All The Tropes:History page would be a good place to describe those events, since they were the stepping stones to our eventual forking. The Great Hack would also be good to write down.

As for Administrivia, the ultimate end goal should be to export everything that matters from there into our own policy namespace, then turn it in a redirect for our main policy index.

[Bob Schroeck]

Actually, yeah, good idea. I'll put a link for All The Tropes:History on Administrivia and use that as a reminder to myself.
Edit:  Except, as it turns out, All The Tropes:History is the timeline page.  Heh.  More to do.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[Bob Schroeck]

My recent work on stuff in the "All The Tropes:" namespace has reminded me... what do we have standing in the way of getting the ATT Page Creator and other scripted things like it from working again? Just curious.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[robkelk]

My recent work on stuff in the "All The Tropes:" namespace has reminded me... what do we have standing in the way of getting the ATT Page Creator and other scripted things like it from working again? Just curious.

If we just want a plain-vanilla page, this code should work:


type=create
buttonlabel=Enter a page name into the box, then click here to launch the page


It definitely works on the freebie wiki. I haven't tested it on ATT, so I can't be sure that it shows the page-creation templates, but I can't imagine why it wouldn't.
--
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]

Oddly enough, All The Tropes:ATT Page Creator has code more or less identical to that as plain text on the page. I seem to recall that there is something preventing us from just turning that back into working markup, but I can't remember what.

Meanwhile, we have three pages in the New Pages Feed that need to be marked as reviewed, but when you try, it throws an error of the form

An error occurred while marking the page as reviewed: [17d418565804d01bd8c883a6] Exception Caught: Cannot notify anonymous user: 73.33.196.34

I'm posting this here and in the ATT forums in the hopes that someone knows how to get around it. (I've got one idea which I haven't tried yet, but I figured it can't help to raise a flag on this.)
Edit:  Per Geth, I've posted a request for Miraheze staff to look into this, as he thinks it's a DB issue.    My idea failed to get me the results I wanted anyway.
Oh, and I tried to get the input button markup to work, but it's not marked up as nowiki or anything -- it's just not being interpreted. 
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[GethN7]

Oddly enough, All The Tropes:ATT Page Creator has code more or less identical to that as plain text on the page. I seem to recall that there is something preventing us from just turning that back into working markup, but I can't remember what.

Meanwhile, we have three pages in the New Pages Feed that need to be marked as reviewed, but when you try, it throws an error of the form

An error occurred while marking the page as reviewed: [17d418565804d01bd8c883a6] Exception Caught: Cannot notify anonymous user: 73.33.196.34

I'm posting this here and in the ATT forums in the hopes that someone knows how to get around it. (I've got one idea which I haven't tried yet, but I figured it can't help to raise a flag on this.)

Edit:  Per Geth, I've posted a request for Miraheze staff to look into this, as he thinks it's a DB issue.    My idea failed to get me the results I wanted anyway.

Oh, and I tried to get the input button markup to work, but it's not marked up as nowiki or anything -- it's just not being interpreted. 

We need InputBox reinstalled.

[Bob Schroeck]

Ah. For some reason I thought that was a primitive and something else was the issue. I really should learn more about the underpinnings of Mediawiki.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.