All The Tropes Wiki Project, Part X

[Bob Schroeck]

Everyone's favorite three-digit number is once again taking the place of all content on Miraheze... That's right, it's the triumphant return of the spectacular 503 on its fifth world tour!





Sorry, feeling a little silly despite being annoyed.

ETA: It's back. Took about 15-20 minutes.

[Bob Schroeck]

The last couple times (twice in the last two-three weeks) I've tried to go to a user's (redlinked) talk page, I've gotten an error like this:

[ce694ddfd67ff26197072911] 2017-11-09 13:52:29: Fatal exception of type MWContentSerializationException

Does anyone have a clue why?

[robkelk]

Bob, that looks like the error I mentioned a few months ago. Did we ever fix that?

Changing topics... YKTTW somebody uses a word incorrectly? "You Keep Using That Word" is a list of real-world terms often used incorrectly, not the trope. (I'm asking because today's Darths and Droids includes the phrase "neutral Partisans")

[SelfCloak]

Changing topics... YKTTW somebody uses a word incorrectly? "You Keep Using That Word" is a list of real-world terms often used incorrectly, not the trope. (I'm asking because today's Darths and Droids includes the phrase "neutral Partisans")

I don't know when it comes to a general trope. I searched for a while, nothing came up.

The word usage in the comic, in this case, looks like a low-key paradox, but Paradox is not a trope that exists on ATT.

[Bob Schroeck]

Bob, that looks like the error I mentioned a few months ago. Did we ever fix that?

Apparently not...

[robkelk]

Well, the Commission is a thing. Please go vote for who you want to see in the two community positions.

• Questions to candidates
  
• Voting - note that votes are not anonymous.
  

As yet, I haven't seen any votes against, just votes for. I'm not sure whether "votes against" is something that should be happening here, to be honest.

[Bob Schroeck]

To be honest, I may abstain from voting proper. My concerns and activity are very parochial, limited to ATT, and consequently I don't really know any of the candidates other than Geth. And I don't think I can make a wise choice based on several short paragraphs of position statement. (A reason I don't usually vote in IEEE and ACM elections, either, despite being a member of both for 25 or so years now.) And I'm still debating with myself whether, setting aside my personal experiences with him, I can in good conscience vote for Geth "by default" as it were.

[Bob Schroeck]

Can other admins please weigh on on this thread in the forums, please?  Am I wrong to delete the pages for works that no longer exist?  It seems to me self-evident that a work that cannot be read/watched/experienced cannot be adequately analyzed, nor can an article about it be maintained, updated -- or corrected where necessary.  And given that we also act as much as a source of inspiration and recommendation as a point of analysis and discussion, we also do a disservice by providing links to works that aren't there at the other end of the connection.

But if I'm alone in this belief, I will yield to the vote of the majority.

Thanks.

[robkelk]

Thread read and replied to.

I think you might be in the minority on this one, Bob...

[Morganite]

I think there's a difference between not making new pages for a vanished work and getting rid of ones you've already got. Maybe locking would make sense, but I don't think they should be deleted. Not every purpose is frustrated by a missing source. And sometimes things resurface.

A message box at the top saying that the work is currently unavailable would probably be a good idea, particularly if they're going to be locked.

-Morgan.

[Bob Schroeck]

Okay, I think I see which way the wind is blowing. I'll work up a banner template for works that are missing in action and use it instead.

[LulzKiller]

Not so fast, I think this is more a grey area and depends on the status of the work so to speak.

[robkelk]

...
Now for a tricky question: Is there any way to pass the contents of an InputBox (or some other text-entry method) to a DPL list?

We already have DynamicPageList3 installed. If we can use it to let people search for pages with more than one category, we could open up the range of services we offer. ("Want a list of horror anime made in the 1990s? Want a list of rom-coms that aired on Fox? Want to know which books are banned on TV Tropes? We can make those lists for you!")

First Rob, thanks, that's a good idea you had.
...

I've had a request to implement this on the freebie wiki: "I need to do some research on how to pass variables into a line of code to make a page of the resulting list. Like what we have when we go to the search button up at the top of the page. With this type of feature the website will become a very powerful tool in finding that perfect freebie."

Does anyone have any ideas on how to actually make it happen?

[Bob Schroeck]

Well.  After six or so months -- and last-minute quibbling -- I have completed working my way one page at a time through the entirety of the Works category.  My comments and throughts at this time:

1. We had many many creators misassigned as works.
   
2. We had a lot of tropes misassigned as works, too.
   
3. We really need to set up a separate top-level category for websites.  They are rarely single works, any more than a library or an art gallery is.  For the nonce, I've turned a lot of what I found into Useful Notes.
   
4. I want to find the troper back at TVT who thought it was a good idea to dump about seventy-zillion one-paragraph, no-trope descriptions of 1980s/90s video games into the wiki.  And I want to beat him soundly.
   

Next I think I'll go through Tropes.

[Bob Schroeck]

Please take the time to closely check any edits by new user "Jason taylor".  He's turning out to be prone to spelling, punctuation and grammar errors, and has an unfortunate tendency toward run-on sentences. He also doesn't seem to use any markup other than that for links.

[robkelk]

Please take the time to closely check any edits by new user "Jason taylor".  He's turning out to be prone to spelling, punctuation and grammar errors, and has an unfortunate tendency toward run-on sentences.  He also doesn't seem to use any markup other than that for links.

I just rolled back his most recent edit to "Brits With Battleships", for being (a) factually incorrect and (b) irrelevant to the example that he appended it to. So that's something else to watch for.

[Bob Schroeck]

Well. That's a strike against him.

[LulzKiller]

It seems like MH are invoking clause 8 as a permanent solution to the LP problem.

[Bob Schroeck]

Okay, how the hell do we delete content on a User: page?  We just had a spammer sweep in.  I've banned him and deleted the page he created, but there is still a URL on his user page that just won't go away no matter what I do.

EDIT: Where the hell is this data stored? Even Mass Edit can't find it. And shouldn't admins have access to delete stuff like this?

[Labster]

It seems like MH are invoking clause 8 as a permanent solution to the LP problem.

Given Amanda's alternate personalities, I've thought of her as a Section 8 for years.

[LulzKiller]

Okay, how the hell do we delete content on a User: page?  We just had a spammer sweep in.  I've banned him and deleted the page he created, but there is still a URL on his user page that just won't go away no matter what I do.

EDIT:  Where the hell is this data stored?  Even Mass Edit can't find it.  And shouldn't admins have access to delete stuff like this?

I remember Geth some time ago finding some kind of workaround I think, you'll have to ask him.

[Bob Schroeck]

You know, I like this user space extension, but honestly, this one thing is enough for me to move that we nuke it.

Edit:  Thanks for the pointer about the message from Geth, Rob.  Found it, and found the place to go to nuke this crap:  here.

I would still like to be able to delete the page outright, though.

[GethN7]

You know, I like this user space extension, but honestly, this one thing is enough for me to move that we nuke it.

Edit:  Thanks for the pointer about the message from Geth, Rob.  Found it, and found the place to go to nuke this crap:  here.

I would still like to be able to delete the page outright, though.

I just scrubbed any remnants, don't worry.

But as for deleting the page completely, impossible, for technical reasons. Even a deleted normal page will leave a record it was deleted in the database you will see on the human side for proper bookkeeping.

SocialProfile creates a separate record for the SP page linked to the regular page to prevent data corruption, so while it will never truly disappear, it's content can be erased so a spammer can never derive benefit from it.

[Bob Schroeck]

I think we've just had a return of a strange little vandal.  Back in February of this year, an anonymous user wandered in and replaced the Architecture section of the 'Pataphysics page with a bit of nonsense that looked like it could have been the first sentence of a larger case of comment spam.  It was of course reverted and the IP banned.

And just today, nine months later, another anonymous user wandered by and replaced the Architecture section of the 'Pataphysics page with a different bit of nonsense that looked like it could have been the first sentence of a larger case of comment spam.  Revert and ban, of course, but, just... why?  What purpose does it serve?

[LulzKiller]

I think we've just had a return of a strange little vandal.  Back in February of this year, an anonymous user wandered in and replaced the Architecture section of the 'Pataphysics page with a bit of nonsense that looked like it could have been the first sentence of a larger case of comment spam.  It was of course reverted and the IP banned.

And just today, nine months later, another anonymous user wandered by and replaced the Architecture section of the 'Pataphysics page with a different bit of nonsense that looked like it could have been the first sentence of a larger case of comment spam.  Revert and ban, of course, but, just... why?  What purpose does it serve?

Probably a bot poorly written to the point it edits sites from ' onwards, so that it is easily predictable.

I don't see it being anything more interesting than that.