08-10-2012, 03:38 PM
(This post was last modified: 04-14-2022, 10:29 AM by Bob Schroeck.)
Thank you very much for your kind response, everyone.
Of course, Tropes Tales should be monitored but, well managed, can be a factor of highly interactivity and fun for the community.
If I may, I'd give a couple of little suggestions for your project.
a) I guess it's a little late, but I'm worried about the name chosen for the project. Let me explain. My greatest wish is that the project would succeed and attract many visitors. For this, the site should be as easily accessible as possible. If you enter "TVTropes" in the google search engine, for example, that's eight keystrokes. "Allthetropes" has twelve keystrokes. That is a whole 50% more of keystrokes, and I think it may be too much for a new visitor.
Well, maybe I am a little too worried, as this is a very minor thing, but I think that "Alltropes" or, even better, "Thetropes" are more appropriate names. Each has nine keystrokes and are therefore more easily typed on a keyboard.
b) Humans are visual creatures. A wall of text with no image does not look good, no matter how interesting or well written, so the images in the headers should not be forgotten. I understand that is a lot of work but it is important to create a visually attractive space to attract visitors.
Well, that's all for now. Anyway, I suppose that when the project becomes operational, will be gradually improved.
Again, good luck!
I guess I missed the Fetish Fuel problems - never paid much attention to that section until it got portion off into its own branch wiki. Can anyone give me a picture of the crazy there, in a nutshell?
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"thetropes" is a bit too close to the name our dubious competition picked, I think.
-Morgan.
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nylor: It started getting really kind of red-light-district, with stuff verging on "my kink is filthier than yours" in places.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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@Ferfer
a) Oh man, eight characters versus twelve? I think you might be underestimating the our users just a bit. The entry point for most people is either Google search for a work's name or another link, so I doubt we have to worry about URL length that much. Google even has autocomplete these days.
b) Don't worry, all of the image content will be imported as well. We won't have the same size restrictions on images, so new images can be much larger (with an option to have a smaller thumbnail displayed and the full-size when you click). I haven't given a whole lot of thought to things like a logo yet -- I want a working UI before we try to make it pretty. If anyone has a logo idea, I'd love to hear/see it.
I only started exploring the Fetish Fuel pages around the end of the end of their lifespan on TVT. My general reaction was "what the hell is this?" I really didn't need to know which two of The Doctors make the hottest pairing according to ThisTroper. Adultfanfiction.net exists for a reason; use it instead.
Alright, I'm off to see how difficult importing Troper Tales will be.
edit: Hey, that was surprisingly easy. Only an hour of work coding, and they're included in the archive. Noticed that I have no good way of fulfilling the Attribution clause of CC-BY-SA, but given that the folks at TVT created that zip file, I'm not worried about anything from them.
-- ∇×V
@vorticity
Surely you're right. It's just that sometimes I worry about little things. Thanks for your answer.
I'm happy for the good news. It seems that the project is going very well.
@Bob Schroeck
I'm afraid I do not know much about the "Fetish Fuel" page. It was a section that did not interest me too much. I did not know it had become something so extreme.
By the way, add another vote for the term "Franchise".
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Another vote for it for what? Like I said before, it's already being used for something.
-Morgan.
I just meant that, in my opinion, "Franchise" is a less confusing term that "Series".
But anyway, if it is being used, I suppose other terms can work just as well.
Anything new to report, gang? 
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Uh... ask me again tomorrow. Been busy on other stuff, and JabberWokky (the wiki programmer) went to GenCon over the weekend (lucky guy). Though I should have something to tell you soon.
-- ∇×V
Ah, that lucky stiff. I do Origins every year, but I've never been able to get to GenCon yet..
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I just came to a striking realization.
We've all praised Nanoha for being innovative and cool for taking mecha tropes and applying them to a magical girl show.
But it isn't all that new.
It's an inversion of Macross 7. Yes. Macross 7, I have realized, applies Magical Girl tropes to a Mecha show.
Basara is clearly The Chosen One.
Once they get the Sound Booster harneses we go straight to Beam of Love and Everything's Better With Sparkles.
Monster of the Week: The various Protodeviln
Heel-Face Turn caused by The Power of Love: Gigil and Sivil
Fairy Companion: Guvava
Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Gamlin, obviously
Magic Wand: Basara and Mylene's guitar-controlled Valkyries
Non-Human Sidekick: Veffidas. She's a Zentraedi.
Power Gives You Wings: They fly Valkyries
Sealed Evil in a Can: Protodeviln
Transformation Sequence: Launch bits of the Sound Boosters and their linkup with Sound Force planes
Useless Boyfriend: Lt. Docker
Need I continue?
--
Sucrose Octanitrate.
Proof positive that with sufficient motivation, you can make anything explode.
Good to know that the project is progressing, vorticity.
I also look forward to any news you can anticipate.
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So far as my part in the programming, it's essentially done: Everything is ready in the import format, and properly tagged with the correct license. Except for the inevitable debugging once we do the import, I assume everything will be working fine on that. The final markup is sort of a mixture of the TVT style and Click's own style, where most of the macros ( like [[strike] ) keep their old formatting from TVT. However, anything with an ending macro (like [[/folder]) has been converted to Click's block style macros, like so:
//// folder Anime and Manga
* ''NGE''
* ''Utena''
...
\\
This is similar to the table syntax, and blocks do nest. I have a full documentation ready, with another page for people who are coming over from TVT. But theoretically this should all be optional, since there will be a graphical user interface as well.
So far as the software itself, I hear that we have working code, a theme, and content ready to be imported, so now they just need to combined. Evan's business partner has been after him to finish up the wiki software, so they can use it to make websites for their clients. We're still higher priority because we're a test community, and because wikis get most of their reputation by being non-commercial and unbiased communities. But Evan has been dealing with other random stuff, like getting skin cancer burned off, or having his family's only car decide to stop working. It's not the kind of stuff you can plan around.
I am well aware that we're behind schedule, and the content is something like 2.5 months out-of-date. And I'm at the point where I can't do much to help either. So I'll just have to ask you to have faith that we'll finish up soon.
-- ∇×V
I had no idea of the difficulties of Evan. Of course, with all that stuff the delay is more than justified. I hope everything is going well for him.
Sorry if my previous post maybe got the feeling that I was pushing someone, I assure you that It was not my intention at all. I have faith in your work, and I'm sure that the end result will be great.
I do not think that a little out-of-date is too important. It is certainly something that can be corrected with time.
At this point, and seeing the information you has provided, all I can say is "good job!"
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I don't have much of an update for you, but I just want to say that I haven't abandoned the project. The software delivery date might be turning into Duke Nukem Forever, but I keep getting the timeframe of "it's a couple of days away". But I'll be ready when the we finally get a wiki instance running.
-- ∇×V
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Maybe other folks could help with something. If you have a written project plan, you could post it and let us know what's at 100% complete, what's at 0% untouched, and what's in the middle and holding up everything else and really needing some help...
--
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
I'll be ready and waiting when it's available.
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Well, in general, we've both been squashing bugs in the our respective pieces of the wiki software. Evan just took out a bug where the software would soak up 2*(DB size) worth of RAM. I'm going after page translation bugs, finally getting nested brackets to work right via recursive regular expressions.
I am going to be on a trip starting around October 12, for about 3 weeks, and AFK most of that time. Hopefully I'll have something to show you before then.
-- ∇×V
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Excellent! That's great news.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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Well, it is the 12th, so I thought I'd check in. Progress has been made, but it's not enough to actually show. My big project has been in making sure the page names look good, because my dataset doesn't have any info on the custom titles. A lot of that is just looking through for works I know -- adding the é to Pokémon, colon-izing everything White Wolf ever made, etc. Ptitles have been virtually eliminated.
On the back end though, punctuation and spacing won't be too important in links, because the software will correct it for you. A link to ["Anime / Kampfer"] will work just as well as ["Anime/Kämpfer"], or even something like ["anime/kAmpFer!"]. This seems to be the best balance of usability and flexibility to me -- and we can now have pages starting with numbers and punctuation.
Sorry this is taking a long time, but I'd much rather do it right than have people showing up at a broken site. Evan will still be working on it while I'm off to Oklahoma to visit my 96-year-old grandmother (and have her beat me in Pinochle), with a little camping side trip in Arkansas. I'll be mostly AFK for that time, but I might be able to put in a bit of work -- but more likely I'll be outlining my not-yet-published fanfic in my free time. When I get back, I'll be done with the data, and working on the wiki code itself, mostly on any custom code we'll need, like [[folder]. And maybe even make a front page that isn't boring!
-- ∇×V
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Again, thanks for the update, Vorticity. I'm sure we'd all rather wait for everything to be clean and working right than rush it.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
Checking back in - hoping everyone's come through the nasty weather safe and sound, looking forward to hearing more about the project when there's more to hear.
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Hi everyone,
I just got back from vacation, and I'm still de-vacating. Apparently, while I was gone, Leia became a Disney Princess and Manhattan sunk beneath the waves. I'm starting to wonder if the Mayans were right. I'll do much more of a status update when I've settled in; I just wanted to post a notice that I'm not dead yet.
( /me vaguely starts wondering if I'll need to rename Darth Wiki now that Darth Mickey is in charge of the trademarks)
-- ∇×V
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