All The Tropes Wiki Project

[GethN7]

Bob SchroeckThanks for the responses. I probably won't get a chance to do much with them until I get back from Philcon, but it's good to know. However, I think you misunderstood me on one point:

As for the link on the Wayback Machine, the Wayback Machine may not have scraped any links to the page in question from the old webhost or it may have had a robots.txt restriction on page scraping. I'm guessing that it may not have been able to scrape a working link at the time or it got back a corrupted result based on the error I got when I tried to access the link.

I have the link -- it's the one I included. It works, it has a page on the Archive. But Orain rejects it because "sytes.net" is part of the URL. After I get through the spam filter, this is what appears when I try to save:

* The text you wanted to save was blocked by the spam filter.
This is probably caused by a link to a blacklisted external site.
* The following text is what triggered our spam filter: sytes.net

Since sytes has apparently not existed for years, why is it still being filtered? And why when it's not the domain the URL goes to, but in a parameter?

Oh, my mistake, thanks for the clarification.

I'll ask about that for you.

Update: I informed the Orain staff about the captcha issue and the spam filter. The former will be changed, and the latter is a bug they are looking into.

[Labster]

Now that the import is done, I finally got to upgrade to Mac OS 10.9 (Sea Lion, I think).  Surprisingly little breakage, since I was upgrading from 10.6 (Endangered Snow Kitten); I only have a few bugs with linking to image libraries.

*Morgan screams in terror*

Fine, you made your point.  It may be small-wiki mentality on my part -- with only ~200 active users, talk pages work well.  But I can see things getting out of hand without forums with our (hopefully) larger site.  We ought to come up with something for "what's that show?" and YKTTW at the very least.
I think that you and Bob are somewhat apart on the issue of forums, and I'm trying to figure out an approach that will make everyone happy.
This is also a good place to note that nothing I say is really Word of God.  I have a long history of no one liking my ideas and voting them down, so I see no reason to change that approach now that I have absolute power on the wiki.  I briefly considered getting better ideas, but I'd just have to murder my darlings eventually.
That last paragraph is brought you you by the Goddess Eris and the number 5.
-- ∇×V

[NifT]

Bob Schroeck wrote:

---

Have you edited a page on the wiki that has external links yet?  I've done at least a dozen in the last couple days.  You would think that the parser would figure out if the URLs have changed or not before demanding you prove you are a human being by picking cats from a lineup.

You mean that thing that pops up and I go "KITTY!", and promptly forget whatever I was doing?

[GethN7]

Okay folks, long post here: but I wanted to give you guys some tech updates on ATT:

First, you may notice a lot of our images and image descriptions are gone. Thanks to some database timestamp snafu, a lot of them got hosed, but that should be remedied soon.

That aside, some technical improvements have been made:

* Our search engine is still kinda slow (we have a huge database), but it's somewhat less crippled than before now that the TitleKey extension was installed across Orain. Basically, before, you had to type in the exact spelling of a wiki link to go to that page or it would take forever to boot you to the search results. Now, it doesn't matter if you type in "hero tropes" or "Hero Tropes", it will send you to the correct page either way. Search speed has also improved somewhat as a result (about as good as TV Tropes by default, slightly slower than on Wikia by my estimation).

* I have installed some gadgets (code you can turn on and off in your user preferences) to make editing much less retarded.

** An autocomplete links/markup gadget which will automatically suggest wiki links, categories, and templates as you type in a pop up window (a feature Wikia had that I liked).

** An "edit tools" gadget that will place a box below the edit window with "buttons" you can click that will place common markup and templates. For now, it has stock MediaWiki defaults from MW.org, but I will be customizing it to have ATT specific sections for the most common markup and templates.

* A solution has finally been found to show YMMV links, but since I cannot replicate the behavior of the "turn bullet point red on work pages with YMMV items" TV Tropes schema exactly, I have opted to go with a highlighter function that will highlight all links to a YMMV trope with either light purple or red background color around the link, or at least that's the colors I'm thinking of using. If anyone has better ideas, feel free to share.

Due to the fact it can screw with the spoiler code, I was going to make this a togglable gadget as well.

* I have thrown up a mockup of the forums I proposed awhile back. It currently leads to nothing and has no content, but I figured everyone might want a visual image of what I was intending should we have a forum. It's not final and subject to change.

The link to proposed forum is below:

http://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki/Forum:ATT_Forums

[Bob Schroeck]

Wow. Thanks for all the work, Geth! I'll have to check this all out first chance I get. I did look at the forums link, and it's kind of hard to get an idea of what it'll look like "in use", but I don't see anything that bugs me.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[Another Troper]

Just some nitpick: The forum is at http://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki/For ... The_Tropes
Who's gonna make the first post?

[Dartz]

Shlipped a little something into the Sandbox
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

[GethN7]

Another TroperJust some nitpick: The forum is at http://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki/For ... The_Tropes
Who's gonna make the first post?

I just added a warning that the forum option is still in development, so for now, no one should be using this feature. (I have protected the page as well for the time being)

I had originally planned to alter a premade forum template with some custom CSS from another wiki, but since that isn't working for some reason, I've have to add custom styling to the forum layout in HTML.

The feature is still very much a WIP, but suggestions are welcome.

Note: Feel free to make test edit on the Forum Sandbox page all you like, that's what's it's there for, but be aware that page can be edited, changed, blanked, etc by anyone. The rest of the sub forums should be unedited for the time being.

In other news, while we wait for the image snafu to be cleared up, I have another tech update:

All categories (or indexes as they were called on TVT) are currently red on ATT, which means they don't exist, or, more properly, their description pages have no content.

This is something of a problem since due to "not existing", the categories will not show up in searches or via the auto complete or HotCat gadgets (which let people fill the blanks on edit pages automatically), which means inserting categories would be a cast iron pain at present.

Thankfully, I am working on a solution.

I have a localhost clone on my PC with all the content that was originally ported to the live site, and courtesy of a bot, I am filling in all the categories with the following text:

{{main|{{PAGENAME}}}}
[[Category:Index Index]

The first line will provide a redirect to main namespace page for the category

Example - {{main|Hero Tropes}} will provide a link to main "Hero Tropes" page.

The second line will add all categories to a master category, or "Index Index", as it was called on TV Tropes.

I have already prepared preloaded page templates for creating new categories, so in the event new categories need be created, it will be a very simple process.

In fact, I already have an option for that on our ATT Page Creator page.

Anyway, once my bot finishes filling in all the categories (we have about 60,000+ categories, so this could take awhile), I will be importing an XML file with everything we need to Orain so all those red links should turn blue and thus be useful for our purposes.

[Ranchoth]

A few logo-variants, from me. I've been fiddling around with a "film strip" look to the background shape—if that's too specific a reference to a medium in particular, perhaps smaller media glyphs could be interspersed around it (e.g. a musical note, quill, etc.)—or even something simple as the iconic "lampshade" added to the top (Assuming the latter wouldn't cause too much user "brand confusion" and/or conniptions among certain other web site operators.   )

[GethN7]

Another tech update:

The forums took a little work and some elbow grease, but I've finally gotten most of the bugs worked out, so we should have a working on wiki forum soon.

They won't be as fleshed out as the TVT version, partially because we want the wiki to be the main focus, not the forums, but most of the essentials should be in place that you'd expect on most forums.

Also, there is a way to have the "Ask The Tropers" feature like they have on TVT, but I was wondering if anyone thinks its a good idea or if the feature would be wanted in the first place.

@Ranchoth.skindex - All of those logos would work with some minor contrast enhancements. However, I would avoid the lampshade for two reasons: One, we probably want to distinguish ourselves from TVT in that regard, and second, both TV Tropes and the Tropes Mirror Wiki have a lampshade logo, the former for obvious reasons, the latter as a blatant reference to how the site originally created to mirror TV Tropes content, and ATT should probably have a logo that alludes to its all inclusive nature anyway. At least, that's my two cents on the topic.

[Dartz]

This feature worked, at least

Very low priority page. But one worth using, I guess.
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

[Labster]

I'm going to pronounce the wiki usable right now, even if there are some bugs to work out. Content is up, images are up, and the most important policies are up like copyrights and ToS. I think I need to get a new logo up, but we're okay for now.

So, I guess, tell your friends. Anyone have some ideas on how we could promote this project?
-- ∇×V

[robkelk]

I've already linked to it where I previously would have linked to TVT, over on another forum. If we all do that, we'll start getting awareness of it up without being blatant/obvious/in-people's-faces about it.

Of course, if the particular forum prefers being blatant, obvious, or in people's faces, advertise it for all it's worth (within the bounds of each particular ToS)...

"ATT - like TVT before they started deleting pages"
--
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

[GethN7]

@rob kelk - good plan.

Anyway, just want to let everyone know our site forums are operational now.

[Tennie]

I would like to point something out when it comes to advertising ATT's existence: one thing that I would recommend would be to avoid mentioning ATT on those forums or sections of forums that have had a history of bashing TVT for problems real and/or perceived, especially if said bashing started well before the Second Google Incident.  It wouldn't do for our project to gain an unwanted reputation while it's still getting on its feet now, am I right?  Other than that, do whatever you feel is necessary to advertise ATT's existence.  Indeed, I personally plan to occasionally edit some Wikia pages in order to change TVT links to the corresponding ATT articles (assuming that ATT has said articles already on it).

[Labster]

Dang, why you gotta shoot down all of my ideas?  Clearly if we get ED, SA, /., 4chan, and BTL on board with us, that's gotta be good.  Right?  Right?
I wonder if there's something to be gained in contacting creators who often link back to TVT.  That's probably a lot of work, but these things spread through osmosis.
Anyway this post was supposed to be about me mentioning a wiki page.  Fast Eddie complained that there was no possible value in copying TVT material to another wiki, so I felt like a counter-argument was necessary.  Naturally, I can't reply to him directly, because I've been permabanned -- and the thread in question was dropped down the memory hole.  So instead I made this page: Why Fork TV Tropes.
I hope that feels right for most people.
-- ∇×V

[Bob Schroeck]

I'm glad to see we're finally ready for primetime.

One minor glitch, I think: sometimes I get weird search results. For instance, search for all pages with "fenspace" on them. You'll get multiple instances of the same match.
Edit:  Just read the "Why Fork" page.  Bravo.  Well done. 
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[Tennie]

vorticityDang, why you gotta shoot down all of my ideas?

Well, somebody has to be a voice of reason, and if that person is me, then so be it!

Oh, and by the way, I read the "Why Fork" page, and I happened to notice a typo:

While we're a lot less informal than a scientific paper

(Bolded for emphasis.)

The bolded part should be rewritten to be something like "more informal" or "less formal".  Other than that, the page itself is quite good.[/quote]

[Tennie]

(Sorry for the double/repeat post, but Yuku won't let me edit my previous post for some reason.  This is my corrected post.)

Dang, why you gotta shoot down all of my ideas?

Well, somebody has to be a voice of reason, and if that person is me, then so be it!

Oh, and by the way, I read the "Why Fork" page, and I happened to notice a typo:

While we're a lot less informal than a scientific paper

(Bolded for emphasis.)

The bolded part should be rewritten to be something like "more informal" or "less formal".  Other than that, the page itself is quite good.

[nylor]

Looking good!

[nylor]

There was an oddity with how Academic Freedom was linked on the Why Fork page, though, so I edited it to be a standard link so it wouldn't break up the flow of reading the sentence.

[Labster]

Thanks for the comments, all.

Also: it's a wiki.  Feel free to edit things you think are a bit wrong.  Even policy pages.  Actually given the amount of work needed there, especially policy pages.  Almost all the existing policy pages use negative phrasing throughout.  On YMMV, I replaced "Just because YOU think an item is subjective doesn't mean it belongs here" with "Ask first on the talk page or forum if you want to add a trope".  There are little things like that everywhere, where the tone of writing is so paternal and patronizing that it's a wonder TVT manages to attract new users.

If you do want to help with them, policies are any page that's in Category:Administrivia, or where the page name begins with "About/" (which is where I originally planned the new Administrivia to reside).  Current wiki policy pages should be tagged with [[Category:Wiki Policy], and most likely will end up living in the "All The Tropes:" namespace.

Also, the Main Page has been redesigned.  It now has color.  The TVT main page has color too, but it's all from advertising.  I offer a screenshot of the new page, because I think people might appreciate a record of this achievement.  Look over in the Popular Articles box.  Yeah.



* Turn-On Tropes is there because it was literally the last file in the import, and I kept refreshing to see if we were finished.  It's not most popular because we're pervs and all.

Main Page is protected, so if anyone wants to edit, let me know.

Morganni's logo is set to become the main logo for now, it just hasn't made it up yet.  I only made that determination based on "Which logo looks more finished".  We'll probably end up using Ranchoth's logo and Morganni's logo in the end.

Lessee here, what's left ... the remaining syntax problems.  Some images aren't displaying, when combined with {{quote box}} where they shouldn't have been.  I know about this, and we need to automatically fix it.  I have a page on the Special Efforts forum that lists pages where the titles came out all wrong, and should be fixed globally with a bot.  Reply there if you see any more.  I don't know much about the search issues, other than there's orain-wide problems.  It's a wiki software issue, so take that up with my comrade.

And wow, we're getting awfully close to the 15 page mark here.  Hopefully, we'll be moving out on our own forum soon, so we don't have to eat up the pageviews here.  But I've been very grateful that we've been hosted here.  Let me know if there's something I can give you in return.  GethN7 tried to put a link to these forums on the front page, but I'm afraid that would be a little too much publicity.  But let me know if there's any publicity you do want, or anything we can offer around here.

-- ∇×V

[Bob Schroeck]

Hopefully, we'll be moving out on our own forum soon, so we don't have to eat up the pageviews here.

I was going to offer ATT its own subforum here, but now that the wiki has a forum of its own...

And Brent? Thank you for the amazing effort you've put in on this.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[Jorlem]

The site appears to be missing dedicated category pages, as most of the category links at the bottom of the pages are red. I noticed this while looking for an easy way to navigate around fanfic recs.  Also, Fanfic Recs and Fan Fiction Recommendations are separate categories, for some odd reason. I've added a link to the main Fan Fic Recommendation page to both. Incidentally, the main Fan Fic Recommendation page has some broken 'hide' code, that I don't know how to fix.  (Edit: Broken in that, while it hides or unhides the text block it controls, it also sends me to the top of the page, which I don't think is intended.  Edit 2: Also, when I use the 'hide all' button, I can't unhide specific categories, as the 'hide/show' buttons are also hidden.)
-----
Stand between the Silver Crystal and the Golden Sea.
"Youngsters these days just have no appreciation for the magnificence of the legendary cucumber."  --Krityan Elder, Tales of Vesperia.

[GethN7]

JorlemThe site appears to be missing dedicated category pages, as most of the category links at the bottom of the pages are red. I noticed this while looking for an easy way to navigate around fanfic recs.  Also, Fanfic Recs and Fan Fiction Recommendations are separate categories, for some odd reason. I've added a link to the main Fan Fic Recommendation page to both. Incidentally, the main Fan Fic Recommendation page has some broken 'hide' code, that I don't know how to fix.  (Edit: Broken in that, while it hides or unhides the text block it controls, it also sends me to the top of the page, which I don't think is intended.  Edit 2: Also, when I use the 'hide all' button, I can't unhide specific categories, as the 'hide/show' buttons are also hidden.)

Jorlem, I'm currently working on a solution to fill in all the categories in one go, so please don't edit any of the categories. I'm aware of the problem, and I'm almost done cobbling together a solution for it. Should be done in a day or so.

As for "SectionHide" code, I'm afraid our show/hide is imperfectly implemented. Part of that is due to how the SectionHide extension was written, and part of that is because of how sections are controlled in MW (there is no easy way to emulate how it was done on TVT at present)