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I'll again recast my vote for deletion. Some people apparently couldn't keep certain things to themselves like they should've, and the rest of the Troper community had to suffer the consequences. Blegh.
In other news, http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?di ... =837#20901I just announced that I'm leaving TVT[/url]. My message wasn't much--just some stuff about how I've participated on TVT for almost sixyears (yes, even I am surprised at how much time has flown by!) and how, due to issues related to the Second Google Incident and its fallout, I no longer found the atmosphere to be as fun as it used to be. I didn't explicitly mention anything about moving to greener pastures, and from the looks of the current situation it's a good thing that I omitted such a comment.
Of course, I'll still be browsing TVT, at least for awhile, but I'll be doing so as a non-member from now on.
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(Dammit, why isn't Yuku letting me edit? Okay, posting the corrected version here.)
I'll again recast my vote for deletion. Some people apparently couldn't keep certain things to themselves like they should've, and the rest of the Troper community had to suffer the consequences. Blegh.
In other news, I just announced that I'm leaving TVT. My message wasn't much--just some stuff about how I've participated on TVT for almost sixyears (yes, even I am surprised at how much time has flown by!) and how, due to issues related to the Second Google Incident and its fallout, I no longer found the atmosphere to be as fun as it used to be. I didn't explicitly mention anything about moving to greener pastures, and from the looks of the current situation it's a good thing that I omitted such a comment.
Of course, I'll still be browsing TVT, at least for awhile, but I'll be doing so as a non-member from now on.
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vorticity Wrote:I've gathered what I think are everyone's votes so far.
Quote:Bob: Delete
GethN7: Delete
Tennie: Delete in a fire
Morganni: Fun but off-topic so probably delete.
Nylor: Keep
Vorticity: Keep but heavily redact: http://drunkardswalkforums.yuku.com/rep ... ply-116793
It looks like I'm being outvoted. Let me try a few test edits to see if I can actually clean up Troper Tales pages to my own standards. And if that turns out to be impractical/impossible, I'll go ahead and call the vote for the majority. If my vote matters - I'm barely a kibitzer, after all, and my skillset here is in avoiding confrontations, not adding content - my vote would be to delete. I'll echo Bob's reasoning and add the difficulty in maintaining the silly things.
--
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
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Of course it counts, Rob. We're all fen here.
As for me, I get the feeling that if we wanted to try this, it would be better to start over. I like the idea in theory; people telling more stories is always cool. I'm just unsure as to whether people on the internet can tell the difference between crap they would post on The Facebook and an actual story. Honestly, I'm not sure I can tell the difference. I delete at least one paragraph of pointless details before posting here just about every time.
Seeing as we've been debating it for months, the question is called. Those in favor of deleting all the Troper Tales pages: Bob Shroeck, GethN7, Tennie, Morganni, robkelk Those opposed: Nylor Abstaining: VorticityThe motion is passed.
I'm assigning this to GethN7, since it was his idea to remove them. I recommend just deleting everything on Category:Troper Tales with a bot, unless you know of some better way.
-- ∇×V
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vorticity Wrote:As for me, I get the feeling that if we wanted to try this, it would be better to start over.
I have to agree with this. The old TT is practically a lost cause. Assuming that we do indeed decide to restart from scratch we would do well to educate potential posters on what can and cannot be posted. Those who fail to follow the rules should have their Troper Tales-posting privileges suspended for some length of time, or some other kinds of consequences for rule-breaking. Perhaps have repeat offenders banned from posting to that particular section unless they can appeal; if they demonstrate that they've indeed changed their ways then they are welcome to post Tales again, but otherwise they should be re-banned. Of course, these are just some ideas intended to start a conversation about how to properly handle the rather thorny question of "What do we do with Troper Tales?"
If I could just chime in, as a lurker/lay troper, I'd personally love to see Troper Tales continued in some form, even if that means starting over from scratch, and with restrictions. Although I'm damned if I can offer much in the way of technical suggestions on how to keep them as free of natter/scum as everyone would seem to like.  Aside from maybe restricting TTs by default—at least for some tropes—and/or assigning someone to approve or reject TT posts. Which all sound draconian, too labor-intensive, or technically impractical.
Or, hell, maybe even allowing VOTING on TT entry acceptance—make it like a weekly "game" on the ATT main page, "Does this Troper Tale constitute a valid/interesting instance of this trope in real life?" Kinda like Steam's "Greenlight"—with mod screening/veto of TT entries that are outright troll bait, smutty, poorly written, repeated urban legends, confessions of felonies, etc.
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Well, there *is* a Troper Tales wiki elsewhere. (Well, I think I've seen two actually, but one seemed better from what I could tell.) It's not really thriving, but other than linking to it there's not really much we can do about that.
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@Ranchoth:
Approval for everything sounds too hard. Policing isn't going to happen. Though I can say, if you do a good job of of telling people what to do, for the most part they do it. If you set a speed limit, for the most part people only go a few mph/kph above it.
As I said earlier, the core requirement for Troper Tales has to be a tale. If you're using only one sentence, that can't possibly cut it. But for the sake of argument, we'll go with Papa Hemingway's shortest short story: "For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn." There are still 3 acts in that -- introduction, rising action, climax/resolution.
The key questions we'd ask the user are: Does your tale have a plot? Does it build to a dramatic climax or comedic punchline? If the editor can answer yes to that, then it might be a good Troper Tale. The question for us here is: Can we trust editors to answer this about their own posts?
@Morganni: We could just allow liberal linking to the existing Troper Tales wiki; maybe even have an external link in our {{trope}} template?
-- ∇×V
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On a different note, does anyone know about whether any other sites have at least mentioned ATT? I know it's only been a few days, but I'd still like to know and my Google-fu has been weak in this regard.
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I know I haven't gone looking, but on the topic of Google, I can confirm that their spider has hit ATT and is now returning ATT links for some searches.
Edit: Is there anyone here with an account already on Wikiapiary? If so, can you please fill in the description and other missing data on http://wikiapiary.com/wiki/Special:Form ... The_Tropes ? Thanks.
Oh, and we may have a little trademark conflict: http://hello.allthetropes.com/ (which bills itself as a site for "exploring ways to turn your digital videos into analog fun like Flipbooks, Zoetropes, Thaumatropes, Praxinoscopes, Phenakistoscopes and a couple of other nouns we'd like to make up in due time!").
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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I have an account on Wiki Apiary, Bob, will handle that for you.
Not sure what to do about the trademark conflict, noticed that myself.
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We may be covered by the fact that we are about something so different from their stock in trade that there's no likelihood anyone will confuse us with them; that's usually safe territory, IIRC. Plus, I don't actually see any trademark claims being made (no "TM" on anything visible on the site), plus it's basically a one-page site for vaporware. I suspect we'll be okay.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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Good news, guys!
You know that horrible version of Section Hide we have?
Due to Vorticity rewriting huge chunks of the code and yours truly doing a lot of QA testing, we finally came up with something a lot less badly designed and far closer to what the TV Tropes version is like.
Vorticity just sent in a commit to the Orain tech guys, so we don't have it installed yet, but it's in the pipeline.
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Bob Schroeck Wrote:We may be covered by the fact that we are about something so different from their stock in trade that there's no likelihood anyone will confuse us with them; that's usually safe territory, IIRC. Plus, I don't actually see any trademark claims being made (no "TM" on anything visible on the site), plus it's basically a one-page site for vaporware. I suspect we'll be okay. I don't recognize http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/r ... tropes.com]the site owner's name, but it is a single person, not a company. Maybe he'd be willing to sell the domain...?
--
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
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To be fair to $domainsquatter, I haven't actually filed a trademark.
That should happen in the near future. I do own allthetropes.org, but
I've been lacking in round tuits for setting up SSL.
There's been some information circulating in blogs, so just to make it clear for everyone: None of the administrators of All The Tropes have engaged in illegal behavior in any way connected to TV Tropes. We are in no way connected with any denial of service attacks against tvtropes.org nor mediatropes.info. We simply don't have that much time to care about that shitty website. Any further indication that we are involved in attacks on TV Tropes will be considered defamation, and be seeking the advice of our legal counsel.
-- ∇×V
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It would be a good idea to post that somewhere where it could be more easily found, as I don't know if most of those who've written stuff like that have even heard of this forum.
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They have heard of this forum. I just wanted that post as a third-party verification that we deny it, anyway.
Okay, major policy change: You are now prohibited from posting content on All The Tropes that you first posted on TV Tropes. As of today, Fighteer added this to the wiki policy: Fighteer, on Administrivia/WelcomeToTVTropes Wrote:By contributing content to this site, whether text or images, you grant TV Tropes irrevocable ownership of said content, with all rights surrendered ...We are not required to attribute content you contribute to you, nor do you retain ownership of anything you contribute. Anything you contribute may be deleted, modified, or used commercially by us without notification or consent, to the extent permitted by applicable laws. For that reason, we strongly recommend that you do not post material on our site, whether in text or image form, that you wish to receive commercial benefit from in the future. As such, posting content you wrote on TV Tropes first would violate TV Tropes' copyright.
However, if you post on All The Tropes first, you can then continue to post on TV Tropes. Because the Creative Commons licenses can't be revoked by the owner -- only the licensee breaking the terms terminates the license -- TV Tropes will still own the content you wrote, but they will be bound by the preexisting CC-BY-SA 3.0 license. You also may wish to consider releasing the content under a more permissive license, such as CC-By 3.0 or CC-Zero 1.0, beforehand, where TVT's ownership of the content you submit will not prohibit you from profiting on your own writing.
Hope that was helpful!
-- ∇×V
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...
Wow.
Okay, just checking, how exactly is that "not required to attribute" part supposed to be compatible with the use of an "attribution" CC license? It seems to me like that gets complicated anyway with wikis, but at least there's some kind of effort there.
-Morgan.
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It's compatible if they own the content. If they own the content, they can do as they wish with it -- only licensees are bound by the attribution requirements of creative commons licenses. (IANAL -- please consult an attorney if you need real advice in these matters.)
Oh, one note of positive news. If any of our graphic artist folk can come up with something around 240px square, a friend of mine has offered to donate some free online advertising.
-- ∇×V
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It's the claim that they own the content that strikes me as dubious. I'm not aware of them having claimed that submissions involved granting ownership before. My reading was of the form "I am allowing the wiki to use my content, which I retain ownership of, as long as they abide by the terms of the license" - as in, the wiki is a licensee, and thus bound by the attribution requirements.
-Morgan.
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In my opinion, they are bound by the license that they set for earlier contributions -- they would be require to attribute those. This would only apply to contributions dated today or later.
However, there are a couple of wrinkles here: It's not on any page that users are required to see, so many users may not know that they are transferring ownership by editing. It's hard to argue that you agreed to a contract that you never actually saw.
The second issue is that TVT argues that this rule has always applied -- that the transfer of ownership was an assumption that you made when you clicked save page. I tend to agree with a stance more similar to that of the EFF -- that in the absence of a license, you only transfer a bare right to distribute, and to make incidental copies in the process of distribution. Since the license is on every page, the assumed license most likely shifts that which appears on the wiki page -- CC-BY-NC-SA (previously CC-BY-SA). Again -- not a lawyer here, just an experienced policy analyst.
In any case, I'm going to err on the side of caution with this one. There's no need to antagonize TV Tropes any more than we have to by our mere existance. After all, they seem to be perfectly capable of antagonizing their own user base.
-- ∇×V
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It'd probably be a good idea to put a specific note to this effect on the edit page.
Still, damn.
-Morgan.
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vorticity Wrote:However, there are a couple of wrinkles here: It's not on any page that users are required to see, so many users may not know that they are transferring ownership by editing. It's hard to argue that you agreed to a contract that you never actually saw. Oh, definitely - any competent or even semi-competent lawyer would make the case that contributors hadn't actually agreed to that statement, and thus it is not a binding contract. Especially since the statement did not exist when the vast majority of accounts were set up on that website.
Decent lawyers could make some other arguments as well, but that's the one that's most likely to stand up in court.
--
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
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vorticity Wrote:After all, they seem to be perfectly capable of antagonizing their own user base.
Which is something that is usually not conducive to long-term existence.
There;s a part of me that wishes that, before it's too late, the TVT administration has something of a collective "My God, What Have We Done?"-type moment and at least attempt to reverse the damage that's been done, so that TVT can survive. It's a long shot, I know, but yet I can't help but hold on hope...
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Well, the good news is that in MediaWiki, that information will always be present in some form on the edit page, so we have no need to worry about any legal hassles in that regard. In fact, part of the setup to MediaWiki includes an explicit step to set up the copyright license.
In other good news, my category bot is almost done, should be finished in another day or two in fact. Our WikiEditor interface does not load properly and the CharInsert extension has some issues, but that should be remedied soon when the Orain staff upgrade the MediaWiki core.
Once the category bot finishes, I can also start mass adding templates and custom CSS styling to certain pages that need them, and we can finally decide what material we may want to keep or throw away, as some pages may be throwaway (in the vein of Troper Tales).
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