All The Tropes Wiki Project, Part II

[Bob Schroeck]

Okay, interesting issue: The page image on http://allthetropes.orain.org/w/index. ... nti-Christ]Anti-Anti-Christ was used by TVT with the permission of the artist, according to comments inside the page -- permission which does not automatically devolve down onto us. I've commented out the image for now, but we need to either contact the artist and negotiate permission for us, or find a different image.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[GethN7]

Okay, something I wanted discuss that's important:

I and Vorticity have been brainstorming ways to clean up our tons and tons of redirected pages so we don't have so many redirects to worry about, but even though I have figured out how to make a list of the currently 35,000+ redirects we have, converted them for my bot program, and could run it and fix them all in one shot, I'm afraid it will cause a problem.

Specifically, due to the scale of the job, it will take several days, and during that time, I would have to ask for a freeze on page renames/removes. The bot would be fixing pages on a wiki wide scale, so any further page renames/moves during the process would complicate matters and make the process take longer.

We are not doing this yet, but we would like to do this to clean up a lot of links, so I just wanted to let anyone who need to know what we require to pull this off.

[Bob Schroeck]

That's fantastic -- I was about to ask if there would be a way to automate that. Just say the word and I'll take a vacation.

On an earlier topic, I found another image "used with permission of artist", on Unstoppable Rage.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[GethN7]

Okay. Vorticity or I will give you a heads up on when we plan to do that.

In the meantime, in the interest of playing it safe, here's my take on images TVT has permission for but we don't.

Comment it out unless/until you have an image you can replace it with, and in that case, delete the original image and use the replacement.

[Bob Schroeck]

Comment it out unless/until you have an image you can replace it with, and in that case, delete the original image and use the replacement.

Been doing the first part already, haven't gone searching for replacements yet.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[Labster]

@Bob: Clippy is clearly a parody, and not therefore not infringing (though deleting it wouldn't be a great loss).

I tend to feel that if you're proposing to change something that people
are already comfortable with, there should be a compelling advantage to
making that change. And personally, I'm not seeing the advantage here.

No, I'm saying that no matter what I choose, someone will be uncomfortable with it.  I'm mainly worried about which class of users will be annoyed, and what will be the total magnitude of the annoyance.  The style we're leaning towards is more or less the same as what TVT puts in their custom titles, but we can make free links that ways -- and have a style guide reference to go with it.
Now the major change that I'd like to suggest is getting rid of the works namespaces from TVT, more or less entirely.  I don't know the original logic behind putting works in a separate namespace, but the reasons I'd guess are:

• Tropes with the same name as a work causing problems
  
• Works with the same name also conflicting
  
• Work names look like trope names in links, and misuse work names as tropes
  
• Easier to select the right subpages automatically (like our more manual {{work}} and {{trope}} things)
  
• When all you have is a hammer (Pmwiki), everything starts to look like a namespace
  

Mediawiki, for better or worse, was built around the needs of Wikipedia.  And so I started off by just putting the namespace in parentheses, like Wikipedia does for their disambiguated pages.  But they only use these when a page actually needs disambiguation.  And by importing all of these, it feels like "when all you know is hammering, everything goes into a round hole."  By keeping up with the namespace idea, we get:

• More typing for users in basically every work link
  
• More data storage, because almost every work link becomes a piped link.
  
• Users have to remember the all the namespaces
  
• Users have to guess the correct namespace for a new work
  
• When a page covers a work in multiple media, the choice of namespace is really arbitrary -- sometimes it's what was first written (wait, Dirty Pair was a light novel?), sometimes it's most popular (Utena was a manga first, but the anime is somehow more canonical)
  
• No real gain on site organization
  

Most of these things are a tax on the editor, rather than them needing to know just the name of the work or trope.
As for organization, Mediawiki does subpages and categories quite well.  Category:Manga can house all the manga, and can be put on a page right alongside Category:Anime when appropriate.  Subpages can organize all of the different media associated with a work, if necessary (as with the Harry Potter books currently).  So my proposal is:

• Eliminate the parenthesized part of titles, unless they're necessary to disambiguate.
  
• Use disambiguation pages where necessary, or notes on the top of a page when a work is dominant.
  
• If a work and a trope have the same title, the trope always wins the main unparenthesized page name.
  
• While moving the page names, make sure that pages have all the appropriate categories (e.g. TV and Film, or Anime/Manga/Light Novel), which means that they're more organized than before.
  
• Make sure the text actually notes the media type, because it should.
  
• Lowercase the remaining work types in parentheses (except TV, natch), to be a little more Wikipedia-ish.  Yeah, it's different, but there's no need to swim upstream against common practice in the new software.
  

This still leaves us with the potential problem of work names being used as tropes (which is another way of saying we have the potential problem of having bad editors).  We could also get pages linked to the wrong work, though I doubt that problem will be much different than it is currently.  It might confuse is people coming from TVT, but I suspect they'll pick it up rather quickly if they stick around (and we're already doing something slightly different anyway with parens and all).  The only other downside I can see is that hovering over links would provide less information than it used to (but I'd still like to hack the hovering behavior to be more informative, eventually).  But overall, I think it's easier on users to just drop the namespace part.
OK, I think you can tell I had policy analysis in my background.  What do you think?/Have I missed anything?
-- ∇×V

[Tennie]

In the meantime, in the interest of playing it safe, here's my take on images TVT has permission for but we don't.

Comment it out unless/until you have an image you can replace it with, and in that case, delete the original image and use the replacement.

What about actually asking for permission from the original content creators?  I'd think that it'd be doable, at least for those images that were originally hosted on third-party sites such as Imgur, deviantART, etc.

But yeah, the other options should serve well in the meantime.

[Bob Schroeck]

That's what I ultimately intended on doing, Tennie. I'm just more concerned with finding images which are or contain TVT trademarks. If only the damned search would return any given file just once instead of multiple times, it would be a hell of a lot easier.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[GethN7]

Gentlemen, I have some good news that will make you relax.

Every single image (from our initial upload) has been tagged as having been imported from TV Tropes from when they were still under a CC BY SA 3.0 license. Further, we have added an addendum that some images we are unsure about and wish to resolve the status of if it turns out we do not have permission to host them (since TVT does not have a uniform method of tagging images to demonstrate their copyright status as we do), and our policies clearly state we wish to show good faith and will remove infringing material as soon as we are made aware of it.

That said, if you discover infringing material, just follow our current policy. If we get a complaint about it from anyone, do the same.

Since our default policy is to show good faith whenever possible and we have a policy of honoring copyright when and where there may be violations, all we have to do is continue what we have been doing. Unless we sit on our hands and ignore violations, we are not in any immediate trouble, and as long as we continue to show good faith and be mindful of other people's intellectual property whenever the issue arises, we should be fine as long as we react as promptly as possible when a possible problem occurs.

[Labster]

Well, since it looks like I got Warnocked on my namespace-in-titles proposal, I'm going to assume I have more or less approval to go ahead with it.  Either that, or everyone just assumes that I'm bikeshedding, and doesn't want to start an argument.  Or no one bothered to read my Wall O' Text.
I guess I have two modes of expressing opinion:  "I'm leaning towards" (my gut feeling or basic value judgement) and "I think we should" (I thought about pros and cons for an hour+ to make sure I thought of everything).  This is obviously the latter.  So we're going work on how to best get the media type out of page names that don't need disambiguation; and we'll go ahead and implement it if I haven't heard anything negative back by then.  ("Then" being 1-2 weeks, I'd guess.)
On another topic, our editor base has been growing thanks to some forum spamming outreach efforts by GethN7.  His efforts have kept this project's bus factor at 2.0 for quite some time, and for that I'm very gratified.
-- ∇×V

[Bob Schroeck]

Well, since it looks like I got Warnocked on my namespace-in-titles proposal, I'm going to assume I have more or less approval to go ahead with it. Either that, or everyone just assumes that I'm bikeshedding, and doesn't want to start an argument. Or no one bothered to read my Wall O' Text.

I frankly don't have a strong opinion one way or another. As far as I'm concerned, if it works it works, and I don't have a strong investment in how it works, as long as it's consistent.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[Bob Schroeck]

...The {{work}} template isn't wrapping any more on IE. I just checked the same page (http://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki/Hal ... inch_Night_(Animation)) on Chrome and Firefox and it looks fine there, but in IE the template runs right off the right edge of the window.
Edit:  Actually, all three pagetype templates are no longer wrapping on IE.   What changed? 
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[Bob Schroeck]

Something's gone seriously wrong -- every page is coming up with a "Database error" message for its contents. I'm trying to contact Orain staff, but I figured I'd put a note up here, too.
Edit:  Got into IRC with orain staff, and they fixed it in about a minute.  You can all stand down now. 
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[GethN7]

Something's gone seriously wrong -- every page is coming up with a "Database error" message for its contents. I'm trying to contact Orain staff, but I figured I'd put a note up here, too.

Edit:  Got into IRC with orain staff, and they fixed it in about a minute.  You can all stand down now. 

 

Yes. Yes we can.

That error noted above was the Orain guys tinkering with the servers to fix that feature, which is now fully functional! We also have Liquid Threads, which is a much less crappy talk page alternative!

It's been auto enabled on all currently existing user talk pages, so you'll probably want to archive your old talk pages.

More details on how LQT works here:

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:LiquidThreads

We might have a few feature hiccups, but from what I understand any errors should be smoothed out by the end of today.

If anyone has any ideas how our YKTTW/Tropes Workshop feature should be implemented, I'm all ears.

 

[Bob Schroeck]

Say, guys, what do you want to do with http://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki/Exa ... tionectomy]Example Sectionectomy? Historical, revise, nuke entirely?
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[robkelk]

Say, guys, what do you want to do with http://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki/Exa ... tionectomy]Example Sectionectomy? Historical, revise, nuke entirely?

Nuke, IMHO. There's no reason why a webpage has to be shorter than a particular length, except for readability - and tropes pages are naturally broken into thematic sections that promote readability. If there's a technical reason to shorten a page, spin off those sections onto their own subpages.
--
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]

I won't be in much for the next two or three days (my internet has been having some issues), but after reading the Example Sectionectomy page, here's my take on it's (we should keep the page for archival reasons, if nothing else, but I propose modifying it for ATT use and putting it in the All The Tropes namespace as a policy page) guidelines in regards to ATT

1. Prune the examples section. Useful if many of the examples are of poor quality.

If many examples just don't fit or are grossly off topic, fine, but I'd rather focus on improving them.

2. Kill It With Fire. Delete the entire article as having poor focus.

This is retarded. With the exception of vandal crap, spam, or troll nonsense, I'm against this.

3. Create a set of subpages for it. Useful if the page is sufficiently popular, and also sufficiently objective, that deletion is undesirable. (The results may possibly be put under Sugar Wiki or Darth Wiki if not objective, and sufficiently popular and straightforward (e.g., Crowning Moment of Awesome, So Bad Its Horrible.)

Fairly reasonable guideline IMO.

4. Give it an Example Sectionectomy, for which this trope is named. Leaves only the definition, and some scar tissue saying "No examples please. This only defines the term."

Never was entirely sanguine on this this, felt it was applied unfairly to many pages, but in very limited cases may be justified.

5. Leave the trope where it is, but make the example section a separate page, sometimes on the Sugar Wiki or Darth Wiki.

Okay, this was just stupid.

6. Rename a trope. Sometimes it's the title which can cause the whole mess. See Everything You Wanted to Know About Changing Names for more detail on that front.

Okay, renaming tropes entirely (aside from fixing them for punctuation and style) is a topic that needs to be discussed on the talk pages and/or site forums, so this guideline isn't totally foolish.

7. Move examples to another wiki entirely.

This only applies to Fetish Fuel (has it's own wiki on Wikia) and Troper Tales (has one on Wikkii). We already decided we don't wish to retain this information, so as applied to ATT, we just remove any of this wherever we find it.

[Tennie]

I've been thinking (perhaps overthinking) about this for at least a couple of weeks now, and I've decided to just go ahead and post it now in order to get it out of my head:

I know that ATT and TVT aren't on speaking terms for reasons, but if there's one thing that I actually fear it would be this little "cold war" going hot for whatever reason (probably via stuff like litigation, internet vandalism, etc.).  I've actually come up with a list of possible culprits for such a scenario, and the likelihood of such factions being responsible:

(1.) All The Tropes:
Personally, I feel that this would be the least likely candidate for starting the war.  We don't seek to actively antagonize anyone, we're merely trying to build and maintain a wiki according to our own principles.  The likelihood for us starting a war is extremely low, and even then it'll most likely be accidental (through some form or fashion).

(2.) TV Tropes:
In my own opinion, the likelihood of TVT starting a fight is higher than ATT, but not by much.  Their policy in regards to us seems to (currently) be "Pretend we don't exist and leave it at that", and that doesn't seem likely to change for some time.  Again, if they do end up starting the fight, it's more likely it'll be accidental than intentional.

(3.) A Third Party:
In my own personal opinion, this is the most likely group who would start a war.  There are at least three subgroups that I've personally identified:
(3a.) Anti-trope types:
We know these types, from stuff like the Something Awful mock threads.  These people have something against the very idea of a trope-cataloging site (and especially one run by and for fans/nerds/the like).  I wouldn't put it past them to try to engineer a war between TVT and ATT in the hope that it'll lead to both sites being taken down (of course, whether an entirely new troping site emerges from the ashes is a good question; I sincerely hope that, should worst come to worst, this is pretty much what happens.  You can't really keep tropers down!).
(3b.) Trolls:
These types practically love internet drama, even more so when they are the ones starting the drama.  I wouldn't put it past them to start a TVT-ATT war just for the lulz.
(3c.) Poor, hapless noobs:
It's also possible that some newbie troper tries to port an entry he made on TVT over to ATT, unaware of the licensing issues surrounding such a move.  This causing a fight is rather low in likelihood, because if TVT's admins notice what happened, then we should be ready to handle that situation the best we can.

Personally, it is my view that the factions labeled (3a.) and (3b.) are the likeliest to be the ones to get a fight going between TVT and ATT, but the others also pose a risk of starting it themselves (primarily accidentally).  Regardless, I can only hope that we're prepared in some form or fashion for such scenarios.

[Labster]

I had a teeny tiny bit of spare time last
night, and wrote a bot that takes the renames list and distributes it
out to all the pages.  And, while I'm there, it does:

 * Get rid of [[Category:Trope] if {{trope}} exists * Does basic addition of {{tropelist}} if the page matches "This ? provides examples of:" * {{examples|Examples}} is turned into plain {{examples}}

 * Pages with markup get [[Categoryages with comment tags] for further cleanup
This
is gonna take a long time, though.  It's been running for 12 hours, and
I'm on entry 314 of 4400.  It should get exponentially faster by fixing
pages along the way, but wow, slow.
Other than that, the "hover to reveal spoilers" thing finally works as a gadget.  All the cron jobs didn't run while the admins were away for Christmas, which resulted in the CSS cache never getting updated.  I should figure out a "show all spoilers" option and "show all spoilers this page" option shortly enough.
Bob added the stub templates, but we also have older categories like Pages Needing Wicks and Works Needing Tropes.  Do we just want to replace all of those with the work stub and trope stub categories, or should there be something separate for pages whose descriptions suck?
As usual, the answer for Example Sectionectomy is "refactor entirely".  The bigger issue there I see is what about all of those pages that had all of their examples removed.  Should we allow examples there again?
There seem to be multiple categories of sectionectomies.  Lolicon and shotacon are character types or genres or something, and were only prudepurged.  Some other tropes are entirely subjective, like Award Snub or Album Filler, and would probably just accrue Fan Wank.  And then there's stuff like Baka, which I've seen used as a trope but is theoretically only a term, or The Untwist which seems like it maybe examples could be ok?
We'd still need to keep a list of those pages around, somewhere.  Also, someone needs to go look into Permanent Red Link club, and see if there's anything there we need to resurrect.
-- ∇×V

[Bob Schroeck]

I had a few free minutes late this afternoon, and I made some changes to take care of an item from someone's wish list: I've turned "Made of Win" into a disambiguation page pointing at http://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki/TV_ ... in_Archive]TV Tropes Made of Win Archive and http://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki/All ... ade_of_Win]All The Tropes Made of Win (the latter of which I've also created, Frankenstein-style, from bits of the former).

One more down, several million to go...
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[robkelk]

...
As usual, the answer for Example Sectionectomy is "refactor entirely". The bigger issue there I see is what about all of those pages that had all of their examples removed. Should we allow examples there again?

There seem to be multiple categories of sectionectomies. Lolicon and shotacon are character types or genres or something, and were only prudepurged. Some other tropes are entirely subjective, like Award Snub or Album Filler, and would probably just accrue Fan Wank. And then there's stuff like Baka, which I've seen used as a trope but is theoretically only a term, or The Untwist which seems like it maybe examples could be ok?
...

Given your list of examples, the answer to your question is "yes or no, depending on the page".

Can the examples for the prudepurges be recovered from the Wayback Machine?
--
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

[Labster]

I know that ATT and TVT aren't on speaking terms for reasons, but if
there's one thing that I actually fear it would be this little "cold
war" going hot for whatever reason (probably via stuff like litigation,
internet vandalism, etc.).  I've actually come up with a list of
possible culprits for such a scenario, and the likelihood of such
factions being responsible:

GethN7, whose internet is on the fritz (something about losing the token?), wants me to let you know that you really don't have much to worry about.  No one is moving towards any action against either site.
The funny thing here is that your analysis is more or less backwards.  Right now, we have all quiet on the internet front -- SA has mentioned us all of once, Project After doesn't mind us, BTL got bored of us when they realized that trolling us was impossible, and ED is friendly.  Other communities could get involved, but I really don't see any of them having more of a passing interest.  Most of the highly trollable things are gone, like Troper Tales and Fetish Fuel; the only bait remaining are the loli and porn tropes which, well, Wikipedia has pages on that stuff too.  We are a truly boring trolling target because we think trolling is either boring or funny.
TV Tropes is a little more likely to start things, because they have a history of doing stupid reactionary decisions in the past.  The original relicensing happened when the site was ripped; the "we own all the content" passed when the fork was launched.  If we get some big promotion from another sector of the internet, we can expect yet another dumb defensive measure by their admins.  But to be honest:  they're doing their level best to ignore us as hard as possible.
And finally that leaves things to All The Tropes.  We're easily the most likely to start shit.  Truth be told, I'm kind of a hothead (and my Wisdom score is just terrible).  And the fact that the site even exists is an expression of my anger at TV Tropes, more than a year later.  Anger is the emotion for "something is wrong", and I wish I could fix that wrong.  Of course, we're the rebel faction -- and revolutionaries are always the ones to take principled stands.  I'm sure Bob has at least a little bit of Doug Sangnoir in him as well.
The thing that stops us from launching a legal offensive -- which would be terribly easy to do, just one email away -- is the idea of getting our revenge through success.  If we can show people that we made a better community, better software, more content, more openness, then we will have truly won.  This is not my first rodeo.  I've tried the other way, and while the attacks were fun at the time, I ended up losing the war.  So this time, we're gonna win by being smarter and working harder than our rivals.  ????????!
-- ∇×V

[Bob Schroeck]

vorticity wrote:I'm sure Bob has at least a little bit of Doug Sangnoir in him as well.

Heh.  See how I describe myself in the "Known Quirks" section of my http://fenspace.net/index.php5?title=Bo ... own_Quirks]Fenspace avatar's writeup.

vorticity wrote:The thing that stops us from launching a legal offensive -- which would be terribly easy to do, just one email away -- is the idea of getting our revenge through success. If we can show people that we made a better community, better software, more content, more openness, then we will have truly won.

Agreed, very much so.  Which is why I've put every free minute (and some less-than-free ones) into editing and cleaning up the site.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[GethN7]

I know that ATT and TVT aren't on speaking terms for reasons, but if
there's one thing that I actually fear it would be this little "cold
war" going hot for whatever reason (probably via stuff like litigation,
internet vandalism, etc.).  I've actually come up with a list of
possible culprits for such a scenario, and the likelihood of such
factions being responsible:

GethN7, whose internet is on the fritz (something about losing the token?), wants me to let you know that you really don't have much to worry about.  No one is moving towards any action against either site.

The funny thing here is that your analysis is more or less backwards.  Right now, we have all quiet on the internet front -- SA has mentioned us all of once, Project After doesn't mind us, BTL got bored of us when they realized that trolling us was impossible, and ED is friendly.  Other communities could get involved, but I really don't see any of them having more of a passing interest.  Most of the highly trollable things are gone, like Troper Tales and Fetish Fuel; the only bait remaining are the loli and porn tropes which, well, Wikipedia has pages on that stuff too.  We are a truly boring trolling target because we think trolling is either boring or funny.

TV Tropes is a little more likely to start things, because they have a history of doing stupid reactionary decisions in the past.  The original relicensing happened when the site was ripped; the "we own all the content" passed when the fork was launched.  If we get some big promotion from another sector of the internet, we can expect yet another dumb defensive measure by their admins.  But to be honest:  they're doing their level best to ignore us as hard as possible.

And finally that leaves things to All The Tropes.  We're easily the most likely to start shit.  Truth be told, I'm kind of a hothead (and my Wisdom score is just terrible).  And the fact that the site even exists is an expression of my anger at TV Tropes, more than a year later.  Anger is the emotion for "something is wrong", and I wish I could fix that wrong.  Of course, we're the rebel faction -- and revolutionaries are always the ones to take principled stands.  I'm sure Bob has at least a little bit of Doug Sangnoir in him as well.

The thing that stops us from launching a legal offensive -- which would be terribly easy to do, just one email away -- is the idea of getting our revenge through success.  If we can show people that we made a better community, better software, more content, more openness, then we will have truly won.  This is not my first rodeo.  I've tried the other way, and while the attacks were fun at the time, I ended up losing the war.  So this time, we're gonna win by being smarter and working harder than our rivals.  ????????!
 

 

As for my internets, I'm on one of those "you have only so much internet bandwidth a month internet services before it rolls over and you get some more unless you buy some restore tokens to tide you over" kind of things, and while that usually isn't a problem, it took a nosedive for reasons I'm still not sure of this month (probably all that online holiday shopping during Christmas ^_^), but it'll be good soon.

As for the internet denizens giving us trouble, to Tennie and anyone else, relax. Most people hate TVT (mostly due to Fast Eddie's kneejerk admin decisions), and at best, many are cynical of any spinoffs due to the stigma of TVT's more embarrassing history, but we've already gotten rid of most of the trollbait, have been going out of our way not to cause drama (ED is more like "meh, whatever", if not "friendly" as a result), and as Vorticity said, we are the ones who need to light the fuse to the powder keg first.

However, our policy is to be internet nice guys who act as a community, refrain from trolling ourselves, and we don't get upset about our critics and attempt to engage them in civil debate when possible instead of acting hatefully, which goes a long way towards not causing trouble. Besides, the best "revenge" we could have in this situation is building a better site than TVT, and so far, I think we're doing pretty good on that score.

[Tennie]

Thanks, guys.  It was something that I needed to get off my chest, and to know the truth of the situation actually leaves quite a good feeling.

Now, as to TVT being the ones to stir things up, I have something that I want to mention:  I get the feeling that when Gus and Janitor were participating in running TVT they seemed to be acting more or less as a (pardon the pun) moderating influence on Fast Eddie; their departure seems to have let FE run wild (so to speak).(*)  I think what he needs (regardless of whether he wants it) is for someone or some people to play that same role for him.  In lieu of that, well, that's one of the reasons we built ATT.

(*) I'm not actually sure that this interpretation of things is correct (even partially), only that this was the vibe that I was getting from that time.

Oh and another thing:

????????!

Google Translate claims that this term means "Good luck!"  Now, I'm not very knowledgeable in Japanese (or, for that matter, languages other than English), but if that translation is correct, then I'll take that as a thank you or something of the sort!