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Quote: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).(*)
(*) No. Nice theory, but Gus is Eddie.
I'd translate "ganbaru" as "do your best"/"work hard", but I suppose it has a more than a hint of "good luck" to it too. It doesn't have a great English equivalent, which is why my mind chose that word. I used the polite volitional form, with the net effect of "let's work hard!".
GethN7 Wrote: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. Oh, I was afraid that you had a token ring network, and the token had gotten dropped (usually between the couch cushions). While I'm on the topic, does someone want to merge Token Loli into Token Mini-Moe for me?
-- ∇×V
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vorticity Wrote:No. Nice theory, but Gus is Eddie.
Ah. I'd heard rumors to that effect, but wasn't sure. But that still leaves Janitor--didn't (s)he (I don't recall Janitor's gender offhand) act somewhat like a moderating influence? And I wonder what led FE to drop his Gus persona--perhaps he felt it wasn't necessary anymore, or something along those lines?
Regardless, my point still stands: if TVT is to survive, the current administration needs to have some people within who can act as moderating influences. ATT's administration already has that built in (so to speak), doesn't it?
On another tangent, should the conflict between ATT and TVT attract media attention, how exactly should we have it (or at least our view of it) be framed for them? Because if we play our cards right we can garner some much-needed support for our project and its success. And I wonder how the TVT administration would try to have themselves and their opponents be portrayed and how well that'd work in the media...
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Tennie Wrote:vorticity Wrote:No. Nice theory, but Gus is Eddie.
Ah. I'd heard rumors to that effect, but wasn't sure. But that still leaves Janitor--didn't (s)he (I don't recall Janitor's gender offhand) act somewhat like a moderating influence? And I wonder what led FE to drop his Gus persona--perhaps he felt it wasn't necessary anymore, or something along those lines?
Regardless, my point still stands: if TVT is to survive, the current administration needs to have some people within who can act as moderating influences. ATT's administration already has that built in (so to speak), doesn't it?
On another tangent, should the conflict between ATT and TVT attract media attention, how exactly should we have it (or at least our view of it) be framed for them? Because if we play our cards right we can garner some much-needed support for our project and its success. And I wonder how the TVT administration would try to have themselves and their opponents be portrayed and how well that'd work in the media...
As to Fast Eddie's identity, ED seems to have laid out a dox trail on Gus (or Guy, as his name shows up on some public records). It's ED, so neither I nor Vorticity can be totally certain how much is fact and how much is BS, but the links listed seem to back up the page claims.
Start here and you can make your own conclusions:
http://encyclopediadramatica.es/Fast_E ... _To_Autism
As for PR, no worries. I've made some announcements about us on some some writing sites and forums, plan to do so at as many places as possible, and so far, the reception is at worst skeptical (troping carries the understandable baggage of TVT with it), but since we aren't being run by TVT's admins, most of the response has been hopeful if not outright optimistic.
This early on, I'm more concerned about building the best website we can instead of PR (aside from raising attention to ourselves in the interest of drawing potential traffic), and we'll handle the media attention bridge when we get to that point.
In technical news, I'm currently tinkering with a prototype Sugar Wiki template for all SW pages. It shouldn't take nearly as much time to perfect as did the DW template, so I should have that rolled out and ready for a bot job pretty soon.
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Geth, I read the article in your link and some of the stuff it links to, and I can't help but wonder about what TVT would've been like had you been the founder of TVT rather than FE. Certainly things would've been a heck of a lot better than they actually are!
Oh well, I suppose we could call ATT an attempt to get things right the second time around...
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^ Everyone likes GethN7 more than me 
I started getting second thoughts about the whole idea of getting rid of the work namespaces. I mean, I hate editing with the namespace tags, but it's nice to know at a glance what you're looking at before you click. So I started thinking about the problem laterally -- I want to know more about what I'm clicking on before I click. Most of the works are potholes anyway, so I end up looking at the URLs, which is suboptimal anyway.
So I'm thinking of applying distinct CSS classes on tropes, YMMV tropes, and everything else. Sort of like how the redirect highlighter works. But the redirector detector is fairly ugly (and bright frakking pink), and I'd like to use something much more subtle. And because it's CSS, it would be easy for users to get rid of, or for me to make a gadget-based toggle. I think that addressed my own issue about the work namespaces. And the implementation doesn't look too bad in pseudocode.
My bot finished the first rename batch after 42 hours. Everything renamed since before 3 days ago has had its links updated. This should hopefully obviate most of LooneyToons' tiny updates. Any more stuff you want done, you can feel free to add to ATT:TODO.
-- ∇×V
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Tennie Wrote:Geth, I read the article in your link and some of the stuff it links to, and I can't help but wonder about what TVT would've been like had you been the founder of TVT rather than FE. Certainly things would've been a heck of a lot better than they actually are!
Oh well, I suppose we could call ATT an attempt to get things right the second time around...
First off, I appreciate the compliment, but what I consider my greatest strength is that I know my limitations, and that the wiki is not an extension of my own ego. I merely want to provide a service to the public for free that everyone can enjoy, and I have no qualms with allowing that information to be distributed under proper conditions (pursuant to our Creative Commons licensing, more or less). I also prefer to work woth a team whom I consider my peers and am perfectly willing to share power with the community since I've seen what happens when the opposite occurs, and I don't want to become that.
I could not have even gotten this off the ground without Vorticity parsing this info into MW format, and in many ways is The Man Behind The Man (and still is). Bob's hard work cleaning up pages is more efficient than I could do on my own (without a bot), and most of all, everyone who has contributed to ATT's success is just as important as myself (if not more), and I still see myself as the backroom guy who just wants to keep everything running smoothly.
However, I will concede I hope we are hopefully an attempt to get things right this time.
Speaking of that, almost done with the Sugar Wiki template. A few final tests are needed, but it's about ready to go.
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Guys, does it matter who's who at some other site? The only thing I can see that discussion accomplishing is getting someone at that site (more) annoyed with this site...
--
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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Agreed. We have a slow but steady growth in user base. Word of mouth and the occasional forum pointer will do enough to sustain that, and we should simply focus on making the wiki as good as it can be. The interwiki politics holds no attraction for me.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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I agree as well, Bob.
Also, it's ready:
http://allthetropes.orain.org/w/index. ... Sugar_Wiki
I'm prepared to roll this out via bot job on all Sugar Wiki pages, but first, if anyone has any suggestions or improvements before rolling it out, I'm willing to wait on that.
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Alright, the Sugar Wiki template has been added. Let me know if we have any issues with it.
Now, we are currently working on our YKTTW/Trope Workshop namespace organization, and I and Vorticty had two ideas for it.
The main page of the namespace (which will be linked on the sidebar and front page) will either link to a forum like page, or to a Category page (both would allow for easier sorting of the YKTTW's)., with a page creation box for making a new YKTTW that can be moved to the main namespace once the page has been worked on enough.
The forum version would be similar to how it is done on TVT, but would require links to the page and the discussion page posted in every topic, which would be problematic for organization.
The category version would be much easier to set up, and would work like pages in the main namespace, though any comments would have to be added to the discussion pages (though they could be transcluded to appear at the bottom of the YKTTW page).
Either way, we could easily set this up, we just need to know what version sounds more practical.
Also, we have decided to forego the voting aspect as is done on TVT, unless anyone still thinks that is a good idea. If so, it could be worked into the YKTTW system however we set it up, but if no one wants it, we don't have to include it.
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I was never fond of the voting system, myself, but hell, I was real old school and still liked the days when I could just whip off a trope entry the moment I thought of it.
Beyond that, the category version sounds better to me.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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I went with the category system, and I have a working prototype of the YKTTW/Trope Workshop ready.
However, before I set it loose on ATT, I'd like us to hammer out a clear policy for this namespace.
On TVT, they have a policy of punishing people for launching these without permission, require a certain amount of people to approve of the launch to the main namespace, and a lot of other rules. Our policy will almost assuredly be a lot simpler, but I'd like us to have a decent policy on this hammered out before I roll out our new namespace.
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Well, I'm not sure on what our YKTTW policy should be, at least off the top of my head.
On another note, Geth, I've noticed that you and/or another person/people have announced the existence of ATT in threads on several forums other than our own. I have an idea on at least one or two more forums where that topic, I feel, could be discussed:
RPG.Net: This site had a thread on TVT's problems in the "Other Media" section a few months back, when TVT had its temporary outage at that time. I think that now would be a good time to have a formal announcement of ATT's existence there.
SpaceBattles.com: This forum has seen occasional threads on the subject of TVT before, so it too, I think, would be ripe for a formal discussion about ATT (as opposed to merely putting in links to the site in our signatures there). However, be aware that, as of this post, SB's been suffering off-and-on lag spells lately, so try to time your posts so that they don't get lost in the lag.
Of course, I wouldn't be able to start those threads, as I'm not all that good at getting a thread on a subject like ATT started in a way that attracts attention and discussion. I would greatly appreciate some assistance from you guys on this! ![[Image: banana-dance.gif]](http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/forumimportfiles//banana-dance.gif)
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Thanks for the advice, Tennie.
As for the Trope Workshop, it's up now!
http://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki/Cat ... e_Workshop
Vorticity wrote out some basic policy (the page has a link to it), and I've tested everything on my localhost wiki and it works fine.
If you notice any problems or have improvement suggestions, either discuss them here or leave them on the talk page for the Trope Workshop.
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Our policy on launching into Main: will be: If it doesn't look done enough, just move it [back] into
the Trope Workshop. Any error it takes me 10 seconds to fix is not
worth banning anyone (or even complaining about). The rest of the policy was off the top of my head (over 9000 cs in notepad.exe), but thankfully policy pages by admins are a free launch.
I do
agree with you in principle that there shouldn't be a separation
between content creation and deployment, but I like to think of the
Trope Workshop as a quick and easy-to-find editing shop. You go in,
throw your idea out there, and let Wiki Magic make it into a real
entry. Just like Santa's Workshop.
And democracy with drive-by voting is a terrible way to run, well, anything. There's a reason every non-monarchy country does the republic thing. Anyway, if you want to express an opinion, editing to actually express it is not hard.
Also, "YKTTW:" is a shortcut for "Trope Workshop:", which already confused the Orain folks who set it up, and will make a fine shibboleth for n00bs.
-- ∇×V
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While looking up how our wiki's been doing in terms of attention, I found a website that tracks wiki statistics over time. Below is the link to our wiki's stats:
http://wikiapiary.com/wiki/All_The_Tropes
I figured that this could be useful for us in terms of graphing statistics; that is, unless you can find/create even better means of recording wiki stats over time!
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I know all about WikiApiary, very good site.
It's tracks our stats by gathering information from the MediaWiki API (the programming interface of MediaWiki), but only does so at occasional intervals. Still, it's pretty good at doing that.
Anyway, now that the YKTTW/Trope Workshop is set up, Vorticity and I have been discussing getting two more features added:
Liveblogs and Reviews.
The first one is something I thought would be nice to have so we can have yet another feature that exists on TV Tropes (but better).
See the following pages for more information on what I was thinking of:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Wikilog (basic concept)
http://github.com/mediawiki4intranet/Wikilog (Was going to use this version, more current and feature rich)
However, the blogging idea will require a little setup and testing, so Vorticity wanted to get a new subpage section up for Reviews.
Much like on TV Tropes, it would be a subpage for reviewing works, and we even wanted to add voting capabilities, which should be easy enough to do (and much more viable in both mine and Vorticity's opinion than the blogging), and the best extension for that seems to be this:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:VoteNY
We were also looking into getting the ability to set up polls established, with this extension as my recommendation:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:AJAXPoll
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All of those look good. Let's do it. Once we have the blogging up, maybe we can add an admin blog, half chat and half technical updates or something...
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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Great news guys!
We now are on Twitter!
http://twitter.com/ATTropes
I or Vorticity will be using the account to post minor tech updates (we will still discuss them here as well), and I've also added a link to the Twitter page on the ATT wiki sidebar. In fact, I just posted a tweet on a minor fix I just did as a test.
We're still working out the details of getting in house wiki blogging and a reviews system set up, will take a few days, but we are working on it.
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You know, Geth, you honestly impressed me with the way you very professionally handled the guys over on the Project AFTER forum. Have you at least considered working that same magic of yours on the people over on the Something Awful forums? Because if you do decide to do so, then I'd recommend that you start a separate thread dedicated to the subject of ATT and to dispelling the rumors and accusations being flung against ATT over there. Another forum that you might want to work with would be the "It Just Bugs Me!" forums. I hope that they might at least be intrigued by what we offer in comparison to TVT.
Just thought I'd mention that. You really have been a big help, not just with the wiki but also with getting good PR going for it. I'd like to see that professionalism carried further! 
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Thanks for the compliments! 
As for Something Awful, I don't think that's possible, and that's being very charitable. Besides, they briefly mentioned us in their latest TVT mock thread, took a few things about our site goals out of context, and wrote us off a site of perverts and pedophiles.
I did find a mention of us on Reddit, which I commented on:
http://www.reddit.com/r/tvtropes/commen ... _the_nsfw/
Anyone think we should set up our own subreddit?
As for IJBM, I would post on that topic only if the moderators there explicitly allow it. If not, I will respect their wishes and not post on that topic. It does look like a good site for general venting though, so I plan to check it out anyway.
Any other suggestions you have for sites to mention us on are appreciated.
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GethN7 Wrote:As for Something Awful, I don't think that's possible, and that's being very charitable. Besides, they briefly mentioned us in their latest TVT mock thread, took a few things about our site goals out of context, and wrote us off a site of perverts and pedophiles.
I brought it up because I'd seen how well-received you were on Project AFTER, and it made me wonder if you'd given thought to doing the same with SA. Maybe you could at least give it a try. If you get something similar, great, if not, then at least we gave it a good shot. And if in the latter case they ever decide to do a PR campaign against us like they did with Reddit, I would recommend that we show the world that, unlike the admins of Reddit and TVT, we actually are handling the problem the best we can, thank you very much!
GethN7 Wrote:As for IJBM, I would post on that topic only if the moderators there explicitly allow it. If not, I will respect their wishes and not post on that topic. It does look like a good site for general venting though, so I plan to check it out anyway.
Well, they do have a subsection called "It Just Awes Me", which is more for gushing about stuff. So yeah, I would recommend at least checking it out and going from there.
GethN7 Wrote:Any other suggestions you have for sites to mention us on are appreciated.
Why, thank you! I'm quite willing to help make ATT a good site and to help bring it to the attention of others in any way that I am able to, and seek help on those parts that I'm not so competent at. Let's keep up the good work, everybody!
Oh, and one more thing: if any mods/admins over on TVT get fed up with the way things are going over there and decide to quit, then we could probably do well in convincing them to come over to ATT. Of course, that requires that they actively decide to quit TVT first, but still...
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I saw that big NSFW marker on reddit, and it kinda made me sad. I mean, we host pages on the same works of fiction as Wikipedia, and you never see " Wikipedia NSFW" anywhere. I mean, they have pages about... well here, have a link.
Do you think it would be be a good idea to make a NSFW browsing mode? We could blank out the pages of works with a {{NSFW}} template, unless they click to view (or toggle off in preferences). Or is that a bit heavy handed on our part? One of the curses of being a programmer is trying to find technical solutions to social problems.
-- ∇×V
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We're committed to academic freedom - that includes making available information, if I recall correctly. I wouldn't make it more difficult to obtain any of that information.
--
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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Geeze, the wiki is slooooooooooow tonight, and I'm getting 504s just trying to view pages. (Forget about editing/saving them!) Orain's hamsters must be tired.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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