All The Tropes Wiki Project, Part V

[GethN7]

Oh yeah, Morven had this to say about the copyright issues we've been discussing with TV Tropes:

http://morven.tumblr.com/post/115250432 ... render-all

IMO, props to you Morven.

[robkelk]

Don't know whether anyone noticed my request on the Short-Term Projects forum, but I haven't heard a yea or nay about it yet...
http://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki/For ... eeded_2871

It's rather needed in order to fix Special:Wanted 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]

Don't know whether anyone noticed my request on the Short-Term Projects forum, but I haven't heard a yea or nay about it yet...
http://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki/For ... eeded_2871

It's rather needed in order to fix Special:Wanted pages

 

I'll give Vorticity a heads up.

[robkelk]

Thanks.
--
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]

Did a little reading of what links refer to my blog out of curiosity (both via Blogger and Google search), and it seems Fighteer wrote this interesting article on the copyright situation on TV Tropes:

http://lementalia.wordpress.com/2015/0 ... licensing/

It seems to have been written slightly before Drew undid half of the copyright wrongs on TV Tropes, and Fighteer did have the decency to admit he's not a lawyer, so I can't really blast him for talking out his butt. I'd argue some of his facts about CC licensing are dead wrong, but I'd have to be an attorney to decisively do so, so I'll hold my tongue.

I will say, however, he seems to have some badly wrong ideas why were we pissed:

1. We weren't pissed because we wanted to profit off of the content (quite the opposite)
2. We weren't pissed because we want monetary payment for damages (those would be hard to prove, we just were offended at the idea someone might try to legally claim we surrendered our rights to rerelease the content we submitted there personally elsewhere, since that is in contravention of CC licensing.
3. This wasn't done just to spite TV Tropes (if anything, we just wanted them to obey the same copyright law everyone else, us included, is bound by).
4. Yes, we can claim ownership of certain edits (but only if they are illegal terms). Otherwise, he makes a good point about one cannot ask one's contributions to be taken down for the hell of it, only if they are being used under illegal terms, in which case we could ask for proper redress to address the illegal usage.
5. His entire line of reasoning about how it's hard to prove our identity for purposes of identifying one's work shows an apparent lack of knowledge how the DMCA and wikis work.
5a. To be fair, even with the Wayback Machine, TV Tropes has openly admitted to burning evidence of older server logs to preserve space, so the onus of proving things was made more difficult by them.
6. Similarly, he seems convinced TV Tropes could just change it's licensing globally without prior consent from the community. Apparently, he's unaware of the precedent set by Wikipedia when they proved that false by them having to work out a deal with Richard Stallman to add CC BY SA licensing to their terms as well as the GDFL.

Again, he did say it was all his personal opinion, not representative of his role as TVT moderator and since I'm not a lawyer either, I'm not going to legally challenge his opinions, but speaking personally myself, I believe he's dead wrong on several of his points and find it deeply troubling he believes such apparent inaccuracies on a site where he exercises any form of authority over community contributions.

[robkelk]

Two unrelated things...

1) Nobody's contacted me about where to send the Indegogo swag yet.

2) I've kinda-sorta filled up the "pages for speedy deletion" queue. (Found lots of subpages and redirects for TVTropes tomfoolery, and empty categories with names that are one letter or punctuation mark away from live categories...)
--
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]

Two unrelated things...

1) Nobody's contacted me about where to send the Indegogo swag yet.

2) I've kinda-sorta filled up the "pages for speedy deletion" queue. (Found lots of subpages and redirects for TVTropes tomfoolery, and empty categories with names that are one letter or punctuation mark away from live categories...)

 

1. I'm sending Dusti an email, I'm curious too.

2. Thanks, will do some cleanup.
 

[GethN7]

Got an update from Dusti, he was involved in a nasty car accident, so his presence on Orain and dealing with the Indiegogo campaign issue has been constrained as a result, but he has promised to address it once he has recovered from the injuries he suffered and the financial burden of having his car wrecked.

For my part, I wished him a speedy recovery.

[robkelk]

Thanks. I understand and agree with the delay now... although somebody should let all the other backers know.

Please forward my best-wishes to Dusti as well.
--
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]

Thanks. I understand and agree with the delay now... although somebody should let all the other backers know.

Please forward my best-wishes to Dusti as well.

 

I concur, will be leaving that recommendation with the rest of the Orain Staff, as well as making sure he sees your best wishes.

[robkelk]

I think I've cleaned up http://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki/Spe ... adendPages]this list a fair bit...

Do those slightly-over-a-dozen templates need to be those particular templates? As far as I can tell, they're used only in documentation, as examples.
--
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 think I've cleaned up http://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki/Spe ... adendPages a fair bit...

Do those slightly-over-a-dozen templates need to be those particular templates? As far as I can tell, they're used only in documentation, as examples.

Might as well burn them to ashes, they look pointless to me, so stick deletion templates on them  and anything similar.

Also, if you'd like something else to work on, try my sandbox page:
 

http://allthetropes.orain.org/w/index. ... N7/sandbox

All the stuff in red needs redirects to pages we have (try to make the official page titles align with Wikipedia) or stubs created, the stuff in blue need the apprpriate categories added if they don't exist already, feel free to remove items from the sandbox page if you address anything on it.

[robkelk]

Looks like somebody needs to buy Orain some flowers, or go on a walk with it, or sing a happy song along with it ... because it looks like it's down.
--
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]

Looks like somebody needs to buy Orain some flowers, or go on a walk with it, or sing a happy song along with it ... because it looks like it's down.

 

Up for me, try purging your web cache.

We have been delousing some minor wiki creation errors, but that shouldn't affect the farm as a whole.

[robkelk]

Looks like somebody needs to buy Orain some flowers, or go on a walk with it, or sing a happy song along with it ... because it looks like it's down.

 

Up for me, try purging your web cache.

We have been delousing some minor wiki creation errors, but that shouldn't affect the farm as a whole.

Back up now, but when I posted that even http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ couldn't reach Orain.
--
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

[robkelk]

orain's down again...

"The server at allthetropes.orain.org is taking too long to respond."
"The server at poserdazfreebies.orain.org is taking too long to respond."

"It's not just you! http://orain.org looks down from here. "

At least I wasn't in the middle of an edit...
--
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]

orain's down again...

"The server at allthetropes.orain.org is taking too long to respond."
"The server at poserdazfreebies.orain.org is taking too long to respond."

"It's not just you! http://orain.org looks down from here. "

At least I wasn't in the middle of an edit...

 

We're up again.

We've had some pull requests for ansible that have been pushed through pretty lately, one of them probably caused the issue and was reverted when it screwed stuff up.

[GethN7]

Update: We recently had some moron try to DDoS Orain, which our hosting service DigitalOcean attempted to choke off by killing all traffic between our servers, hence any downtime this morning. Also, in more local news, ATT got hit by classic Wikipedia page move vandal (or an imitator of) "Willy on Wheels".

I undid his damage and globally banned him as insurance, do be on the lookout in case anyone else tries to move page to anything ending in "on Wheels" or something else idiotic, and I will take stronger measures if required to make sure it doesn't happen again.

Update: IPv4 users may still be screwed to some greater or lesser extent, but IPv6 users should be fine.

[robkelk]

This particular IPv4 user can't connect, nor can downforeveryoneorjustme.com - don't be surprised if you get a slew of "site's down" emails.
--
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]

This particular IPv4 user can't connect, nor can downforeveryoneorjustme.com - don't be surprised if you get a slew of "site's down" emails.

Good news, we'll have one of the staff on hand in a few hours to flush the servers. Turns out our IPv4 connection basically got crapped out (on Orain's end), and we'll need to flush ansible and reboot one of our MW servers. It's not just a simple reboot (or I'd do it myself), as it will require some changes I do not have technical knowledge to effect.

[GethN7]

Service should be returning, we hopped in a time machine to restore older DNS settings so we can pick up IPv4 packets, seems to be working.

[robkelk]

I'm in ... and it looks like the freebie wiki dodged the "on wheels" bullet. Do you have everything under control on ATT?
--
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'm in ... and it looks like the freebie wiki dodged the "on wheels" bullet. Do you have everything under control on ATT?

 

We're good.

[robkelk]

Good to hear.

Orain's been on a yo-yo string today - up, down, up, down, up, down ... Is there another DDoS going on?
--
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]

Good to hear.

Orain's been on a yo-yo string today - up, down, up, down, up, down ... Is there another DDoS going on?

 

We had to go back in time, so the new and old settings are clashing because all the servers haven't gotten used to the new (old) loadbalancer settings, givee it a day or two.