Drunkard's Walk Forums

Yep - I was just about to report that we're back.
--
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

I had an idea I believe would really increase our content base and make us far more academically useful than TV Tropes.

We should import quotes pages from Wikiquotes for many book, films, plays, and so on that don't have them, as well as quotes from famous authors and playwrights. Of course, many of these pages would have to be modified to avoiding leaving tons of red links, but legally, this should be completely fine since we both have CC BY SA licensing, and would fill in a lot of holes.

Also, I propose a new subpage instance on Works pages: Source.

Basically, for public domain works, it would be great if we could provide the source of the original work from places like Wikisource, Project Gutenberg, or somewhere similar. The way I see it, if we are to be an academic resource, might as well take that title seriously, and what better way to do so than by actually encouraging the reading of actual literature.

Again, this should legal so long as we cite the source.

It also has the added benefit of us not having to write a ton of stuff ourselves, boosting our Google page rank by providing pages with richer content, and making us a more serious resource than TV Tropes concerning use by academics.

I like -- and I see you've already started at least on the quotes part.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

Okay, the second one isn't really news, we've had it for awhile, but it's basically an opt in Beta Feature for zooming in on thumbnailed images without leaving the page, which I added for people who want that feature.

The second, however, is the Collection extension, which allows printable books to be made out of collection of pages that can be bound in PDF format, perfect for portable reading of your favorite pages.

Update; Checked into those weird issues you reported regarding Collection, Bob, turns out nagios dropped the ball a little due to a high load and our servers were drooling somewhat as a result, going to force an ansible/database update to see if that flushes the issue.

Cool. Thanks!
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

ATT is going to be down for a little while as I fix some mistakes I made yesterday that are coming back to haunt me.

This mess was caused by me, I offer no excuses, and I will be working on remedying it as soon as possible.

Update; Problems should be fixed, but due to the fact my idiocy caused Orain some grief, I accepted removal of my commit rights to Orain's ansible playbook for an indefinite period, which means I will not have the power to directly fix any issues on my own, but due to the fact I committed an act of gross incompetence with those rights that also caused ATT downtime, the only thing I can offer is my apologies for all the trouble I caused both Orain and all of you.

Eh, this is just a rite of passage -- being the FNG who broke the build.  It's happened to all of us.
-- ∇×V

I'm currently doing a bot run to rename a bunch of Recap pages to change the format to Work/Recap/S1/E01 Episode Name.  Which means I can finally turn on the hierarchical menus for the work pages after this, as that template wants to parse on a slash.  Did a lot of manual renaming while I was there, adding apostrophes in the appropriate places in episode titles, etc.  And with that, I think that the import from TV Tropes is done.
That's actually a pretty big milestone.  In wiki features, All The Tropes is now better than TV Tropes.  And for me, this milestone means that the time of my major involvement in the project is coming to an end. 
I started working on ATT to provide a place for people to work on tropes without attitudes of uniform positivity and censorship, and because I was the only one I knew with the technical skill and drive to make a replacement.  And I believe that we have succeeded in building that site, and in creating more inclusive and educational values for tropers.  While there is certainly still room to grow, the site has become self-sufficient and has attracted editors from all over the world.  I've helped to build a wiki with an open culture that doesn't rely on one person, and I'm very proud of that.
What ATT needs the most now is not raw technical skill, but content creators and people to grow the community.  And I'm confident that ATT will find them, and continue to grow.  I have every confidence in GethN7 and Bob to lead ATT onward (and I may poke my head in and help a bit too).
I'm not really going anywhere, but I want to concentrate on other efforts.  When I joined, I didn't have a job, but now I am employed full-time.  I'd like to get back to working on the final push for the Perl 6 language, which is offically coming out Christmas next year.  And working on the wiki has kept me from working on my own writing, and I want to get back to that.  Not that anyone reads my work, but I want to create more than analyze right now.
So instead of hanging on to the idea of leadership and doing gradually less work, I want to encourage ATT to seek out future leaders now.  Thanks for believing, everyone; Viva Tropes!
-- ∇×V

vorticity Wrote:I'm currently doing a bot run to rename a bunch of Recap pages to change the format to Work/Recap/S1/E01 Episode Name.  ...

Your bot is http://allthetropes.orain.org/w/index. ... &limit=500]leaving hundreds of thousands of broken links in its wake - can this be fixed, please?

(I grow tired of cleaning up manually after these bot runs - and this time, there are too many to clean up manually.)
--
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

Rob Kelk Wrote:Your bot is leaving hundreds of thousands of broken links in its wake - can this be fixed, please?

(I grow tired of cleaning up manually after these bot runs - and this time, there are too many to clean up manually.)

First of all, yes, they will be fixed, but since we're so technically unstable, I can't do that many jobs at a time.  Fixing the links is actually the last step in the process, which will probably happen around Thursday.  Second, you probably should never fix these manually, because it's a big waste of time.  Create content instead, and complain for a link update bot run.
I guess the good news is that I probably won't be doing any more mass renames.
-- ∇×V

In the interests of transparency, I wanted to reveal something I informed everyone about earlier has finally been created: the Source tab for hosting public domain works and works under free content licenses.

http://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Source

http://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki/Category:Source

I bring this up because that means not only public domain material may be hosted, fanfiction like Bob Schroeck's "Drunkard's Walk" could be hosted (currently under CC BY NC SA), and to safeguard the rights of authors who wish their copyright be respected, each page with this material must bear a prominent template with the appropriate license (I plan on importing the appropriate templates from Wikisource or making them as appropriate), and the URL's for the originating content must be cited in the edit histories at bare minimum for attribution purposes.

I hope this is reasonable and respectful enough of copyright, as I intended this tab to allow reproduction of permissible works as described above to be reproduced so as to make it easier to find them, read them, and analyze their tropes while still respecting the rights of the original authors.

If anyone has any questions or comments, please let me know.

vorticity Wrote:

Rob Kelk Wrote:Your bot is leaving hundreds of thousands of broken links in its wake - can this be fixed, please?

(I grow tired of cleaning up manually after these bot runs - and this time, there are too many to clean up manually.)

First of all, yes, they will be fixed, but since we're so technically unstable, I can't do that many jobs at a time.  Fixing the links is actually the last step in the process, which will probably happen around Thursday.  Second, you probably should never fix these manually, because it's a big waste of time.  Create content instead, and complain for a link update bot run.

I guess the good news is that I probably won't be doing any more mass renames.

Oh, I always wait a couple of months before doing the manual fixes. And I'm more an editor than a troper.
--
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

First off, Happy Thanksgiving to the Americans (like myself) in the audience.

In other news, some wiki updates.

Search has been globally disabled due to the resource crunch we've had of late, John is currently investigating means of fixing this, feature will be reenabled then. Also, MediaWiki 1.24 has come out, we have yet to update to that due to the first issue needs to be solved first.

I have tested all of our current custom extensions and ATT stuff via localhost, and MW 1.24 works fine with all of it, so when we update, it should be painless.

A new change in MW 1.24 is that we can finallY move category pages, but this only moves the page, not everything in it, but this should make mass category cleanup jobs somewhat easier once we have MW 1.24

Also, all the Beta Features work even better with MW 1.24. We could theoretically install VisualEditor with a fair degree of stability starting with MW 1.24, but until we have even more resources than we do now by a fair margin, that's still off the table, but I mention it because it wasn't even a viable option on 1.23 at all since those builds were ridiculously bad at working at all.

If anyone is using the Monaco skin, that is expected to work fine (it's my custom forked version), but please report any issues to me specifically, so I can fix it.

orain just went bye-bye... (Pages aren't loading at all, not even a 504 or 403 error)
--
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 Wrote:orain just went bye-bye... (Pages aren't loading at all, not even a 504 or 403 error)

Update: Fixed, rolled back to 1.23 until John figures out what the issue is.

Get a load this, I think I'm gonna hurl:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tv ... on-project

Update: Retracting my bile, especially since Fast Eddie is no longer in charge.

That's not even a product...

That's literally just 'give us money'

That's not what kickstarter's for.
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

Since TV Tropes changed owners, I decided to contact drewski (the new owner) with this message:

As you may know, I'm the founder of All The Tropes, the wiki founded on Wikia and Orain in opposition to the censorship, and more importantly, the illegal copyright changes effected by TV Tropes July 2012 changing the copyright of all content from CC BY SA 3.0 to CC BY NC SA 3.0 and later on November 2013 adding a retroactive ownership clause to all contributions, forcing users to surrender them to TV Tropes.

In case you aren't aware, these moves were made in contravention to Creative Commons licensing and thus all pages affected are now illegally tainted as a result, as CC licensing does not allow for these changes without the consent of all parties who have submitted edits to those pages, and the retroactive ownership clause is in blatant defiance of the free reuse policies of CC licensing and flagrantly illegal.

That said, I am contacting you privately to inform you several members of our wiki have seriously considered filing DMCA notices on the pages in question, or, if need be, pursuing legal action in response to this disregard for the copyright of those contributions, which myself and other parties never agreed to have submitted under anything other than CC BY SA 3.0.

However, since you aren't Fast Eddie, I am contacting you in the hopes you might prove more reasonable and ethical and be willing to address these legal concerns. If so, and if proper compensation is rendered to any injured parties, we would consider the matter closed and merely wish this site well in its efforts to proper, especially since Fast Eddie (who was the chief architect of these illegalities) is no longer in charge.

This does not necessarily mean many of us would wish to return to TV Tropes, as so much bad faith has occurred many of us no longer feel welcome here, even if the needless censorship was rescinded and the copyright issue was addressed, but we would abandon any possible legal action/DMCA notices and so on if you would be willing to work with us to address these issues, and while we may not return to TV Tropes, we would be willing to wish the site our best.

I have submitted edits here that I do not personally want to raise a legal issue over (my account here was made willingly after the license changes), but other members of my community do have serious griveances considering the violation of their copyright, and I am asking if you would be willing to address these issues so TV Tropes is no longer tainted with compromised content under illegal licensing.

A summary of our legal concerns can be found here:

http://blog.brentlaabs.com/2013/12/the- ... mmons.html

If you are willing to address these issues, please contact our staff here:

http://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki/All ... Contact_us

Bob Schroeck is the one with the most sizable list of illegally copyrighted items, and I respectfully request his concerns be dealt with as soon as possible.

Respectfully,

GethN7

P.S - We have kept careful records of all the pages that were illegally copyrighted, and if need be can produce them, including copies of the pages histories of the pages in question.

*Reads*

...Now all we can do is sit back and wait for a response, then go from there.  I'm not holding my breath, but I'll at least take a "wait and see" approach on this.  I'll just let you guys handle it.

I'm dropping my own question to the project administrator about the project.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

Okay, here's what I sent through the Kickstarter message function:

Quote:My name is Robert M. Schroeck. I am a professional author, a member of SFWA (The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, a professional association), I would like to address some issues with the TV Tropes wiki of which you may be unaware.

As of 2012 I was the longest-active member of TV Tropes outside of the administrative staff. Under the handle "Looney Toons", I wrote the original text for nearly 600 individual pages on TV Tropes, including nearly a dozen so-called "tropes of legend", such as Adaptation Decay, Executive Meddling, Genre Blindness and Buffy-Speak. I created the anime section from scratch. I helped set some of the earliest policies of the wiki. However, when I publicly protested Fast Eddie's decision to impose a censorship regime upon TV Tropes in May 2012, I was summarily banned from the wiki and locked out of my account.

I would like to emphasize that at no time during the period where I was actively contributing to the wiki did I ever agree to transfer my copyright on the material I wrote to the Wiki, Fast Eddie, or any other affiliated entity. I accepted the redistribution license -- the initial implied one, and then the later CC BY SA 3.0 license Fast Eddie applied to the site. However, at no time did I cede ownership of my work. Any claims Fast Eddie has made to ownership of the text of those 600 or so pages is not only false but illegal.

I have been in the beginning stages of preparing a lawsuit against TV Tropes for its attempt to unilaterally seize the rights to my work, because Fast Eddie had proven so hostile and recalcitrant over the past two and a half years, because the change in the site's license broke the contract implicit and explicit in the terms of CC BY SA 3.0, and simply because it is illegal to unilaterally claim the ownership of another person's work. I would point you at the case of the Prince George County, MD Board of Education, which in early 2013 attempted to claim by fiat ownership of the copyrights to all creative work by their teachers *and* students. They were quickly disabused of the notion that they could legally do so. Fast Eddie's attempt to fraudulently claim ownership of all material written for the TV Tropes wiki -- while publicly claiming that the material is merely licensed to the wiki -- is equally invalid, and I was prepared to take him to court to purge my work and all derivatives thereof from TV Tropes.

I would like to know what you plan to do about the illegal rights grab made by Fast Eddie and how you plan to address it in your "new" TV Tropes. Let me emphasize that I am not seeking to deprive you of the pages I wrote; I simply want my copyrights respected and acknowledged (and similarly, the copyrights of all other contributors similarly respected and acknowledged). If you do that, neither I nor the Berne Convention will have a quarrel with you.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

Oh man, this Kickstarter is hilarious.  While GethN7's instant reaction was disgust, my first reaction was "I wonder if I can pay a grand to get ATT featured on TVT's front page?"  Seriously, ten bills would be cheap for *that* kind of publicity.
But let's get back to the hilarity.  Basically, they want to get rid of the wiki.  No, really.  They'd be replacing it with a model that was not page-based, but relation-based, where the network would automatically generate itself.  And something like that basically means writing the software itself -- and developing a brand new UI for user-generated content, and integrating existing content into the new plan.  And to achieve this plan, they will hire one programmer for 50k$ for one year.  Oh wait, they're paying for more hardware too, so say 45k$ for the year.
So that programmer doesn't exist.  I mean, I remember the BS I had to do to set up a wiki with the existing content, and that took more than a year.  I couldn't do their proposal in that amount of time -- and a sufficiently good enough programmer who could do it will not work for $45 thousand a year.  Or $90k.  We're in the six-figure range minimum, if it's even possible.  And it's not like they can offer stock options as a future prospect -- TVT is not a startup, and I don't see how it could grow to more than double it's existing user base.  There's no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
They could maybe monetize their existing users more effectively, but there's only so many otaku are willing to spend for weird crap.  But the existing revenue stream, internet advertisting, is not really robust enough to support multiple paid staff.  Which I guess is why we're back to begging the users to donate cash for pie-in-the-sky goals, the untapped revenue stream.
So am I thinking of donating a large amount?  Yep!  Do I think they'll achieve their kickstarter goals?  Not a chance in hell.
-- ∇×V

Getting back to our little slice of the trope universe for a moment...

I do not have time to do anything with this link, but I'm sure somebody could use it to populate the "Anime of spring/summer/fall/winter ####" redlinks at least to stub level. This database goes back to the 1910s and is current to "dash means it isn't out in Japan yet"
http://myanimelist.net/anime.php?q=&typ ... =2&o=2&w=1

As for the KickStarter, isn't there something about needing to produce a physical product in the KS rules? (I doubt the t-shirts would count.) EDIT: And I notice that any level promising something be run on TVT is "content subject to approval" - so probably no ads saying we've already got all that at 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

robkelk Wrote:EDIT: And I notice that any level promising something be run on TVT is
"content subject to approval" - so probably no ads saying we've already
got all that at ATT.

Depends on how much they want the money, of course.  Just look at any random day of history in international relations -- stranger things happen all the time.
Also, the main thing I get from that link is "hell yeah, new Lupin III".  But yes, it could be used to populate a list.
-- ∇×V

robkelk Wrote:Getting back to our little slice of the trope universe for a moment...

I do not have time to do anything with this link, but I'm sure somebody could use it to populate the "Anime of spring/summer/fall/winter ####" redlinks at least to stub level. This database goes back to the 1910s and is current to "dash means it isn't out in Japan yet"
http://myanimelist.net/anime.php?q=&typ ... =2&o=2&w=1

As for the KickStarter, isn't there something about needing to produce a physical product in the KS rules? (I doubt the t-shirts would count.) EDIT: And I notice that any level promising something be run on TVT is "content subject to approval" - so probably no ads saying we've already got all that at ATT.

Thanks for the link, Rob!

As for the Kickstarter, I don't believe that necessarily true (there have been kickstarters for download only games, which don't exist in physical hard copy format), but if they can't produce even half what they are promising, it would be grounds for a lot of contributors to call foul at least.