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Quote:vorticity wrote:
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.
...the hell? How seriously should I take that?
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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This, to be exact:
http://lementalia.wordpress.com/2013/11 ... -part-two/
I've heard of it too, and I just wanted to say that like vorticity, I deny the allegations of illegal activities as having anything resembling fact to them and maintain a policy of not antagonizing TV Tropes (anymore than we have simply by existing) and not encouraging others to do the same.
We obviously cannot control everyone who might wish to troll TV Tropes and/or use our existence as a proxy means of doing so, but these acts have no part of our goals nor have our sanction or sponsorship, and we especially deny having anything to do with the DDoS attacks TV Tropes suffered a few months prior.
This blog is frankly nothing to worry about IMO. In fact, my reaction was mostly to facepalm at the audacity of the allegations levied in our direction.
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After reading both that and the previous article, I'd have to say that, for one, we most certainly aren't involved in those events that they're blaming on us(*). Secondly, I noticed that, misblaming aside, the author sees things with a kind of logic that's different from ours (indeed, the first comment more or less accurately describes the logic that we have used behind the development of ATT). That's not to say that it's inherently better or worse than ours, but just that it's a different way of thinking. Of course, neither our nor their ways of thinking could be applicable to everyone (as the author of the articles seems to admit), but (if said author is reading this) consider it as being like offering, say, two different smartphones that use different OSes. If someone were to ask me which smartphone to get, I'd tell that person to consider what he/she wants out of a smartphone, and find out which OS would better fill those wants. In a similar manner, ATT and TVT are two loosely similar websites, who merely take different approaches to a similar subject. I would recommend that a user check out either site for some time and decide which governing philosophy would better suit what he/she wants out of a site based around cataloging tropes.
Of course, this is merely my own opinion, and I cannot speak for everyone here, but to the author I ask that you at least consider it (even if you ultimately decide to not agree with it) rather than dismissing it out of hand.
(*)For the record, assuming that the claims of such events occurring are indeed accurate, we can categorically state that the people actively causing such things are working only on their own initiative, and we do not condone their acts. Besides, we have less antagonistic plans to let others know that we exist anyway.
Another Troper
Unregistered
So that's Fighteer's blog? I didn't know that.
But there is something I don't get: How can they demand that people let them use their content "commercially" if TVTropes uses a non-commercial license?!?
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Well, if someone owns a particular bit of content, then they can make it available to different people under different terms. This is not particularly unusual; for instance a lot of Ruby stuff is (or at least was) released under the "License of Ruby", which allows people to use it under the terms of either of two different license structures. (One of which, confusingly, is called the "Ruby License".)
TV Tropes claiming to own the content may be dubious, but if you accept that interpretation, it's fairly reasonable for them to be able to release the content under both commercial and noncommercial licenses.
-Morgan.
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Some tech/status updates:
The categories have been filled in, which means our auto completion gadgets can be used to automatically add categories to pages instead of having to type them all out by hand. Any new categories can also be easily categorized by bot or by a preloaded template, so we're covered on that front for now.
I've also started sprucing up our trope and work templates with icons like they had on TV Tropes, as you can see here:
http://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki/Template:Work
Most of the icons were available on Wikimedia Commons, so I'll be filling in the blanks as much as possible except for the icons that were custom made for TVT, and in that case, I'll be creating a topic thread on our on site forum to submit icon idea for the remaining subpages.
We have also have better SectionHide code, created by Vorticity and QA tested by me. It recently uploaded to Orain and activated, but due to their caching, it may take awhile to be fully functional on a sitewide basis.
We can now start doing some massive site projects now that the category pages are filled in, and on that note, by community consensus, the Tropers Tales pages have been deleted.
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I notice that we now seem to have a huge number of single-entry categories. That seems unlikely to be either intentional or desirable...
-Morgan.
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It's a quirk of how categories work in MediaWiki. Some are artifacts we will be discarding, and some are a result of how categories from PmWiki translate in MediaWiki.
We will need to do a lot of cleanup, no doubt about that. In fact, by filling in the categories, I was able to identify all the Tropers Tales pages and got them deleted in one shot. There are some other categories with pages we may need to do the same for, and now that we have everything categorized, that will make the cleanup process much smoother.
Also, every trope page and work page has a category by design. That category would automatically apply to all subpages of the main page, so that is definitely intentional.
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It's a quirk that if tropes or works get subpages, they automatically have a category to go into. You should think of them as "tags" more than as "categories". So when you create a subpage for a single-page work, you don't have to edit the original page to make a category.
Yes, I could have filtered out pages that didn't share a category with other pages, but I thought keeping them would encourage subpages, and because my project already involved 3kloc and was a year behind schedule. If you don't agree with my call, at least you can write it off as another case of "worse is better". I hope.
It might have gotten lost above, but does anyone have advertising ideas? Or does everyone think the idea of doing image ads hypocritical for an ad-free site?
-- ∇×V
Another Troper
Unregistered
This guy has created some icons on TV Tropes, and they're free: http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/
Maybe we can make use of them, but then we should credit him.
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Quote:Another TroperThis guy has created some icons on TV Tropes, and they're free: http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/
Maybe we can make use of them, but then we should credit him.
Already intend to. In fact, those images were uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, so I was going to use most of those anyway, and since our wiki has the Instant Commons feature enabled, that will handle any attribution issues.
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On getting the word out:
I just noticed that the explanatory notes on today's Darths and Droids link to The Other Trope Wiki. Does anyone here already have a forum account there? If so, would it be appropriate to mention ATT there?
Because that's not a lightweight site when it comes to fen awareness... but creating a forum account just to advertise a website counts as spamming, in my book at least.
--
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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I think general good form in such a case would be to first contact a site administrator, and see what they think.
-Morgan.
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I've been thinking about approaching David Morgan-Mar for a quite some time (Darths & Droids, Irregular Webcomic). It's actually IWC that led me to TVT in the first place. I haven't figured out how to approach him yet. His site has the same NC license as TV Tropes, so I don't know what advantage he'd see from linking to us instead.
Edit: Can anyone explain to me the difference between Synopsis and Recap namespaces? Are they mergeable?
-- ∇×V
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"Synopsis" is "what happens in the entire work," while "recap" is "what has happened up to this point." At least, that's how I understand the words in regular English.
--
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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Off the top of my head I'd say they were safely mergeable.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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vorticity Wrote:I've been thinking about approaching David Morgan-Mar for a quite some time (Darths & Droids, Irregular Webcomic). It's actually IWC that led me to TVT in the first place. I haven't figured out how to approach him yet. His site has the same NC license as TV Tropes, so I don't know what advantage he'd see from linking to us instead.
Well, the NC license makes sense for the stuff he's doing, since it'd be dangerous to use most of that material commercially. It's not really a judgement on everything using a CC license ever. Also, we have the advantage of not being jerks claiming to own everything someone submits to our wiki ever, which I think many people will approve of.
Also, what's the worst that could happen? We -don't- get any free publicity out of it?
-Morgan.
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Some wiki updates:
We've merged "Synopsis" into "Recap" and "High Octane Nightmare Fuel" into "Nightmare Fuel". We have also modified the work templates to reflect the changes.
Also, this seems to have had a positive effect on performance, since without a ton of red links for some non existent page types, our Special:WantedPages (which used to keep timing out), now works just fine.
Some more cleanup will be taking place, so if you have suggestion for things that need fixed, please visit the following ATT tech forum topics and post suggestions for improvement:
http://allthetropes.orain.org/w/index. ... 1125210105
http://allthetropes.orain.org/w/index. ... 1125221113
I have a bot that will perform mass cleanups, but if you notice any errors, feel free to fix them manually (it just means the bot has less to do).
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Morganni Wrote:I think general good form in such a case would be to first contact a site administrator, and see what they think.
-Morgan. That's the approach I took with the SJGames forums.
The result was http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?t=120239]this post, incorporating suggestions that the moderator offered.
--
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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Some more joyous news:
Vorticity's bot account "Dai-Guard" has joined the clean up alongside my own "Gethbot"! Lots and lots of stuff can be fixed by automated processes now!
This is compared to TV Tropes, where they have to fix everything by hand.
We will also be getting several upgrades once the newest stable version of MediaWiki 1.22 is installed, like a much more functional editing interface, as well as a few other upgrades that should make adding content even more easy than it already is.
Most of this won't happen until after the holidays, so in the meantime:
HAPPY THANKSGIVING!
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Although it was a long fight, Dai-Guard has untied the textual knot of image markup on the wiki, reducing the number of pages that need to be fixed from 13271 to 292. It was a long struggle, and the bot had to get a replacement arm regex upgrades while running. The remaining ones have to be fixed manually, because they're pretty tricky -- or quote-box wasn't being used as image markup here. Existing images might need to be scaled down though -- replace "frame" with "thumb|300px" (or a similar size) to get things looking a bit better.
Dai-Guard is a bot running Perl's MediaWiki::Bot module. It's hand-coded, so it can do a lot of tricky fixes. The image fixes above took seven interconnected regular expressions. It was actually designed to be used by three coders.... ok, overly long gag, never mind.
Bob has been spending time on converting {{trope}} to {{work}} templates. But it's really so easy to do with a bot, that I'm probably going to set up a web interface to automatically do things like that.
Looks like most of the technical issues have been ironed out. I look forward to focusing on recruitment for December. Happy Thanksgiving, all!
-- ∇×V
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Okay, some tech updates.
I'm currently running a bot to fix a lot of pages with misplaced trope/work templates. Due to the hideously byzantine category structure Vorticity had to parse into MediaWiki, a lot of templates got put on the wrong pages, and now that we have an idea what we need to fix, Gethbot is fixing lots of pages to have the correct templates and will be running for several days.
I cannot guarantee I can get them all, though. I had to manually edit some of my bot runs to strip out certain pages so they wouldn't get screwed up, but for the most part, thousands of work pages (those got worse off than the trope pages for the most part) and their related subpages should eventually have the correct templates.
There may be some leftover pages I wasn't able to get that may need get fixed, but hopefully, I should be able to cut down the misplaced templates from several thousand pages to several dozen.
In the meantime, have fun on ATT, and I hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving.
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Happy Advent!
I suppose Advent isn't truly a celebratory time, despite all that happens in the malls and with the insistent happy Christmas music over the radio. Originally the liturgical season was more a time of contemplation, of the history of the past. And how that past foretells the promise of the future; a mix of historical and eschatological perspectives. And most of all, it's about waiting and expectation.
Many of the people who have posted in this thread, have waited a long time for a new wiki to come to fruition. And finally, we're almost there. A website is up, the large majority of the content kinks are worked out, and it's a perfectly serviceable timesink. I mean wiki. IRC is becoming an active place. Some things are in progress, like rewriting policy. And there's going to be cleanup of the import and TVT-specific pages for a long time to come.
But it still feels almost done to me. What I'm missing are all of the people. The people who watch the obscure films, who watch the latest anime, who read the wierd fanfic, and want to share it all with us. That's what I'm waiting for.
The Spanish word for waiting, esperar, also means hoping. The hope that "if you build it, they will come". So that's what I want for Christmas -- a community to share All The Tropes with, so we can have fun together.
So thanks to everyone who has waited for this project. Every other day or so, we pick up another user, so we're headed in the right direction. Just wait a little longer, and have faith, and we'll have a great wiki going into 2014.
Anyway, this week is going to be policy writing week for me. I think my favorite of all of the TVT policies is [[Zero Context Example]. As usual, it's written from the point of view of "your content sucks, rewrite it", but the idea that we should describe what we're talking about is sound. How do people feel about a [context needed] template (or "[context?]"), much like the [citation needed] links on Wikipedia?
We don't actually need a citation, of course, but things like that do make it easier to find pages that need help. After all, a ZCE is just a good example waiting to be written.
GethN7 has been asking me what to do with the Made of Win archives. Most of those tropers aren't around with us, but they could be in the future. I don't know what to do with it -- I'm leaning slightly keep, GethN7 wants delete. Any thoughts?
Anyway, let me know if you see any egregious policy pages, either here or on the forums. And please keep telling your friends about us.
-- ∇×V
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I like the idea of keeping the Made of Win archives. But then again, I had (and still have) one of the highest MOW scores on TVT.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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Well, to explain my logic, I don't want to delete the Made Of Win page (which also has TVT specific content). We could always repurpose that for ATT. The archives are expendable IMO:
My issues are two fold:
One: They are MOW moments of TV Tropes. They don't really have a lot of relevance or bearing on ATT, but I can understand why others may wish to archive them, but I wouldn't miss them personally.
Two: They will be a nightmare to cleanup, even if for archival reasons. They have a TON of red links, which add to our already massive backlog of red links, which slows down our search engine (due to bloating the database with non existence links) since it's already having to wade through a massive tidal wave of legit and non existent links to find stuff, and the less red links we have the less time our search engine will take when searching.
If we could cleanup the red links, I wouldn't be opposed to keeping them, but given the added burden they place on our already barely average search engine performance, that's why I'd like their removal.
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