All The Tropes Wiki Project, Part VII

[TvT Rivals]

We will use at least some advertising (more for lurkers, less for active
tropers). ... But we definitely don't want to sell user
data.

Are there advertising networks out there that don't collect user data, or are you planning on doing direct sales? I guess the good news is that ATT doesn't have to worry about its competitors providing a better user experience.

Ouch.

But you shall get your answer: We are checking out alternatives. It says a lot about Google Ads when you can't find any disadvantages on their WP page... anyway, if we add ads to the wiki, we'll try to make it as safe as possible. Talking about both the added code and the anonymity of our users. If necessary, we'll write our own software for that too.

BTW, you know what's paradoxical? You guys kept the old license that'd allow you to make money - but you chose not to. Fast Eddie went to a shameless level with advertising - and changed the license to non-commercial. Even if the unauthorized license change hadn't been a problem, that's wrong somehow.

We've been there for years, but later, the wiki lost its fun. ... Then we learned that you had made the site rip, and downloaded it.

Tell me about it. I have really done any troping in years. The programming part keeps me interested though. As for the site rip ... I was a much worse programmer back then. I apologize about the quality of the dataset, with all of its duplicate pages and such. I have improved much since that day, but still know nothing. (Also, CSS Zen Garden looks fun, but also overdesigned for real websites.)

1. You mean you haven't? That's kinda sad to hear... no, we had some other users in mind who spoilt our troping experience. Maybe one day we can chat about this.
2. Eh, we had to check for double examples anyway. (Work and character pages; main pages and subpages; Fridge Logic and Headscratchers...)
3. About CSS Garden: True - but it still makes a nice inspiration.

but then again, Wikipedia is also struggling with their WYSIWYG editor.

Less so than you'd think based on the press. It was pretty shaky at launch, but it's improved quite a lot since then. The real issue is that forcing change onto Wikipedians will always result in chaos.

How are they handling their thousands of templates? That would be the most interesting question to solve.

Open Source is great, but in our special case, there's a problem: Our
software is highly specialized - it's great for a troping wiki, but not
for much else. The only ones who could put it to use are us - and the TV
Tropes crew. Just the folks we don't want to schlep for free for. You
understand our problem?

I do see your issues, but I reject the premise that it would only be useful for a troping wiki. The central idea of the Portland Pattern Repository is so close to troping wikis that you can basically replace the word "software" with "entertainment" in the purpose and it makes sense.

I also reject the idea that software can automatically be used for free if it's open source. I mean, look at Unix. That's like the classic example. It took some 30 years until we got a FOSS alternative to Unix and you're not really concerned *that* far down the road, are you? There are legitimate reasons to keep your application closed-source, but at this point it seems like a matter of taste.

Well, if you have a suggestion, or know someone who'd pay good money for a modified version of our wiki software, feel free to tell us. But for the moment, we haven't thought about it. Yes, we are no salescritters.

Since our wiki is built upon a real DB, we can rate all the pages,
whether they are good clean family fun or hentai guro. Tropers can use
their settings to decide which pages they want to see. If you don't want
to see the real bad stuff, you'll get a 404 when you go there by
mistake. Oh, and people will have to make an account before they can
read up about bad stuff. Good enough?

Actually, that's elegant. I worry about the edit wars on what acceptable concepts are, but this is at the core a good idea.

Thanks for the praise! But yes, we do think that a fiction wiki where people can choose to filter out pages based on their amount of sex or violence does have a killer feature. - About the edit wars, we can worry after the launch.

Most of the ideas I'm coming up with involve forcing Mediawiki to do things that it really wasn't designed to do. I have the core of an idea/implementation to enable Pmwiki traces (a.k.a TVT index footers) into a Mediawiki footer. I'm not really sure if people even want that feature, but it's something that could be toggled. I think that if I was truly clever with Javascript, I might be able to come up with something that mimics your example sorting thing. No new ideas, I'm afraid.

jQuery is a great language, but this stretches things too much. If all wiki pages had the standard structure Quote / intro text / example caption / examples / stinger, it'd work. Since this isn't the case, a script would mess up too often and confuse lists in the intro text for proper example lists.

Yeah, we had to check many pages manually, and are still finding some errors now and then, but it was the only way.

Did you get our mail with the attachment (the custom titles for pages)?

Yup! At the time, I had no idea how to harvest it. I have a whole 4MB file of me attempting to rename page titles on translation to the new wiki syntax. I only really got half of what we needed, and had to bot a lot more fixes after launch. I'm sure we'll have to figure out someone to go through it.

We can imagine that. We never throw our old stuff away.

As long as we are the only ones using the software (we don't plan to sell it), we use our time for other stuff.

That's too bad, I was thinking of buying it. Totally serious here.

Now if you hadn't told us you liked trolling so much... ;-) But yeah: For concrete financial offers, by you or other people, please use PMs or mail.

Read carefully what we wrote, there's a hint hidden in it.

And if you keep teasing me like this, I'm rapidly going to become disinterested. I asked because I saw your "hints" and could not figure them out.

Hey, it's a script language commonly used in LAMP, and PHP is right out. - Would it make a difference to you if we used Python instead of Perl? Or Perl 5 instead of Perl 6, or Python 2 instead of 3?

We don't comment on that. The Administration of the future troping wiki has to stay neutral.

This line, more than anything else you've said, makes me think you're unsuited to run a troping wiki. Good luck on trying to run a fan site without passion. Hint: there is a difference between having favorites and playing favorites.

Well, if we had no passion about this, we wouldn't have started this wiki thing at all.

And we do plan to use it for our ideas too - at the moment, we have several hundred kiB of new trope examples we plan to add. Not to mention our interest in the question how to write great fiction.

But as said, as admins we have to stay neutral. That's why we'll join the wiki later, as soon as there's a small userbase. Using our old screen names. (Apropos screen names: On our wiki, you can choose a login that's different from your screen name. That means additional security, since someone who knows that our screen name is "The Administration" still won't know our login name.)