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Jorlem Wrote:I've seen that in a number of forums actually. Some boards don't like it when people bring drama from other boards to theirs.
You might have gotten a better response if your OP had mentioned some of the other things TVTropes/Fast Eddie were doing while acting all high-and-mighty, and explained what was going on with Bob as the most extreme case known. As it was, I could see how the post could come off as you trying to draw the SBers into a fight between Bob and Fast Eddie, instead of trying to raise awareness of how the admins at TVTropes are treating contributors and creators, as your thread title suggested. Honestly, I was hoping that they would have realized that this could easily have been any one of their number. Unfortunately, they seem a lot more apathetic than I estimated, and only a few really clicked to the fact that I mentioned Bob's works in GURPS and not just his fan works. Even fewer still got the idea that maybe Bob just doesn't want to be associated with these guys anymore.
I suppose it really is my fault in a way. I could have presented the OP in a manner that would have been less Bob vs. Fast Eddie and more 'TV Tropes is now DPRK. Discuss.' Unfortunately, as quickly as things have been moving I didn't have much time to move on it. Not to mention I was between two twelve-hour shifts on a temp labor job.
Personally, though, I do feel a bit miffed with the mods at Spacebattles. Sure, I did technically break the rules, but refusing to discuss the meltdown at TV Tropes is a bit like sticking your fingers in your ears and going "NYAH NYAH!" Especially on a site where fan writing is their bread and butter, so to speak. I'm considering deleting my account there just on this point alone.
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It appears we're back at the head of Ask The Tropers. Someone there found this thread, saw the mention of the unreverted changes, and then Elbruno went after the ones he missed. Glad to see that they have their priorities straight.
They also seem to be systematically misreading what I'm writing here, and viewing it through the filters of their own prejudices. For instance, completely missing that the C&D was on a story of mine copied in its entirety without permission. And failing to notice that I expected things to be reverted, which is why my edit reasons and my revised troper page asked them to respect that out of courtesy.
Still, gotta love the bombastic adolescent self-righteousness of some of the posts, with gorilla-like chest-banging at how clever they are for "outwitting" me. I left the wiki without a single warning, challenging no one, without getting into a fight with Fast Eddie, and with as little fuss as I could get away with and still do what I hoped to do. They are doing more to publicize this and keep it in the community focus -- and thus perhaps get more and more people wondering what the fuss is about, and possibly raising doubts in more users' minds about the new policies -- than I ever could had I decided to put my activist hat back on and get myself kicked out for being a troublemaker. It's not something I actually intended but I'm certainly enjoying it.
I'll take exception at the characterization of removing my works as censorship. Censorship is when you destroy information out a desire to keep it from someone you don't want to have it. I destroyed no data. I simply wanted to remove any possible suggestion that I endorsed the wiki censorship regime by allowing my works to remain associated with the wiki. I don't want that kind of taint on my work. My work remains -- I did nothing more than erase an address in an address book, not blow up the house at that address.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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Hmmm... Do links from TV Tropes website have some sort of referrer tag? It'd be nice that any traffic with that tag get's a specialized welcome page. "Hi. Thanks for the interest, but just so you know I really don't like being associated with those guys. Hope you enjoy my work anyhow. Click to continue."
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Haven't the faintest idea. If I really cared to do that much work, I'd just offline the relevant parts of my site for a few months, and ask Jeanne if she could do the same for the RAAC files. It's not like you guys don't have your own archive copies, right?
-- Bob
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Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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Eh, you asked politely not to be associated with TVTropes in any way. They decided to ignore you, and have even deleted your troper page where you made the polite request. Fuck 'em, ignore 'em, and lets all move on.
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I would've said it more diplomatically, but yeah.
-- Bob
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Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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I'm diplomatic. Sort of.
Well, I saw the word in the dictionary once!
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I'm just concerned about one thing. Some of the people there seem to be taking it rather personally that I'm not vanishing into the outer darkness, wailing and gnashing my teeth like a good little ban-ee ought to, but am instead sitting on the edge of that outer darkness watching what they're doing. Unlike them, my entire life is in the open on the web, from my wife's name to my employer. I'm just worried that one of them might decide to attack me a bit more directly than by saying nasty things in ATT.
-- Bob
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Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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Just my two bits on this:
Bob, you said this: "After all, the wiki staff didn't violate my copyrights, a user did. "
Thats actually the purpose of the DMCA safe harbor provision. It only applies if a user unaffiliated with the site posted the material. They are actually obliged to delete the offending material within a certain time frame or be liable for violation if they do not.
If they posted it themselves, they are boned.
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It's moot, Vlad. Fast Eddie took the material down almost as fast as he got the email, and acknowledged in the ATT thread it was an infringement.
-- Bob
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Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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Bob Schroeck Wrote:I'm just concerned about one thing. Some of the people there seem to be taking it rather personally that I'm not vanishing into the outer darkness, wailing and gnashing my teeth like a good little ban-ee ought to, but am instead sitting on the edge of that outer darkness watching what they're doing. Unlike them, my entire life is in the open on the web, from my wife's name to my employer. I'm just worried that one of them might decide to attack me a bit more directly than by saying nasty things in ATT.
While I can't say that such a thing can't happen, I'll point out that it's substantially easier to attack somebody online than it is to attack him offline.
And online attacks rarely have long-term consequences. (Remember back in 2006, when somebody decided to smear my good name online? It didn't take, despite the police getting involved.)
--
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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robkelk Wrote:Remember back in 2006, when somebody decided to smear my good name online? Actually, no, I don't. Which proves your point.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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Out of curiosity, how much of the Troper community is actually on Fast Eddie's side? I can't imagine that it'd be a whole lot with people getting ban-hammered left and right for merely questioning what's going on.
And that said, has there been any word yet on a replacement for TV Tropes?
Oh... one more thing... Does anyone here do anything on Wikipedia? If so, then maybe we should... I dunnno... do something about the Wikipedia article on TV Tropes? Because it's woefully inadequate. (Not saying to start an edit war - please keep it well within Wikipedia's guidelines and standards! But I'm pretty sure that it's a good place to start getting the message out that TV Tropes isn't fun anymore.)
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I have a Wikipedia account, and use it sometimes... but I'd be hesitant to edit the TVTropes page right now because everything I know about this mess is second-hand and uncited.
--
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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Quote:Out of curiosity, how much of the Troper community is actually on Fast Eddie's side?
I doubt most have noticed or even care one way or the other.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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robkelk Wrote:I have a Wikipedia account, and use it sometimes... but I'd be hesitant to edit the TVTropes page right now because everything I know about this mess is second-hand and uncited. Why not just put something on the talk page? You know, along the line of "Something funny is going on here. Maybe it should be investigated and cited?" Then again, as Fast Eddie is quick to quash anything about his pogrom, so I don't know if there'd be anything to cite myself. Any ideas?
Wait... Here's something that may be cited. http://tvtropes.org/pmwik...8hpbezck0s&page=2#46
It's not third party, but it's at least a start.
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Wait..... 5P stands for "Panel to Purge Pornography, Paedophilia and Perversity
Mutate: People Protesting Pornography, Perversions and Paedophilia.
Nah.... doing what I'm thinking of doing would be just plain childish, wouldn't it? That almost parody's itself without being bothered. I'd swear it was an actual parody if I didn't know better.
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?
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Dartz Wrote:Wait..... 5P stands for "Panel to Purge Pornography, Paedophilia and Perversity
Mutate: People Protesting Pornography, Perversions and Paedophilia.
Nah.... doing what I'm thinking of doing would be just plain childish, wouldn't it? That almost parody's itself without being bothered. I'd swear it was an actual parody if I didn't know better. No mutation needed, really, Dartz. Not with a sentence like this: "5P, or P5, stands for "Posse for the Prevention of Pedophilia and Pure
Porn", or alternatively "Panel to Purge Pornography, Paedophilia and
Perversity", or perhaps "Panel Preventing Perversity, Pornography and
Paedoshit". It doesn't really matter. You get the gist."
They're all but asking for it. With a big shiny Troll Face(tm). 
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But 5P's going in the notes file for later use. It's just too funny.
The other option involved the username 'Comstock'.
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--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?
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Oh man, I wondered what had happened to you on TVtropes, given that you sort of just dropped off the map. It was fun editing the UF page with you, Bob.
I guess I should have put two and two together, but it was hard for us younglings to figure out what was going on over there at first. I eventually did try to make a story on Slashdot called "TV Tropes begins Censorship Binge", but it never made it to the main page.
I've been forced to leave organizations on principled stands before -- both when I was chair of their respective boards of directors, oddly enough (and both 501(c)3 nonprofits) -- and one of them a wiki organization. And it was a similar problem on that wiki too: a lack of community buy-in for changes. So, I know how you're feeling. And I know that you should be just starting to enjoy the more free time by about now.
I did finally decide to start reading Drunkard's Walk, and I found it from following a link on the Fanfic/DrunkardsWalk from this week. And I'm enjoying it quite a bit. So it's not all bad.
-- ∇×V
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05-17-2012, 02:40 PM
(This post was last modified: 04-14-2022, 09:28 AM by Bob Schroeck.)
Thanks, Brent. I'm glad you're enjoying DW -- it'll probably come as good news that Chris and I are finally finishing up the last chapter of DW5 this week, so you won't be left hanging -- unlike so many of my older fans, who've been waiting for the two of us to weather various personal crises and other problems for nigh unto three and a half years now.
Oh, in case you're interested, here's what I left on my troper page before Fast Eddie stalinized me: Quote:If you're looking for information on Warner Brothers cartoons, see Looney Tunes.
Looney Toons is professional and fan writer Robert M. Schroeck. He became a troper in the summer of 2004, an unimaginably primitive time when the wiki was hosted on the long-gone sytes.net and there were less than sixty tropers in existence including the site admins. As of May 2012 he was, to the best of his ability to determine, the single oldest remaining active member of the wiki outside of the staff.
He is personally responsible for writing nearly six hundred pages on the wiki, including almost a dozen Tropes Of Legend. In response to finding an empty page labeled "Anime" during his first visit, he spent his first few weeks on the wiki creating the entire Anime section from scratch -- including the now-infamous Naughty Tentacles page responsible for The Second Google Incident eight years later in Spring 2012.
He accidentally created the entire Useful Notes hierarchy by writing a (now long gone) page called "Useful Notes On Japan". This inspired other people to write their own useful notes about other cultures/topics until there were so many it was necessary to make an entire branch of the Wiki to store them.
He long considered TV Tropes one of his two "homes" on the Net, the other being his own forums.
For more than twenty years he has been quietly (and sometimes not-so-quietly) active in online anti-censorship and intellectual freedom movements. He was a tangential party to the infamous Secret Service/Steve Jackson Games debacle in 1990, and as a result became one of the very first members of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. In the 1990s he worked with local and national groups to help defeat US government attacks on privacy and freedom of expression including the Clipper Chip and the so-called "Communications Decency Act" of 1996. He continues to be active in these causes.
In the spring of 2012, the fallout from The Second Google Incident -- along with the subsequent imposition of heightened restrictions on "acceptable content" for the wiki -- convinced him that he could no longer contribute to the wiki and remain true to his principles.
In May 2012, he ceased to participate in the TV Tropes Wiki.
Mr. Schroeck politely requests that none of his works, either professional or fan, be cited, quoted, reviewed or linked to in the wiki, and that any excisions he has made to this end be allowed to stand, out of respect for his rights as their author.
Just as a point of reference, there were almost 11,000 troper pages at the time I wrote that.
I suspect it's no coincidence that none of the original tropers, who built the site from the ground up with the sweat of their brow, have cared to remain.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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Quote:Oh, in case you're interested, here's what I left on my troper page before Fast Eddie stalinized me:
I prefer "memory holed". After all, I did co-found that one club in college. I really see nothing there worth deleting, really.
Quote:I suspect it's no coincidence that none of the original tropers, who
built the site from the ground up with the sweat of their brow, have
cared to remain.
Actually, I've seen similar trends on other wikis, including those with more or less absentee administrators. Wiki builders do a huge amount of work creating the content, but are gradually replaced by wiki maintainers. There's always a disconnect between early adopters and those who come later, seeking to impose order on the organic chaos. Builders tend to drift away for a lot of reasons; the most common are: finding more fertile pastures to create new things, getting tired of the old things, or conflict with the new order. In many ways, things are just less fun when there's not red links or dashed underlines of new articles to create. I'm a builder myself, and it's certainly a lot less fun for me when there aren't that many things to create any more.
Now, I know nothing of the specific history of TVT, but they made almost no effort to inform the community what was going on while they were implementing a censorship panel. If things like that are typical, then yeah, surely that would drive out the early adopters.
This whole affair has hit me in the middle of my TVTropesWillRuinYourLife cycle, so I'm still editing over there. It is encouraging me to edit a lot less though, and I've been exercising my Discordian skills in TRS -- getting replies like:
Quote:This is probably the first time (in recent memory, at least) there's ever been consensus for making a Chekhov snowclone as opposed to renaming one.
But honestly, the sooner I get myself off the habit, the sooner I'll be able to get real writing done.
-- ∇×V
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Love the Lum-Asuka Avatar, BTW.
''We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat
them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.''
-- James Nicoll
Angryoptimist
Unregistered
Wow. I had no idea this was going on. Words fail me.
Eternal September. That sums up my feelings, I guess.
I'll miss TVTropes. This is really such a shame.
Sorry you got all that drama thrown on you, Bob. And double sorry about the recent turn of events, here. I recall that you really liked this thing; you're probably twice as sorry as I to see it go this way. I've... really got nothing soothing or helpful to say about that. 'These things tend to happen with big communities' isn't a terribly soothing or helpful thing, I think.
Two great tastes that go great together!
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Vorticity: Glad to see other tropers, even if it's a mere handful, are becoming aware that something's wrong. Also, totally digging your avatar there as I am a bit of a fan of both characters.
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