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I'm (tentatively) thinking of going for "assert our rights, and make preparations for just in case FE and co. decide to sue us."
Of course, there is a (rather idealistic) part of me that hopes that, assuming TVT's administration loses its case, TVT itself could still be salvaged. Most idealistically (but, realistically, not all that likely to happen--though I can still dream!), ATT's administration takes over, and the combined site keeps the name "TV Tropes" (since it's gotten such popularity under that name; why confuse others? Or that's my logic, anyway...).
But I digress...
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Alright, tech update:
I deployed a beta version of the Darth Wiki style sheet on my sandbox page here:
http://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki/User:GethN7/sandbox
Now, Orain has several skins installed, so if you have an account, you can see how it works on other skins by changing the skin in your user preferences and reloading my sandbox page in another tab, but that link will let you see how the style sheet works on the Vector skin (default skin).
I was not sure which skins are preferred by most users of ATT, but I'm attempting to do what I can to please fans of all skins, so any advice or critiques would be helpful.
Note: Modern probably looks the worst, not much I can do to fix it without screwing up the other skins.
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The main text looks good, but the blue and grey on dark grey, not so much.
On a completely different topic...
I spent some time this evening going through the Made of Win archives, looking for old favorites (no, not just anything with my handle on it ). If you ever wanted proof that the Stop Having Fun Guys guys took over the wiki, try and find the things that won MOWs -- if they were the least bit funny or whimsical, they're gone. It's almost like someone used the MOW pages as a shopping list for deletions.
(Obligatory disclaimer: Impression gained from a not-very random sampling of MOW entries and not by thorough survey. Your results may vary. Closed course, professional reader.)
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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Another tech update:
I've cleaned up the Darth Wiki style sheet quite a bit, increased the color brightness of the page content area so all skins should look good, may need further work, but it's about done in my opinion.
Another thing I just implemented is a new layout for the Edittools gadget (enabled by default in user preferences) that places a box at the bottom of the screen with some of the most common templates used on ATT that can be placed by clicking on one of the buttons for the templates you want to use to place them on the page. Any suggestions to improve this are appreciated.
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That reminds me, I came across a page with a {{center|}} template, which was clearly unimplemented. Is this something we're going to implement, or don't need, or what?
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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I wonder when they decided to Stop Having Fun.
I
found this today, and it's still live on the TVT site, though obviously
no one ever looks at
it. Administrivia.AdministrativePolicy (a.k.a. The
Troping Code) Wrote:The two part credo that keeps us from having a
lot of rules:
ahahahaha. Not a lot of...
ahahah ... that link
hahahaha.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/article_hist ... icy&more=t
is more on the sad side -- a policy slowly bowdlerized, then redirected to "Family Friendly". I've restored the 2010 version for
now, which is actually feasible, but I haven't thought through the
policy. Still, targeting 13+ is the right age group for multiple reasons, including legal ones.
We are way, way too policy heavy -- and this is coming from a guy who wrote policy for fun in college for four years.
Anyway, I made a new page called The Troper's Code, the entire contents of which I will repost here: Quote:The short credo that inspired all our Wiki Policy:
- Educate,
- Entertain,
- Have fun, and
- Play nice!
There's more buried in those links, but that's all you really need to know to get started.
The last two links actually work, and should seem familiar to all of you. "There Is No One True Way" is now wiki policy. This is Bob's fault, and I look forward to DW1.
We could always implement {{center}}. You can do the same thing as it by just doing , but I suppose a template is easier.
-- ∇×V
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Nice stuff, Brent.
I only asked about the {{center}} thing because I found one on a page already, and unlike other "unimplemented templates" it was clearly deliberate. An artifact of your translation software, I presume.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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...is there any alternative to a "504 error" when you're searching for a word or term that apparently doesn't exist on the wiki? I mean, I'd really like to really be sure that there isn't an article for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dollyrots]The Dollyrots before I decide to write one...
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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There is an alternative, http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3A ... +Dollyrots I hope they've crawled the whole site by now.
Yeah, I'm not happy with the search situation either. Bugging #orain now.
Edit: Nope, they haven't indexed everything. But they do have a decent number of pages, unlike Bing which only has 3 random pages. PROTIP: Google searching a URL seems to force Google to index the page in question.
From some reading, I get the feeling that Mediawiki search, once it doesn't find a title, does something akin to SELECT pagename FROM allpages WHERE content LIKE "%$searchterm%";, which would explain the slowness. This problem definitely needs to be addressed with some add-on. If nothing else, I'm considering the Google Search extension (which doesn't require the AdSense censorship regime but will have ads :'( ) unless our admins come up with something better.
-- ∇×V
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I wanted to add I will tentatively support Google search as an option, with the caveat that even if we do have some ads, all we are doing is taking advantage of Google's search backend and they have no say/control over our content.
Otherwise, I would be quite willing to be content with our half assed search feature, as I personally refuse to compromise or censor our content just to make advertisers happy. Also, it would be nice if, even if this option was enabled, those with accounts could opt out of having to see the ads.
I would also support a better alternative from the Orain tech staff as a much more preferable alternative.
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Policy statements have been made about advertising on ATT. Why give detractors something to point at?
--
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:Policy statements have been made about advertising on ATT. Why give detractors something to point at? Which is one of the main reasons why I am so reluctant to just say yes on this idea. I would consider it a "last resort" option at present if we absolutely had no alternative, but for now, I'm much more open to any other solution to improve our search capabilities without having to use Google's search backend.
If we could use their backend without ads, that would be ideal, but since that doesn't seem to be the case, I prefer any ad-free alternative at present, though I can't deny that Google search would be much better than out current searching capability, but as I said, I'd rather we exhaust all other options before we seriously considered that option.
Besides, as I stated to Brent: I absolutely refuse to use anything from Google to improve our site capability if it would restrict or censor our content in any way, and I would rather live with our current searching options than risk that.
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Yeah, it turns out I'm a pragmatist most of the time. And despite everything, having a major site feature be broken versus doing something that only appears to violate our ethics, well, I'd choose the former. The ethic in question is advertising doesn't make editorial decisions. If that's clear, there's no slippery slope.
But this is a problem for our wiki provider too. When they're around on the weekend, we do need to have a talk about this. They can't have a site that claims to be ad-free, but is only functional if you add optional ads. I'm fairly sure we're their largest site in terms of content, so a lot of the kinks are going to have to be worked out through us.
Also props to GethN7 for continually opposing me. We're definitely not a culture of yes men. (We do actually agree on a lot of stuff, and when that happens we just *do it* and let questions get asked later.)
Anyway, on another point. So... Nakama. Actually, let's back up a bit. I was watching Lupin III, and started to think about the tropes applying to a certain Inspector Zenigata. He apparently used to be the trope namer for "Sympathetic Inspector Antagonist" which is, if you think about it, kind of a Word Salad Title and not much fun. It's a contrast to "Inspector Javert" the trope, which doesn't have an explicative title. Now M. Javert is arguably more well known in the West, and the perfect exemplar, but if you don't know who he is you don't know to look. These are the core arguments of all the FORKS and SPOONS and TABLEWARE groups, once again.
And then I look at what happened with Nakama. There is a big debate to change the name which was quashed the first time; the second time "True Companions" was forced through over a lot of objection. And then renamed pretty much everywhere wiki-wide. Two established communities want to refer to the same concept by different names. How about we Take a Third Option: can't we just use both names?
Wikipedia does it quite a bit, where there are multiple things bolded at the top. This is really an extension of the There Is No One True Way policy -- I just need to know if there something makes this a bad idea. The worst I can think of is having people make two trope listings on the same work.
We actually discussed this issue a long time ago for two pages -- I didn't want to resolve it then because we were getting pretty far afield when we needed to know stuff like "what do we name our site" and all. But for now, this is the direction I want to head.
If we did this, there are two wiki features we could use out of the box: redirects and {{DISPLAYTITLE}} (custom titles). Not sure if the custom titles are necessary. We could consider doing something with the alt text descriptions, like we discussed earlier, but I'm pretty sure it's above my current PHP skill level. I'd have to hire someone to implement it, or put it off until we found a volunteer.
-- ∇×V
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Ad-Supported Search: We could use this if we put on the search box a disclaimer that performing a search sends one to a third-party site that ATT does not control. It's a kludge, and it won't look pretty, but it'll be stated that the ads aren't on ATT.
No One True Way: Redirects are your friend, yes. On the FenWiki (which also uses MediaWiki in the back-end), "Trekkie" and "United Federation of Planets" both point to the same page, and everybody's happy. We haven't implemented DISPLAYTITLE yet, but our target audience is different.
--
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 am completely against ads in any way. The terms now may favor us, but terms get changed oh-so-often in the world of Internet commerce. I don't want to turn around in two years and discover that suddenly we have to adhere to Google's censorship standards after all.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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I will echo Bob's sentiments, and add on that some people out there have had problems with malware being installed via ads. Probably not on Google's ad service, but definitely elsewhere.
--
"You know how parents tell you everything's going to fine, but you know they're lying to make you feel better? Everything's going to be fine." - The Doctor
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Unless anyone else has anything to add, I plan to go along with the general consensus and reject Google search as an enhancement to our wiki.
In other news, I had a question concerning policy: What's everyone's take on "friendly vandalism"?
On TV Tropes, they used to allow other tropers to make comments each other's troper pages until some trolls parabombed tons of troper pages with malicious vandalism, resulting in Fast Eddie disabling troper page editing except by the troper who the page was for.
Me, I'm cool with "friendly vandalism". Unlike in PmWiki, we can easily revert malicious vandalism, and we can protect pages from unwanted edits if we need to, and I don't feel it's necessary to remove something fun because you don't have an effective way to deal with trolls (a problem MW doesn't have, since it has lots of ways to combat malicious editors).
However, before we draw up any policy, anyone else have an opinion on the subject?
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I'm not even sure what "friendly vandalism" is supposed to mean. I'm going to guess you're talking about the Discordian concept of constructive chaos, in which case I'm all for it.
Oh, I think I solved the issue about thread mode. The page is being demoted from a Wiki Policy to a Style Guide. And like all style guides, they are useful up until the point that it is better to break the rules. In fact, most of the wiki policies from TVT will find their way into the style guide, if we keep them. Because we really don't need to ban people over the proper use of bulleted lists, or talk down to them in telling them how to edit.
Well, I had great Santa Lucia Day -- a big Christmas bonus from work, Santa is now all lit up on the roof, round 9 of the NFR was exciting (as always), and I saw a shooting star. I hope everyone else is having a good time too.
-- ∇×V
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vorticity Wrote:I'm not even sure what "friendly vandalism" is supposed to mean. I'm going to guess you're talking about the Discordian concept of constructive chaos, in which case I'm all for it. Academic freedom includes collaboration, if I recall correctly. If that's what y'all're talking about, why should the troper pages be exempt from it?
--
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:vorticity Wrote:I'm not even sure what "friendly vandalism" is supposed to mean. I'm going to guess you're talking about the Discordian concept of constructive chaos, in which case I'm all for it. Academic freedom includes collaboration, if I recall correctly. If that's what y'all're talking about, why should the troper pages be exempt from it?
I agree. However, it would probably be best to let tropers post a template or create a section for that sort of thing on their user page, so other tropers know it's permissible to post friendly comments.
That aside, some more tech updates:
I've finally tweaked the Darth Wiki template to what should be it's final state. The Modern skin doesn't look very good, but I've given up on trying to fix it since it just breaks all the other skins, so I advise against looking at any Darth Wiki templated pages with the Modern skin. In fact, if no one minds, I may ask the Orain staff to just comment it out so it's not an option on our wiki (it looks really dull by default).
Also, I added some fixes to resolve some issues with the stock Monaco skin when using WikiEditor (and a few issues that happen even without it).
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How about it's always permissible, unless the editor posts a message to the effect of "don't edit my page, it's egregiously perfect."?
Also no one cares about different skins except you, GethN7. I'm assuming, anyway.
My tech update is that I am trolling the Orain staff into fixing the fulltext search timeouts. Basically, they need to get another server set up to handle them, in addition to some search backend software, so I'm going to dangle cash and keep trolling until something happens.
And we are down from November 15 in pageviews. Which is not entirely unexpected, seeing as we were getting views from BTL and TVT people at that time. But yes, we really need to promote.
-- ∇×V
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Quote:Also no one cares about different skins except you, GethN7. I'm assuming, anyway.
Oh, I don't know. I might, if I get around to checking them out. And as we gain registered members, we'll no doubt get other folks who will, too. Quote:And we are down from November 15 in pageviews.
Is there a special page to see that, or is it a report from the host that you check?
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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Bob Schroeck Wrote:Quote:Also no one cares about different skins except you, GethN7. I'm assuming, anyway.
Oh, I don't know. I might, if I get around to checking them out. And as we gain registered members, we'll no doubt get other folks who will, too.
Well, good news.
I finally managed to add some more fixes, including several for external/visited links so they are readable in all skins, and I even got Modern to look decent (it's not as good as the other skins, looking normal aside from some darker borders, but that's about as good as I could arrange things).
Unless anyone has any objections (feel free to go to my sandbox page on the wiki and test it in all skins), I plan to run a bot job to mass tag all the Darth Wiki pages with the new style sheet.
Sugar Wiki should follow soon, and that should be a cakewalk compared to the Darth Wiki sheet.
Also, I shall soon be rolling out some gadgets for those with rollbacker and administrator privileges, which should make many tasks easier for us sysops.
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vorticity Wrote:But yes, we really need to promote.
I've had a few thoughts about that. One such idea would be to put a link to ATT in the signatures that we use on other forums, perhaps along with a suitable description (e.g. "All The Tropes: For those who want TV Tropes to be fun again", or something like that). If anyone else has any ideas, please share it with us!
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Mm. "For those who want Tropes to be fun again", I think would be better. No point invoking the competition.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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