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All The Tropes Wiki Project, Part VII
07-13-2016, 01:19 PM
(This post was last modified: 02-09-2018, 10:25 AM by Bob Schroeck.)
Since the last thread hit 300 posts, here's a new one.
Just made an executive decision. On Essential Anime, there was a link to a TVTropes discussion thread where changes to the page were to be discussed before being made. I've changed that to asking that changed to the page be discussed on the Talk Page. (Yes, this is because I had a list of proposed additions...)
--
Rob Kelk
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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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Oh yes, nothing to be worried about there. Every time we come across a link to a TVT thread or forum, we need to change it to point to our counterpart, if it's something important. And if it's not -- like a pointer to a specific image-picking thread justifying the removal of an image, for instance -- just get rid of it.
I'm going to be doing a lot of that as I slowly make my way through the administrivia and historical pages and whip them into a shape more suitable for the wiki as it exists today.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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On the tech front, put in a feature request for our new skin idea, LinkSuggest, and another extension to add automatic page headers/footers to certain pages and namespaces as an extension of our edit tips feature:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:PageNotice
Update: Page Notice is a go:
http://allthetropes.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Top-notice-ns-8
The top message is the page notice, the bottom one is the actual page content, this is a sample of what we can do with this extension, which allows for a custom message at the top and/or bottom of every namespace.
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Just started getting 503s on ATT and the freebie wiki. I assume something's going on with the servers...?
EDIT: Ten minutes later and ATT's back.
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We had an incident awhile back where someone apparently impersonated an ATT admin. Turns out it was a mistake.
It was QuestionableSanity, who had admin rights since the Orain days.
Miraheze Staff, with my assent, are confirming it's the real QS, though I'm confident it is, and I have asked for an explanation for posting an admin level statement on a non admin account, that's a faux pas if nothing else.
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QuestionableSanity is back, with a month long penalty until their admin bit is restored, per what was discussed here:
http://allthetropes.org/w/index.php?ti ... gjjfepvrwg
If anyone feels this is too long or wishes to waive the penalty, I will consent to do so if a majority of our other admins concur.
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Hi everyone! DW forum/allthetropes' admins should already know this, now you shall too:
First about us: We are some tropers (or ex-tropers, some of us got banned by Fast Eddie) who thought TV Tropes could need some serious improvements.
Like many tropers, we have IT jobs, and quite some experience in databases, web security, AJAX etc.
Second, our big plan: We thought many years ago (as early as in the Oughts) that TV Tropes would be so much better if it was based on a software where examples are fetched from a database. As in, if you go to a trope page, you get all examples from works, and vice versa on work pages. Without too much entry pimping if you want to add stuff.
Third: Then, in mid-2012 you provided the TV Tropes site rip (this was you, vorticity, right? Thanks to you, without we couldn't have started this), and from then on, things got rolling.
(Yeah, originally we had thought this could be done in a few months or so. We were a bit wrong about this.)
But now, we're really close to finishing this. And as proof that we hold what the new owners of TV Tropes only promise, we'll post screenshots of it. Just give us a bit more time.
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tvtrivals Wrote:Hi everyone! DW forum/allthetropes' admins should already know this, now you shall too:
First about us: We are some tropers (or ex-tropers, some of us got banned by Fast Eddie) who thought TV Tropes could need some serious improvements.
Like many tropers, we have IT jobs, and quite some experience in databases, web security, AJAX etc.
Second, our big plan: We thought many years ago (as early as in the Oughts) that TV Tropes would be so much better if it was based on a software where examples are fetched from a database. As in, if you go to a trope page, you get all examples from works, and vice versa on work pages. Without too much entry pimping if you want to add stuff.
Third: Then, in mid-2012 you provided the TV Tropes site rip (this was you, vorticity, right? Thanks to you, without we couldn't have started this), and from then on, things got rolling.
(Yeah, originally we had thought this could be done in a few months or so. We were a bit wrong about this.)
But now, we're really close to finishing this. And as proof that we hold what the new owners of TV Tropes only promise, we'll post screenshots of it. Just give us a bit more time.
First off, heck yeah, glad to hear about this!
And yeah, a semantic style database sounds like a great idea. I toyed with the possibility of going full Semantic MediaWiki at one point, but we decided not to, but if someone can pull off a similar model, sounds like a great idea.
And yeah, Vorticity/Labster was the guy who provided the site dump.
Look forward to the screenshots (go ahead and post it here or at the All The Tropes Wikia fork if you want).
Also, I want to make something clear: Not only do I like this, I give my blessing to your efforts, wish to provide any possible assistance, and would love to collaborate with you guys if possible/need be.
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GethN7 Wrote:QuestionableSanity is back, with a month long penalty until their admin bit is restored, per what was discussed here:
http://allthetropes.org/w/index.php?ti ... gjjfepvrwg
If anyone feels this is too long or wishes to waive the penalty, I will consent to do so if a majority of our other admins concur. As I said on your talk page, I have no objection to the penalty.
What I didn't say there: I'm not sure a full month is or is not necessary; the important principle is that there's a price to be paid for making admin-style edits when not using an admin account. I would speak up against any penalty period shorter than two weeks or longer than six weeks - the one-month penalty is right in the middle of that window.
--
Rob Kelk
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them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."
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Welcome to the Forums, tvtrivals! Like Geth I've long felt that automatically populating works with tropes and vice versa was a great idea, and I can't wait to see what you've come up with.
Edit: goddamned autocorrect doing weird things.
-- Bob
---------
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As promised, we made the screenshots. We put them into a gallery on wikia, on our user page there. Here's the link - you may want to bookmark it.
We could've made some more, but we already had ten of them, and we thought ten per day are enough. So you'll get more tomorrow.
Some important thing first: There will be a lot of changes compared to Tv Tropes or allthetropes. You'll see when you go to the gallery. The thing is, if a different user interface is a problem for you, you wouldn't like that the whole software works in a very different way either, probably.
Yeah, that's our philosophy: We want to make things different than Tv Tropes did. This influenced a lot of our decisions about the GUI, the organization, how to deal with tropers and so on.
Just a few examples:
* Tv Tropes' design used a lot of blue (like every second website out there) - so we use several tones of red.
* Their logo has a small, high, serif-less T - ours has a big, short, very serifed T.
* They use buttons with rounded corners (like every second site out there), so we tried something very different: Slanted buttons!
OTOH, we also kept some elements - the lampshade, some icons, the indexes at the bottom of pages. Things that made old Tv Tropes different from Wikipedia and other MediaWiki wikis. You'll see.
(This is by no means final, and we are willing to discuss the one or other bit, especially of the GUI. Not all of it, though, because there are some things we really like.)
Oh, and in case you wonder about the big crosses on the pages: They're placeholders. We'll tell you at the end of the wiki page what they're good for.
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OK, that's it for today. We still have to work (and celebrate) somewhat.
We'll be back tomorrow with more screenshots and explanations. Please spread the word to anyone you know - tabletop gamers, video gamers, anime fans, sci-fi fans, anyone.
We also plan to contact other ex-tropers. Maybe some are still reading Beyond the Lampshade...
Other than that, @Bob, Geth: We're very glad you like our project and want to cooperate with us! In fact, we thought about giving you accounts on the wiki as soon as it is in beta, no strings attached.
CU tomorrow!
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Interesting look, guys, and I look forward to seeing how it all works together. As for your big crosses, I have no beef with your reason for them. And while I can't promise to be as active on your wiki as I am on ATT, I'll be happy to accept a free account there!
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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Hey everyone, I'd just like to announce that Miraheze is celebrating its one-year anniversary today. New wikis are now 25% off, which is of course still $0. There's a link to our survey on the bottom of that page, if anyone has some feedback.
@tvtrivials: Let me know if a dump of ATT in its current state would be useful. There's been a lot of content cleanup and quite a few new pages made since the original dump. I definitely congratulate you on this, as I'm one of the few people who can comprehend the technical scope of what you've done. But on to the bad news: Your logo is interesting, but I feel like you would probably lose a trademark lawsuit against TV Tropes. I get the impression that it might not pass the "idiot in a hurry" test. Remember that drewski is an IP lawyer. Also, I hope you come up with different skins, because my eyes really dislike reading text on a red background.
-- ∇×V
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Thanks guys. BTW, the second batch of pictures is up. (Except for one, wikia's software complains.)
vorticity Wrote:@tvtrivials: Let me know if a dump of ATT in its current state would be useful. There's been a lot of content cleanup and quite a few new pages made since the original dump.
First, "TvT Rivals", please. (No, that's not the name the final wiki will have.)
But yes: This might be the next step as soon as we go live. We plan to use the same license as you do, after all. If you'll happen to like our wiki enough, and the software runs well enough, who knows, maybe we can merge our forks one day.
In that case we should create diffs for every page on ATT and check whether they apply... but that's for later.
vorticity Wrote:But on to the bad news: Your logo is interesting, but I feel like you would probably lose a trademark lawsuit against TV Tropes. I get the impression that it might not pass the "idiot in a hurry" test. Remember that drewski is an IP lawyer.
Flipping the image probably won't help then either. Hopefully we can keep the big T at least. But the question is, what could they do to us?
We will check this out. BTW, how much contact did you have with the new crew? Maybe you can help us with this.
vorticity Wrote:Also, I hope you come up with different skins, because my eyes really dislike reading text on a red background.
We definitely consider different skins. Only the structure (size and placement of elements) will be fixed. (per platform, that is.)
Any of you guys into CSS? We like CSS Zen Garden very much, but we don't have enough time for working on intricate details.
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tvtrivals Wrote:...
Flipping the image probably won't help then either. Hopefully we can keep the big T at least. But the question is, what could they do to us?
... They can tie you up in court, for one thing. Even if you somehow win, you'll have spent a lot of time and money on the matter. Best not to "lampshade" the logo at all, IMHO.
(Hmmmmm... I wonder whether a "discussed tropes" logo would be possible?)
--
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You do need to be very careful about even looking similar. Twenty-some years ago Steve Jackson Games was able to get my GURPS adapation of Mage: The Ascension published despite White Wolf trying to sink the entire adaptation deal with them because White Wolf had a graphic element on every one of the pages in one of its other current books that had a triangle with a dot inside it. This was close enough to SJG's eye-in-the-pyramid trademark that Steve was able to hold a serious threat of a lawsuit over WW's head, and they chose to back down over MtA rather than risk the lawsuit.
Now some questions for you guys: If you have a work that only is mentioned in trope examples, does your system automatically generate a stub work page for it? If you've sorted a trope or example list, if you go to edit it, is it presented to you in the same order? Or do you even edit lists like that in their entirety? I would imagine that it would make the behind-the-scenes housekeeping easier if you actually add or edit individual tropes or examples instead of editing them in bulk.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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robkelk Wrote:tvtrivals Wrote:...
Flipping the image probably won't help then either. Hopefully we can keep the big T at least. But the question is, what could they do to us?
... They can tie you up in court, for one thing. Even if you somehow win, you'll have spent a lot of time and money on the matter. Best not to "lampshade" the logo at all, IMHO.
(Hmmmmm... I wonder whether a "discussed tropes" logo would be possible?)
I concur with Rob, the current logo is a trademark minefield.
The guys at Beyond The Lampshade (I tried contacting them once in vain, doubt they really care about the troping community anymore) did have a good logo that still had a lampshade, just not remotely in the same style at the TV Tropes one, and the overall design was just different enough it would easily pass an IP test.
You could make a logo with a lampshade, but I'd use a different one than one remotely close to the TV Tropes style one.
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Hi guys!
Our script guru was busy fixing a few thousand examples (from the Trivia and YMMV pages) that ended up in the wrong sections of the pages. It was total chaos, but he managed to track his error and fix it.
Now to your questions...
robkelk Wrote:They can tie you up in court, for one thing. Even if you somehow win, you'll have spent a lot of time and money on the matter. Best not to "lampshade" the logo at all, IMHO.
(Hmmmmm... I wonder whether a "discussed tropes" logo would be possible?)
They don't know who we are (not yet, at least), and we don't have much of money to take. But yeah, we'll be careful with this.
Discussed tropes? As in, our T with a speech bubble? It's an idea, but it doesn't really excite us... also, we already have a different idea. We bet you'll like it when you see it. Hopefully we can make it as good as we imagine.
Bob Schroeck Wrote:You do need to be very careful about even looking similar. Twenty-some years ago Steve Jackson Games was able to get my GURPS adapation of Mage: The Ascension published despite White Wolf trying to sink the entire adaptation deal with them because White Wolf had a graphic element on every one of the pages in one of its other current books that had a triangle with a dot inside it. This was close enough to SJG's eye-in-the-pyramid trademark that Steve was able to hold a serious threat of a lawsuit over WW's head, and they chose to back down over MtA rather than risk the lawsuit.
So that's what they call "close enough" today? Lawyers, what are they good for?
Bob Schroeck Wrote:Now some questions for you guys: If you have a work that only is mentioned in trope examples, does your system automatically generate a stub work page for it? If you've sorted a trope or example list, if you go to edit it, is it presented to you in the same order? Or do you even edit lists like that in their entirety? I would imagine that it would make the behind-the-scenes housekeeping easier if you actually add or edit individual tropes or examples instead of editing them in bulk.
1. We added some stub pages for works with ten wicks or more. Other examples we have to fix like this: We'll put them under the according medium instead. Tropers will have to fix them later.
2. At the moment, on the page you get to after you edit an example, the list will be sorted alphabetically. But we may change this.
3. Every example is stored as one entry in the database. So it's possible to edit one example individually, and you can also add and delete one individually. Adding a lot of examples at one time will be the next step.
GethN7 Wrote:The guys at Beyond The Lampshade (I tried contacting them once in vain, doubt they really care about the troping community anymore) did have a good logo that still had a lampshade, just not remotely in the same style at the TV Tropes one, and the overall design was just different enough it would easily pass an IP test.
BTL is dead anyway, domain's for sale, but we found the logo online and see what you mean. As said, we already have a good idea for a new logo that should pass in court and still... but we'll tell you as soon as we have a sketch.
OK, back to work now, in a few hours you'll get more screenshots!
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tvtrivals Wrote:...
robkelk Wrote:They can tie you up in court, for one thing. Even if you somehow win, you'll have spent a lot of time and money on the matter. Best not to "lampshade" the logo at all, IMHO.
(Hmmmmm... I wonder whether a "discussed tropes" logo would be possible?)
They don't know who we are (not yet, at least), and we don't have much of money to take. But yeah, we'll be careful with this.
Discussed tropes? As in, our T with a speech bubble? It's an idea, but it doesn't really excite us... also, we already have a different idea. We bet you'll like it when you see it. Hopefully we can make it as good as we imagine.
... Don't worry about pleasing me - I'm just one person. If you have a better idea, run with it!
tvtrivals Wrote:OK, back to work now, in a few hours you'll get more screenshots! I'm looking forward to them.
--
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Quote:First, "TvT Rivals", please.
OK, @Tv Trivals then: did you know you can edit your account name in forum settings?
Quote:Any of you guys into CSS? We like CSS Zen Garden very much, but we don't have enough time for working on intricate details.
I'm not "into" CSS, but I either read or code CSS almost every day of my life. Left to my own devices I tend to create "programmer interfaces".
Quote:But the question is, what could they do to us?
Do you like having money? Do you dislike having money taken from you? If so, you may want to consult a lawyer or change the logo.
Quote:BTW, how much contact did you have with the new crew? Maybe you can help us with this.
GethN7 has semiregular contact with them. I personally have a lot of problems with talking to them, most of which involve the fact that I don't really know what I would say to them that wouldn't involve me taking legal action against them or them taking legal action against me. Goddamn minefield.
Quote:If you'll happen to like our wiki enough, and the software runs well enough, who knows, maybe we can merge our forks one day.
Oh wow, I had that same offer from Drewski a couple years ago. It comes with the same conditions, though: - Can you ensure that censorship will be limited enough so as not to infringe academic freedom?
- Does the business model ensure the privacy of users, or is it going to be blasting advertising at people?
- Can you create a moderation culture based on rules, not on how offensive it is to moderators?
- Can we work towards making this a content creation wiki, not a content classification wiki?
- Wait, your offer is: "Come back to TVT and close ATT, we'll give you mod and $0 and no policy changes"? What, so we can work with people we don't even like for fun? No drewski, fuck you too!
Seriously man, drewski gave me such an insulting offer that I never want to work with him.
OK, for the questions part: - Is your code open source? Can I look at your repo? Every part of the ATT infrastructure is OSS.
- Is this an entirely new wiki software, or have you hacked it on to something else? Are you parsing wikicode or are you doing a WSIWYG editor?
- Is this a class page-model wiki, or are you doing more of an trope/example model like what TVT was talking about, where trope/example would be added to both pages at the same time via aggregation of examples?
- Can you tell us anything about your team or yourself?
I also want to say that you are giving me ideas. Lots of ideas.
Quote:It was quite some work, but we decided to keep Tv Tropes-like indexes instead of plain categories as in MediaWiki.
Yeah I've always thought of implementing the TVT style indexes -- at least alphabetically -- on top of Mediawiki categories. At this point it would be a SMOP, but it's all about finding the time. And there always seem to be more pressing needs.
Anyway, I appreciate the work TV Rivals! Keep it up!
-- ∇×V
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We now have the Metrolook skin as as option you can choose in user preferences, so feel free to try it out and give any feedback.
It has some issues, the echo notifications for messages and alerts are wedged into the user menu and look like crap, highly advise opening them in a new tab should you wish to read them for now, but the skin otherwise looks fine, even works better than the default with the Darth/Sugar Wiki namespace.
I sent in a notation about the issues, they require a little CSS modification to fix or at least make tolerable, but the skin is stable and works fine otherwise.
We also have LinkSuggest active, and accordingly I disabled the gadget that does the same to prevent conflicts, and link suggest can be disabled in user preferences under the Editing tab.
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Hi guys,
you had a lot of questions for us, and we want to answer them too, but we have to discuss them a bit first, since you gave us something to think about.
Other than that, new screenshots are at wikia, but something went wrong: Yesterday there was a problem with one pic, today with four of them. Can't go on like this. We have to find that error too.
Pass on the message!
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If you're having upload problems at Wikia, you can try uploading screenshots on allthetropes.org instead. I can actually troubleshoot any problems there. You can take your time answering those questions; I've had years to think about what is important to us.
Oh right, logos. It's hard to find other tropes that are good concrete objects. I had thought about other concrete objects in tropes, but there are really only a few. You could have your letter T jumping over a shark, or with a large ham. Or draw an NPZR (I was a KoL player, where the NPZR was invented, and Jick's original drawing is less than impressive). Or maybe a red t-shirt? Eventually someone offered a free logo for ATT and I was like totally taking that.
To the general ATT community, these pages might be dupes in some cases. They're places where multiple pages are in the same category with the same title -- when uppercased. I'm going to leave it to you all because I don't want to fall down that rabbit hole. [cl_sortkey] => LIFE ON MARS/HEADSCRATCHERS [cl_sortkey] => ALVIN AND THE CHIPMUNKS [cl_sortkey] => IT RUNS IN THE FAMILY
-- ∇×V
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Thanks vorticity, we had a theory why it didn't work the first time, and turns out, we were right. All the missing photos are up, and so is the new batch - about how the wiki looks like if you're editing it. No problem at all.
About logos: Jumping a shark would mean a clash with a different website, and a large ham... maybe we could make it somewhat T-shaped, but it's not... serious enough.
Since the logo is important, here's our new idea: We keep the big T, remove the lampshade; instead, we put on the top of the T (left half) a kind of vase, shaped just like the lower half of an oval, and a lightbulb above, with no lampshade. Then, we also want the big T to throw a shadow, but that's a bit trickier if you want it to look realistic.
For the rest of your questions, just a few more minutes...
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