The first thing I did upon finding out that I was banned was try to locate the source. After some investigation I sent a private message to the moderator who had started the restricted access forum thread helpfully titled "Some Guy". I had plenty of questions- why was I banned, what was the content privately discussed in this thread, and more particularly why this individual, who had only been a moderator for a few weeks, accepted my congratulations at being promoted yet felt it necessary to complain about me behind my back. This moderator only gave vague answers to these questions, exhorting me to "talk about what you've been doing, since it involves the whole wiki."
In the discussion pages I'd had a hand in discussing and enacting modification in regards to a very wide variety of problems, any one of which could conceivably "involve the whole wiki". I decided that since this moderator wasn't going to give me a clear answer, I would respond by detailing nearly every problem and possible fix for wiki issues that I could possibly think of. Suffice to say, this was a long forum post- but since one of the few specific charges against me was that I eschewed discussion, I felt it necessary to make clear that anyone who thought I was unwilling to engage in serious discussion was sorely mistaken.
This forum thread ran for a fairly long while - over a hundred posts - but few of my ideas had any traction. This had little to do with the content of the ideas- mostly they were just proposals for administrative pages that would clearly answer questions I had seen posed repeatedly in the wiki proper. Rather, the objection was over the idea that TV Tropes write down any clear guidelines to begin with. TV Tropes is supposed to be an informal environment, and telling people to do anything goes against its style.
The argument mystified me. I'd always thought of TV Tropes as an open-source encyclopedia in need of constant correction and repair because most of its users are writing amateurs. Indeed, the very existence of Trope Repair Shop seemed to bolster this point- unless there are some sort of standards to enforce, it's hard to imagine under what grounds any trope could possibly be modified or changed in any way. I requested a clarification on the purpose and authority of Trope Repair Shop, not just in regards to this point but also to get an explanation for how I could possibly "stomp all over" the authority of Trope Repair Shop when neither I nor anyone else knows what the authority of Trope Repair Shop is. The first point met with a strict interpretation of the When To Rename A Trope page- which aside from only being about renames was also almost completely unchanged from when I first wrote it one and a half years earlier. To use this, of all pages, as evidence against me was the height of absurdity. The second point was forbidden from discussion as the thread was about TV Tropes writ large, not my specific situation.
This was exactly the kind of exhausting, purposeless argument about nothing that made me leave the forums in the first place. So when Fast Eddie offered a compromise, automated notification of all pages linked in either Trope Repair Shop or Image Pickin', I quickly accepted it even though it had almost nothing to do with any of the issues I had actually brought up in the opening post of the thread. I did mention at some points how the current notification system wasn't working, but mainly to illustrate how forumite thinking was flawed, not to suggest that it be salvaged.
The "upgraded" system caused notifications to automatically appear on a page provided a Wiki Word is provided in the "page being discussed" portion of thread creation in the two relevant forums. This wasn't necessarily a bad solution, in that it brought about consistency, but I realized the flaw in the new notification system almost immediately. The only way for a notification to be removed is for a moderator to lock the thread, and the moderators would only lock threads that had been clearly resolved. Trope Repair Shop does not clearly resolve problems. As a result, as I expected, the stale discussion report which kept track of threads created under the new system quickly ballooned out of control as far more new proposals were being created than old ones were being locked.
As a result of this, Trope Repair Shop became more transparent, but not in a good way- most notifications lead to ancient unresolved threads, so most who click on notifications discover a Trope Repair Shop that is incapable of solving problems. Of course, this was a long term problem- in the short term, I at least had my editing abilities back, and I had acknowledged some authority was invested in the forums. With this and what I had learned from working in the discussion pages in the last four months, I could try to work at changing the system. At least, that was what I thought at the time.
Showing posts with label trope repair shop. Show all posts
Showing posts with label trope repair shop. Show all posts
Monday, May 30, 2011
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
History: Notifications (Part I)
Even though the guiding principle behind headquartering major page action in the forums was that in doing so traffic to major page action discussions would increase, this increased traffic never materialized. In the first months of the trope rename forum this wasn't really seen as that big a deal, mainly because in between all the razzle dazzle of avatars and signatures and pinned threads, it certainly felt as if we were making a significant improvement. But as time went on it became more difficult to ignore the fact that while the names and faces changed, there never seemed to be any more than two dozen people actively posting in Trope Repair Shop at a time.
The lack of meaningful connection between Trope Repair Shop and the wiki proper always had a propensity for some awkwardness. Initially this difficulty was only really noted on the Trope Repair Shop end of things. Courtesy links (usually Wiki Words) to pages under discussion were often requested, as it was a bit of a pain to try and navigate to a page knowing only its name. This irritation only increased after the native TV Tropes search bar (which searches for exact titles) was fully replaced by a Google search bar after a hacker used a flaw in the TV Tropes search bar architecture to attack the wiki. As many of the pages under Trope Repair Shop discussion were poorly linked, it was often difficult to find them using a Google search.
By contrast, notifications are the first, and so far as I know, only serious effort ever made to try and guide traffic toward Trope Repair Shop. The way they work is pretty simple. The first-generation notifications were a special piece of wiki formatting. A person would take the html address of the forum topic under discussion, put it in the formatting, and then post it at the top of the page which was under discussion under the assumption that people would click on it to see the discussion.
This effort failed to garner any new traffic. Threads which had notifications on discussed pages seldom had much more discussion than pages without flags. These notifications did occasionally result in the revival of ancient threads where nothing was accomplished by users who belatedly saw the notification and decided to chime in, usually to no purpose. The notifications had a habit of lingering indefinitely because no one was really sure when a discussion "ended", and so no one was willing to delete a notification.
The main other attempt to draw in traffic came in the form of a a blue circle that would appear in the upper-right corner of TV Tropes saying "Hey, check out Trope Repair Shop!" with a small picture of Trope-Tan underneath the words. This effort similarly failed. In retrospect I realize that this was likely because most people had no idea what Trope Repair Shop was, or why they should have any interest in it relative to the parts of the wiki they already frequented. There were a lot of assumptions in this icon that forumites took for granted but which were not obvious to the rest of the wiki. Even though there was a great deal of deliberation over the title Trope Repair Shop in the forums, elsewhere no one was really sure what it meant. Trope-tan as well was well-known to some members of the wiki, but about as many had no idea who she was or why her picture was supposed to be appealing.
While it only takes me a few paragraphs to summarize all this, when we were actually discussing these matters it took long forum threads of painstaking discussion before we arrived at any action at all. This made the failure of these efforts all the sharper. However much we tried, no one wanted to come to Trope Repair Shop. The only way we could think of to salvage these losses was through a simple credo- anyone can join Trope Repair Shop, and since we go through so much work to try to get people here, it's their own fault if major page action happens that they don't like. Discussions are long, and usually have crowners, so you've only yourself to blame if something happens without your input.
If this attitude sounds rather jingoist, well, it kind of was. It must be understood that forumites were mostly just discussing these things with each other because that's all we had to discuss with. Indeed, even though I was active in YKTTW and regularly launched new tropes, I never tried to get people there to join Trope Repair Shop, and it would not have occurred to me to try given how renames were excised from YKTTW to begin with. As a result, I accepted this attitude as well, though with a bit of resignation as I certainly would have liked to get more people involved in Trope Repair Shop, if only such a thing were possible.
The lack of meaningful connection between Trope Repair Shop and the wiki proper always had a propensity for some awkwardness. Initially this difficulty was only really noted on the Trope Repair Shop end of things. Courtesy links (usually Wiki Words) to pages under discussion were often requested, as it was a bit of a pain to try and navigate to a page knowing only its name. This irritation only increased after the native TV Tropes search bar (which searches for exact titles) was fully replaced by a Google search bar after a hacker used a flaw in the TV Tropes search bar architecture to attack the wiki. As many of the pages under Trope Repair Shop discussion were poorly linked, it was often difficult to find them using a Google search.
By contrast, notifications are the first, and so far as I know, only serious effort ever made to try and guide traffic toward Trope Repair Shop. The way they work is pretty simple. The first-generation notifications were a special piece of wiki formatting. A person would take the html address of the forum topic under discussion, put it in the formatting, and then post it at the top of the page which was under discussion under the assumption that people would click on it to see the discussion.
This effort failed to garner any new traffic. Threads which had notifications on discussed pages seldom had much more discussion than pages without flags. These notifications did occasionally result in the revival of ancient threads where nothing was accomplished by users who belatedly saw the notification and decided to chime in, usually to no purpose. The notifications had a habit of lingering indefinitely because no one was really sure when a discussion "ended", and so no one was willing to delete a notification.
The main other attempt to draw in traffic came in the form of a a blue circle that would appear in the upper-right corner of TV Tropes saying "Hey, check out Trope Repair Shop!" with a small picture of Trope-Tan underneath the words. This effort similarly failed. In retrospect I realize that this was likely because most people had no idea what Trope Repair Shop was, or why they should have any interest in it relative to the parts of the wiki they already frequented. There were a lot of assumptions in this icon that forumites took for granted but which were not obvious to the rest of the wiki. Even though there was a great deal of deliberation over the title Trope Repair Shop in the forums, elsewhere no one was really sure what it meant. Trope-tan as well was well-known to some members of the wiki, but about as many had no idea who she was or why her picture was supposed to be appealing.
While it only takes me a few paragraphs to summarize all this, when we were actually discussing these matters it took long forum threads of painstaking discussion before we arrived at any action at all. This made the failure of these efforts all the sharper. However much we tried, no one wanted to come to Trope Repair Shop. The only way we could think of to salvage these losses was through a simple credo- anyone can join Trope Repair Shop, and since we go through so much work to try to get people here, it's their own fault if major page action happens that they don't like. Discussions are long, and usually have crowners, so you've only yourself to blame if something happens without your input.
If this attitude sounds rather jingoist, well, it kind of was. It must be understood that forumites were mostly just discussing these things with each other because that's all we had to discuss with. Indeed, even though I was active in YKTTW and regularly launched new tropes, I never tried to get people there to join Trope Repair Shop, and it would not have occurred to me to try given how renames were excised from YKTTW to begin with. As a result, I accepted this attitude as well, though with a bit of resignation as I certainly would have liked to get more people involved in Trope Repair Shop, if only such a thing were possible.
Sunday, April 3, 2011
History: Trope Repair Shop
The main initial issue with Trope Repair Shop was over what we should call it. Though there were multiple titles and nearly all of them were given a brief trial period as the "real" title while we tried to figure out what fit, I can only remember two. "Trope Fixin'" was rejected as a title because some thought it implied that any trope that appeared in its annals was somehow broken- many objections to other titles were over the same implication. Another titles was very long- something along the lines of "Discussion Place where we decide whether Tropes do or do not need to be acted upon". That's probably not even close to what the title actually was, but the name wasn't important so much as it was supposed to be an example of a perfectly described name. Which everyone naturally hated because it was really, really long.
In truth there's really not much to discuss about Trope Repair Shop's beginnings. The founding principle was simply the request I made in regards to The Dark Knight Trilogy- make a forum where multiple solutions can be considered. Aside from the implications that the final title had on Trope Repair Shop's authority, no one saw much purpose in trying to define what exactly Trope Repair Shop's authority was in the first place.
What's more relevant is the subtle changes made to the wiki that had made the idea of Trope Repair Shop being headquartered in the forums more palatable. One of these is metaphorical- when I first began making edits to the wiki, Janitor was the main admin who handled wiki moderation. Janitor primarily frequented the discussion pages, and as authority shifted away from discussion pages to the forums, her role became less visible. I can't remember ever actually seeing her after Trope Repair Shop was created, though her opinions were occasionally mentioned by Fast Eddie, the remaining admin who was more frequently seen in the forums.
Trope Repair Shop's creation also happened in the midst of the broader forum's development as a community where people came, not necessarily to discuss tropes, but merely whatever was on their mind. This led to the promotion of the wiki's first forum-centered moderator. Previously there had been admins, who held power over all the wiki, and Cut Masters, who held power over the Cut List. The new moderator held sway only over the forums. This may not sound so fantastic, but bear in mind that until this point all tropers were considered equal, and capable of moderating each other's behavior. The increasing size of the wiki had forced this belief to yield way to the practicalities of dealing with typical forum drama.
Over the several months after arrival at the forums and before Trope Repair Shop's final name, there had already been much turnover in forum regulars. In between the expansion of the forums and the wiki's greater traffic, many users simply grew tired of the debates held over trope renames, and moved on to other, more interesting parts of the wiki. This fact didn't seem important to me at the time, as I was willing to discuss renames with anyone, but has become important in the broader terms of the wiki's history as I became part of an ever dwindling group who knew the full history of the procedures.
Also over this time, the backlash against renames had grown, and was stronger then than it ever had been before. As one of the reasons for moving rename discussions into the forums had been that the process would be more transparent, and thus people would not have so much cause to get angry, this was becoming an increasing cause of concern.
Overall, though, the main important change had nothing to do with the content matter. The site was just becoming more popular. More factions were created, and existing factions splintered into smaller fragments to deal with more specific wiki issues. Trope Repair Shop, as its name came to be hated, was unaware of all this. For that matter, so was I.
In truth there's really not much to discuss about Trope Repair Shop's beginnings. The founding principle was simply the request I made in regards to The Dark Knight Trilogy- make a forum where multiple solutions can be considered. Aside from the implications that the final title had on Trope Repair Shop's authority, no one saw much purpose in trying to define what exactly Trope Repair Shop's authority was in the first place.
What's more relevant is the subtle changes made to the wiki that had made the idea of Trope Repair Shop being headquartered in the forums more palatable. One of these is metaphorical- when I first began making edits to the wiki, Janitor was the main admin who handled wiki moderation. Janitor primarily frequented the discussion pages, and as authority shifted away from discussion pages to the forums, her role became less visible. I can't remember ever actually seeing her after Trope Repair Shop was created, though her opinions were occasionally mentioned by Fast Eddie, the remaining admin who was more frequently seen in the forums.
Trope Repair Shop's creation also happened in the midst of the broader forum's development as a community where people came, not necessarily to discuss tropes, but merely whatever was on their mind. This led to the promotion of the wiki's first forum-centered moderator. Previously there had been admins, who held power over all the wiki, and Cut Masters, who held power over the Cut List. The new moderator held sway only over the forums. This may not sound so fantastic, but bear in mind that until this point all tropers were considered equal, and capable of moderating each other's behavior. The increasing size of the wiki had forced this belief to yield way to the practicalities of dealing with typical forum drama.
Over the several months after arrival at the forums and before Trope Repair Shop's final name, there had already been much turnover in forum regulars. In between the expansion of the forums and the wiki's greater traffic, many users simply grew tired of the debates held over trope renames, and moved on to other, more interesting parts of the wiki. This fact didn't seem important to me at the time, as I was willing to discuss renames with anyone, but has become important in the broader terms of the wiki's history as I became part of an ever dwindling group who knew the full history of the procedures.
Also over this time, the backlash against renames had grown, and was stronger then than it ever had been before. As one of the reasons for moving rename discussions into the forums had been that the process would be more transparent, and thus people would not have so much cause to get angry, this was becoming an increasing cause of concern.
Overall, though, the main important change had nothing to do with the content matter. The site was just becoming more popular. More factions were created, and existing factions splintered into smaller fragments to deal with more specific wiki issues. Trope Repair Shop, as its name came to be hated, was unaware of all this. For that matter, so was I.
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