Why Fandom Cant Have Nice Things / TV Tropes

• Due to vandalism, spam, and subpar quality tropes, page creation directly in the Main/ namespace is no longer allowed (unless you are a moderator). New tropes are instead created and provided feedback at the Trope Launch Pad, and redirects are to be requested on the Locked Pages forum thread.
• No New Stock Phrases was implemented in mid-2011 after a slew of unclear and meaningless phrases such as "I Eat Metaphor for Breakfast" popped up everywhere. Since then, all trope titles are subject to this policy without also compromising the Clear, Concise, Witty corollary.
• TV Tropes has the Rule of Cautious Editing Judgment meant to prevent any Flame Wars on This Very Wiki. Unfortunately, in some situations, some tropers completely ignore this rule, leading to the mods locking the page most likely for good, which means nobody other than the mods themselves gets to add and/or edit the page. In addition, people began wicking it with a rather hostile-sounding "And that's all we'll say on the matter." to shut down further elaboration of a YMMV trope. While well-meaning, these condescending edits often provoked trolls into editing the page anyway, and sometimes these wicks were used to justify Zero-Context Examples. A clean-up effort of these wicks was organized in 2019 and a warning was added to the page not to wick it in examples.
• While YMMV tropes and pages items aren’t tropes in and of themselves (rather they are Audience Reactions) the main reason YMMV itself was created was to keep the more controversial tropes off of the main pages. However, this has not stopped tropers from starting edit wars and complaining about shows they don't like on some shows, leading to said YMMV pages getting locked or even deleted.
• In extreme cases, there's the Permanent Red Link Club, which is when a page is misused, controversial, or breaks the Rule of Cautious Editing Judgment so often that the page is locked and deleted, never to be used again. At one point, tropers were continuously attempting to revive redundant and unnecessary pages placed on the Recent Cuts, so for a while, anything that was cut also became auto-locked and could only be brought back with proper authorization, and that was if the page wasn't also part of it. However, this is no longer the case, and pages that were cut but are not part of the Club can now be brought back by anyone, although asking for permission is still recommended.
• The trope Please Elaborate was meant to be a handy tool for tropers. If one found a poor example but didn't know the source material well enough to expand it themselves, they could add that example to Please Elaborate, and a troper with actual knowledge of said example could fix it. It joined the Permanent Red Link Club when lazy tropers started adding Please Elaborate to their examples preemptively to pawn off the actual elaboration of said example to other tropers.
• In less extreme but still undesirable cases, Real Life examples can be cut and prohibited from a page if things get sufficiently controversial. On that note, there's also the Example Sectionectomy, for which examples are either cut entirely or relegated to a separate area such as Darth Wiki or the Discussion tab if things get nasty.
• This is the reason why Panty Shot is now a Definition-Only Page, while Fetish Fuel and Troper Tales no longer exist. Some people couldn’t resist putting controversial and creepy content in these pages, which led to the sections of Fetish Fuel and Troper Tales being sent off to separate offsite wikis.
• TV Tropes used to have a strikethrough markup, but it was eventually disabled as people were using it to sneak in Take That! points and such. Texts that were previously stricken are now hidden texts. The strike format can still be used in the forums, as strikethrough text tag is still supported since TV Tropes 1.8 update; and pseudo-strikethrough text can still be added to a page by using special Unicode characters.
• Colored text was removed due to negative use and abuse of hard-to-read colors, with even easy-to-read colors like red and blue being disabled from the wiki. It was eventually restored for the forums, though, and to wiki pages in the 1.8 update in 2018, but with the hard-to-read colors removed.
• The Archive of Bellicose Lexicon Entities was a series of articles listing tropers according to their visions on trope naming, images, example lists, and the like. However, when it was determined that these articles, instead of being fun places for like-minded tropers to associate, were inspiring antagonism and factionalism among the user base, they were dish-continued and all of them eventually redirect back to that index. Tropers are no longer listed, as they can simply add themselves through their user pages anyway.
• Encyclopedia Dramatica used to have a page on this wiki. However, the page was very biased against its subject matter, and since no efforts were made to undermine this, it eventually started attracting too much negative attention and had to be put down for good, as it was far too late to save it.
• Trolls, vandals, and sockpuppeteers attacking the site and its articles led to a recreation of the login/handle creation system, replacing the standard sign-up with a CAPTCHA approval addon.
• Troper pages can now only be edited by the troper who created them. The days when a good-faith user could sign or leave a fun commentary on another troper's page (which was known as "fun vandalism"), or even simply fix a spelling mistake, are over because of this. The TroperWall/ namespace was created to bring back the "fun vandalism".
• Many threads in the forums that contain intelligent discussions end up getting locked when people start trolling, flaming each other, or derailing the topic after being told more than once by the moderators to knock it off, ruining it for everyone else who wished to continue the discussion civilly. While some threads get temporarily locked to let everyone cool off, other threads, like the Star Wars General Thread, can get locked forever, never to be reopened unless a mod says otherwise.
• Zero Context Examples used to get a free pass back when many trope names were self-explanatory. This changed when people started placing tropes that weren't self-explanatory on a page without giving any examples at all. Understandably, not everybody will get why a character is or isn't a Knight Templar, and readers may not want to look up every single trope if no examples are present. Nowadays, tropes that have no examples are usually hidden until someone can elaborate on the subject.
• Character Alignmentsinvoked are no longer allowed on main or even YMMV pages because of the Edit Wars they caused. Besides, only the flattest, most one-dimensional characters can fit into one of the nine Character Alignment boxes. The only exceptions for this rule are on pages for game systems that explicitly have character alignments and characters having officially stated character alignments, such as Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and the Fate Series.
• In at least one case, continued violations of the Spoiler Policy on a page have caused the page to be stripped of spoiler markup entirely.
• invoked Unfortunate Implications is one of the few pages on the site which requires citations. Any entry posted without one is almost immediately zapped. Before this policy was in place, the page was overrun with Edit Wars over whether something was offensive or not. The citations became mandatory because they showed that it wasn't just one person who was thinking that way. However, in 2022, it was brought to light that the “citations” for many entries were from non-reputable sources (such as a blog or a YouTube video), and some still didn’t have any citations at all. Due to the previous issues not going away after attempts to rectify it, the trope was ultimately labeled as Flame Bait.
• Creator's Apathy (formerly named "They Just Didn't Care") requires all examples to have some form of Word of God proving that the creators genuinely didn't care. Before this rule was put into place, tropers were just adding random oversights as "proof" that the creators were lazy, no matter how insignificant the oversight was.
• Complete Monster used to be free for anyone to edit. Unfortunately, people began using the page and its subpages to shoehorn in villains who they either personally thought were particularly nasty or just didn't like. Then came the point where people started putting in divisive characters who weren't even villains, let alone evil^note Peter Griffin and Mr. Krabs being popular examples., and trying to start Edit Wars when those examples were inevitably removed. This, coupled with the trope's tendency to be filled with Conversation in the Main Page, was the last straw, leading to the page being locked, most of the examples purged, the remaining examples being reworked, and having a 10000+ page clean-up thread made to decide which characters qualified.
• The main cleanup threads for Complete Monster and Magnificent Bastard were locked and eventually rebooted from the ground up as a response to the hostile clique mentality from the threads, from newcomer paranoia to hostile complaints from other regulars when a major contributor had to be suspended. There were also cases in which some users made the threads their sole focus, compounding the issue even further.
• The Wall Banger page on the Darth Wiki wound up being completely discontinued due to it being a giant Flame War magnet and rather redundant to Dethroning Moment of Suckinvoked.
• DEATH BATTLE! is a Hypothetical Fight Debate web show where the victor of a battle between two characters is determined through logic, mathematics, and reasoning. However, such hypothetical debates are Serious Business in some parts of the internet, and the series created a problem for tropers and staff more than once when people wouldn't stop arguing about the results as determined by the show.
  • Like other media, the show originally had a Dethroning Moment of Suck page relating to the outcome of the battles. Eventually, the entries became very contested, with Edit Wars being so common that the mods were forced to lock the page. However, the debates continued in both the discussion pages and the forums of the locked pages, mainly by fans requesting their moments to be added. Ultimately, the mods and tropers decided to completely blacklist the page from ever having a moment again by stripping all of the examples, locking the page for good, and later sending the page to the Permanent Red Link Club. This made Death Battle the first (and so far, only) work to have its Dethroning Moments officially stripped and blacklisted.
  • The lockup of the Dethroning page did not mark an end to the vitriol, as the Headscratchers page was later hit with similar amounts of arguing from all sides of the fanbase. No efforts at case-by-case moderation could have stopped this from happening, so the Headscratchers page met the same fate as the Dethroning Moment page: stripped, blacklisted, and sent to the Permanent Red Link Club. The YMMV page for Death Battle managed to survive the flame wars without getting stripped or blacklisted, but it's also under a permanent lock because flame wars and edit wars crept onto that page too.
• Very early on in the site's life, there existed a page on the Darth Wiki that allowed anyone to complain about works they didn't like, an activity that wasn't (and still isn't) allowed on the main wiki in any form. Inevitably, the page in question was quickly filled with an unbearable amount of Flame Wars, Edit Wars, and all other kinds of nasty behavior among tropers, leading to the page being deleted after only one month. In comparison, the page's Sugar Wiki counterpart, created around the same time, remains active today due to avoiding the problems that plagued its doomed sibling. Not that this removed every complaining outlet, as pages like Dethroning Moment of Suck came out to replace it, but they're much more carefully monitored to keep the vitriol to a minimum.invoked
• Pages on works that have yet to be released tend to suffer rampant amounts of Speculative Troping based on trailers and production information which is released to advertise the work in question. It doesn't help that there are trailers that have either edited scenes or scenes not in the final product to mislead viewers on many a Plot Twist. Because of this, an upcoming work's Trivia, Moments, and YMMV pages are often cut or locked until the work is finally released, and a policy on specific requirements for unreleased works was established in 2019. Among other things, this policy requires citing sources on all added examples, as well as the upcoming work in question needing actual pre-release material that can be cited, all of which is designed to reduce speculation on an upcoming work's page.
• In late 2020, Getting Crap Past the Radar was completely reworked to where all examples require citations. This was due to the rampant misuse of the trope, often due to users thinking it was similar to the "Parent Guide" on IMDb^note Which states when non-child friendly content is featured in a particular media and adding things that would either fall under other tropes (like Parental Bonus, Accidental Innuendo, or Family-Unfriendly Death) or just plain anything too violent or inappropriate for children, regardless of whether or not it was intentionally hidden to sneak past censors. A separate trope for the misuse (Demographically Inappropriate Humour) was created to prevent more of this in the future.
• The Thread Anti-Necromancy Game in the Forum Games section of the Forum was permanently locked in late 2020, due to the very loose rules letting people talk about anything, which led to it being a place for personal attacks and Not Safe for Work content. Most posters moved to The Trash Heap of the TV Tropes Forums in the Yack Fest section of the Forum, which got locked just a few months later for the same reasons.

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