Did strikethrough get axed when nobody was looking?

It's probably more an issue of it being difficult to switch the markup around from a tech point of view. Markup rules are slightly different in different areas of the wiki, but they pull from basic templates, and I'm pretty sure that Ask The Tropers uses the wiki-side markup, not the forum-side.

Thanks for bringing it back on the forum, Eddie.

@ Fighteer:

Ah, that makes sense then. zerky guesses FE meant no greyouting in the wiki articles to replace nixed strikethrough.

"Since the users are incapable of using the wiki properly, we, meaning I, decided to take it down. Thirty-five minutes ago."

sorry. just a LITTLE cranky after trying to make an allusion to Vonnegut's "Cat's Cradle" and struggling for several minutes with a tag that, quite unexpectedly, had stopped working. IMO, what I had to go with instead is more awkward.

I guess we all needed a reminder that, like Ankh-Morpork, this is a democracy.

edited 29th Mar '11 9:34:59 AM by StClair

Edit: never mind, I misread your post.

edited 29th Mar '11 9:34:18 AM by Fighteer

Like I said, strikethrough did have a few legitamate uses (like quotes) but they were outweighed by the times it was abused.

You could be funny with strike, but it's not really any harder to be funny without it.

But it's nice to have it back on the forums where we are free to make all the unfunny, unclear jokes we want.

: For to do lists and other non-joke-related uses, I'd say graying out would be fine. He did say unfunniness was the problem, and these things aren't meant to be funny.

I'd rather see it be allowed on the wiki than allowed on the forum but not the wiki.

Example of a good use for strikethrough, from yours truly: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=q6ieulkhxqfgl941mbi3y5ip&page=92#2278 (look at bottom of post)

I mentioned a problem in a post.

Then I went and fixed it.

Then I went back to my post, struck out my mentioning the problem (so as to keep the information there but indicate its obsolescence), and indicated that I'd fixed it.

edited 29th Mar '11 2:48:34 PM by GlennMagusHarvey

And how exactly could that be used in the wiki without it being bad style or natter?

Discussion pages, request pages, project pages, and more.

This usage is a discussion tool and shouldn't appear on trope and work pages. In the cases of those, the strikethrough may occasionally be useful for other reasons.

I don't see why it shouldn't be allowed on discussion pages.

Quotes, for one thing. We can not control whether other media use strikethrough, and sometimes we need to quote them.

Furthermore, in this thread there have been a handful of examples of strikethrough being genuinely. Maybe Some of then can be replaced by something else. Maybe some could not. And from the ones that could, maybe the replacement is just not as good as making the point across.

Personally, my main problem with this ban is how there was no motion to make clear strikethrough is not supposed to be used for jokes. I believe most of the offenders were never even aware they were doing a bad thing. If this were more clear, maybe the misuse would be much smaller.

edited 29th Mar '11 3:06:24 PM by Heatth

Did the elimination of strikethrough markup on the wiki break something else, such as separating horizontal lines or something?

Because, on our Castlevania Symphony Of The Night page, the line "Playtime's over" etc. in the middle of the page is supposed to marked up differently than it is currently.

Grr. So much for cases of correct usage too, which is what irks me about this.

(Example of "correct usage," if I'm not mistaken: Air Space Jousting.)

But yeah, I can see why Eddie did it (I disagree, but as I have no leverage over Eddie, that's not very relevant) and especially why he went ahead and did it without telling anyone beforehand. He wanted them gone, he doesn't have to ask anyone before taking an administrative action, and every dictatorial authority knows that you should never call a vote that you don't know the outcome of.

edited 31st Mar '11 12:56:33 AM by Ramidel

Well, I guess there's nothing to do but go over the more appropriate strikethrough uses and reword them into cumbersome explanations.

Smooth move, Slick. Just close your eyes, cross your fingers, leap into the metaphorical air, and oh gosh oh golly hope for the best. ;)

Can we please get a way to find the strikethroughs so we can fix them, similar to the natter search? This has created a huge amount of work to be done on the wiki, and there's no good way to find that work to do it.

^^^ Actually, wait! That's a GREAT idea!

For those tropes that "need customized names", we should strikethrough the trope name in the trope list for the work, and then put the customized name.

For example:

• Sean Connery Is About to Shoot You Natsuki Kuga Is About To Shoot You

Or:

• Sean Connery Natsuki Kuga Is About To Shoot You

This will more clearly indicate the name of a trope if someone wants to find it.

Speaking of which, one of the funny things is that I actually know the trope You Lose at Zero Trust as "You Lose At Two Peace Points", solely because the first time I saw it it was using that text on the Beat Angel Escalayer page.

edited 31st Mar '11 11:48:30 AM by GlennMagusHarvey

''"Please don't. The method of striking-out is not the issue. The un-funniness is the thing.

It doesn't work for the tone we want in the articles. The articles should have the professionalism you would expect from a print magazine. One with a sense of humor."''

Oh, Eddie. Your signature lauds "clear, concise, and witty". Well,

1) This change has no real effect on the clarity of most articles, but it damages the clarity of a few others until those articles are fixed.

2) This change strikes a major blow against conciseness, as the same humorous points will have to now be explained in a lengthier fashion (unless the strikethrough is substituted with an equivalent such as gray-out or the ellipses, which no one favors—including you).

3) This change limits the possible applications of wit. You've more or less stated disbelief that the use of strikethrough can be witty, but its successful application in other sources, including professional ones (none of which can even be quoted in these articles now, as has been pointed out already) demonstrates that your personal taste could possibly be in the minority here.

Look, you snuck this through quickly because you knew it would be unpopular. You knew your take on "unfunniness" was only held by a select few *

As such, consider that it's more becoming to appeal these moments to sheer Screw the Rules, I Make Them!. That's easier for the band-aid, rather than presenting information that no one actually believes, as if it were common sense.

(And yes, I whine and embody They Changed It, Now It Sucks!. It's a vent for us metaphorically impotent, when no effective course is available to correct simple errors. Fortunately, folk like me tend to wander off after we've finished rambling our rambles. :) )

edited 31st Mar '11 11:49:02 AM by BaronGrackle

Also, I edited my previous post but got ninja'd.

^ I agree that using strikethrough for snarkiness is inappropriate on wiki articles, both trope and work articles. But I believe the strikethrough is still useful for other reasons.

edited 31st Mar '11 11:49:59 AM by GlennMagusHarvey

"For those tropes that "need customized names", we should strikethrough the trope name in the trope list for the work, and then put the customized name."

Now that you mention it, I'm not a huge fan of that type of use for the strike. I'd lean instead toward...

• Sean Connery Is About to Shoot You: Natsuki Kuga Is About To Shoot You

But I agree that both examples make the Control-F search more effective, and they avoid issues about alphabetical order in the listing!

EDIT: I imagine that a few of us would, similarly, disagree on the usage of italics. Fortunately, we still have those. ;)

edited 31st Mar '11 12:46:57 PM by BaronGrackle

Eh... I'm late to the discussion, but I only just noticed (while editing a trope) that the strikeout markup no longer works.

For whatever it is worth, I think the strikeout did have legitimate uses, and I think it is a pity it was removed, particularly without discussion. Pretty much *every* markup is widely misused in TV Tropes, and I don't see why strikeout had to be singled out.

It's back in use in the forum atleast. I can understand it being bad(outside of certain uses) in the main Wiki, but it's only used just for fun in the fora.

Well, even though the decision is final, I’m not at all happy with where this might lead. Strikethrough isn’t some novelty feature, it’s a standard part of text markup. It might have been misused, perhaps horrifically so (I’ve clearly been lucky in what I’ve read) , but as one of Heinlein’s characters put it, "Scalping a man is a hell of a poor way to cure him of dandruff." I, for one, am wondering what other things will next be deemed more trouble than they’re worth and excised.

Exempli gratia:

• The word "loose", and all words that derive from it. In many cases it is an obvious misspelling of the word "lose" and lowers the tone, requires fixing, etc, etc, and there are sufficient synonyms available that its use could be avoided.
• The words "literally", "actually" and "basically" – generally overused, frequently misused. Less easily abused alternatives are available.
• "LOL", "teh", "WTF", "roxxors", "ROFL*", "pr0n" and so on - need I say more?

I don’t know how the edit processor works, and whether any rewriting would be needed to implement these interdictions, but it must be possible. And if that doesn’t cause concern, well, I have seen complaints in various places about mis/overuse of italics and bolding. We could go back to delimiting titles with quotation marks, like in plaintext days. Indeed, the settings might have been changed already, and you might be the first one to find out...

So, while it would be nice to live in a utopian dream, where an almighty edit processor blocks spelling mistakes, grammar and formatting boo-boos and even bad examples before they appear, we don’t, and no such code exists. As we have seen, this change is already breaking things, and while many deem these to be acceptable losses, it could represent the beginning of a slippery slope. To carry on the "shitting in a restaurant" example cited by an earlier poster, this highly unpleasant practice has now been tackled by outlawing all defecation and excrement within city limits. The place may be cleaner, but we’re all clenching our buttocks, and it looks like the law catches organic fertiliser and phosphates as well, so tough luck on any gardeners. Of course, lots of people are fine with this - they live out of town and never need to go during the day. But the city council has also been considering representations complaining about public urination, excessive sweating and sundry other annoyances. Pray that they don’t just decide to expand the scope of the Doodoo Directive to cover all of these things. Especially halitosis.

One of the best posts I have seen in quite a while, and quite an interesting representation of FE's MO. One point though — I'd hardly consider this the beginning of a slippery slope; we're already about twenty minutes in. Anybody remember when we used to have "big text", a standard feature in HTML and related markups and a standard feature of typographical expression as well?

Yep. That was about some time ago. This is the slippery slope.