[Official] Troper Tales Redesign and Rename

On June 13, Troper Tales will move to a new format. Any troper will be able to add a new entry, just like in the current discussion system, but there won't be a reply function. This will solve the unsigned Troper Tales problem and the Natter problem.

Coinciding with the launch of the new system, Troper Tales will get a new name to better reflect its purpose. What will the new name be? You all have a week to come up with cool ideas before we make the crowner.

If you have any suggestions or feature requests, please let us know. Try to keep criticism constructive. If you don't say why you don't like a particular choice, your posts will just get thumped for being off-topic.

In any case, let's handle two of the obvious questions ahead of time:

What will happen to the old Troper Tales?

Can we see what the new pages will look like?

Confirmed features

• Entries will be editable by anyone and have edit histories.
• There will be a collapsible "reply" system that will default to hidden.
• All entries will have a Holler button to flag them for the mods. Mods (and only mods) will be able to delete entries.
• The color scheme will not change.

edited 2nd Jun '11 4:40:00 PM by Ironeye

As somebody who contributes to the wiki almost exclusively through Troper Tales...

I would have to say I don't like the idea. I like the current background, but I could sort of get used to a forum-ish thing. My bigger problem is the inability to reply. Troper Tales doesn't have 'natter'. It's basically a forum, except more...specialized, I guess. What's a forum you can't reply to? You guessed it-a very, very dead one. Really, I see TV Tropes and Troper Tales as a bit seperate-you could very well move Troper Tales to a new site like you did to Fetish Fuel, and all me and the other Tr T-obsessed tropers would have to do would be update our bookmarks. But it requires, to some degree, the ability for tropers to converse-to talk about their experiences with the trope, share them with each other, discover that other tropers also have the same issue, and I've many times seen somebody ask about the names of some people involved or why the IP address is the same as their school/uni/work. I wouldn't be surprised if Tr T, as a result of its forum-y-ness, had two tropers meet each other in reality.

Sorry if that was a run-on thing that made no sense. A lot of my arguments for ideas I absolutely hate end up like that as I desperately try to convince everyone I'm right.

Troper Tales Guidelines

You should take a look at Administrivia.Troper Tales Guidelines—Natter is on the list of things not to add. Troper Tales was never intended to be a forum in the form of a wiki page. It was a place for people to put examples from their own lives without filling up the main example pages, and thus inherited much (though not all—see the guidelines regarding the use of first person) of the standards from the main example pages.

I agree that the 'Natter' on Troper Tales isn't really Natter, since a lot of it is just shortening similar stories by comparing them to the post above, and since they aren't trope pages they have a different format anyway. Surely, if people want to tell their stories and relate to other people's, it makes sense to keep it that way. By changing you'd end up with just as much content, just more disorganised than before since very similar stories wouldn't be linked.

edited 30th May '11 1:43:56 AM by Fiwen9430

"Ditto" and "Haha me too!" are natter, plain and simple.

edited 30th May '11 1:48:08 AM by valjevert

We could call it Anecdotes. Since that's what they are. Uh...not very catchy, though, I suppose. But "Anecdotes" is certainly a good word to use in a name.

Ha ha, certainly not just Anecdotes on its own. We're trying to get away from the mistaken impression that Troper Tales is a place to post stories relating to the trope at hand—it's for examples of the trope that would only look out of place on the main trope page because they are not in published media.

What's wrong with calling it Troper Tales? What sort of message do we want the new name to send?

Ninja'd

edited 30th May '11 1:56:41 AM by TripleElation

So, anecdotal examples? I'm not seeing the difference between

This trope happened to me...

and

Another example of this trope is when I...

EDIT: And if this is official shouldn't it be stickied?

edited 30th May '11 2:10:10 AM by thatguythere47

I should add that there is nothing wrong with wanting to share stories—it's just not what Troper Tales was ever for. It's just like there's nothing wrong with having an informal version of wikipedia—that's just not what Useful Notes is for. (If the page doesn't help you better understand a certain topic as it relates to media and how it's portrayed in media—including how it's been incorrectly portrayed—the page doesn't belong.)

Edit: It's not a matter of subtle wording changes like that. Taking a look at I Don't Want To Ruin Our Friendship, it's that we want things like this (which illustrates the trope as it happened in someone's life*

instead of this (which is related to the trope, but doesn't actually feature the trope anywhere)

or this (the trope may show up in there somewhere, but it's surrounded by so much irrelevant detail that it doesn't matter)

edited 30th May '11 2:28:23 AM by Ironeye

If I'm understanding this, personal stories of "I encountered this trope" are unwanted, only non-media examples of it are allowed... so the Real Life section is getting it's own Name Space/page/whatever then?

edited 30th May '11 2:17:56 AM by Rotpar

Not quite. Personal examples are fine and the Real Life section isn't going anywhere. The entries should just be a clear example of the trope and not a full story that happens to include the trope (or worse, winks at the trope slyly as it passes by on its way to somewhere else). See the examples I edited in above for what I mean.

edited 30th May '11 2:27:31 AM by Ironeye

OUCH.

I am sorely tempted to suggest we put a length cap on these things.

Edit: Dammit, now that I actually took the time to read this, I can't hate it any more. Curse you, Rule of Romantic.

edited 30th May '11 2:32:06 AM by TripleElation

This Troper? It would probably cut down on the phrase's use on the wiki.

wouldn't it be simpler to make it a sub-Forum under Real-ish?

edited 30th May '11 2:39:40 AM by Vyctorian

Ok, so content-wise nothing is changing, but people who use it need to post better examples then the section currently gets. Kind of like how you don't go into Strategy Guide Mode to describe an example of a video game trope or mention that Completely Irrelevant Trope is averted if there's no reason or expectation for it to be present in the first place.

Would Troper Anecdotes work? By definition, isn't an anecdote a brief story?

@Rotpar: Exactly! What does and does not belong on Troper Tales is not changing, we're just going to display things differently and under a new name.

If the content and intent aren't changing, why do we need to change the name or format? Cosmetic changes are unnecessary and unhelpful unless they mean something, and as far as I can tell, these don't.

All that might be necessary is to relax the rules for editing the pages. Giving a clear definition of "natter" — so as to exclude comments that convey "this happened to me too" but include such as "cool story bro" — and guidelines that allow deletion of such natter, should be more than sufficient.

...must the format be changed? I really don't see the point in changing the entire layout of the pages. Forum style would just feel...sterile, unwelcoming, in a context like Troper Tales.

EDIT: said it better

edited 30th May '11 3:14:27 AM by ProgenyExMachina

I support the format change. No strong reasons, it just feels more apt for what Troper Tales is. As it stands now, we need to manually conform the usual formatting by signing, avoiding natters, and so forth. Should be neat if there's just a list of entries with the user's name automatically signed... maybe a vote up/down function... Or maybe simply like the reviews section.

But I'm a reader there, so I don't know.

"This happened to me too" is just as useless as "cool story, bro".

The name is changing because it's been giving people the wrong idea about what does and does not belong—see the entry I posted above that doesn't help illustrate the trope because it's too busy telling a tale.

The format is changing for a few reasons. First off, crackdowns on Natter haven't helped much without a dedicated curator for the page. Second, people were too willing to post outrageously unacceptable entries safe in the knowledge that someone would have to dig through the history to find out who was responsible, and automatically attaching a name to each entry makes sure that the troper in question is willing to take ownership of what they're adding. Third, the nature of Troper Tales is such that there should be no "replies" anyway, so taking out the ability to add them will ensure that active curation is not require to keep them in check.

As for how unwelcoming the new format may be, I think we all should reserve judgement until the preview is ready.

edited 30th May '11 3:59:49 AM by Ironeye

Glad to hear this. It'll do a lot to help make the section workable.

Anyway, thoughts:

• For a name, how does Tropes In Life/Tropes In Everyday Life sound?
• It might be worth requiring the pages to get approval (possibly via YKTTW or Ask The Tropers?) before they're started, both to help prevent the overflow of Troper Tales pages, like what we have now, and to keep the tropes that really don't need Troper Tales pages from ever having them.
• Also, it might be worth making a separate namespace for works, since there's a value to having anecdotes for works that provide many experiences (like games with randomly generated content), but they don't really fit with the goal of Troper Tales, and they add to the clutter.

edited 30th May '11 3:54:56 AM by Miijhal

Yeah, I'm for something like 'Tropes in Real Life', 'Real Life Tropes' etc. I don't see what's wrong with Troper Tales though.

Regarding the name: I think, plain 'IRL' will do.