new namespace access method

@Fighteer If any icons absolutely need to stay,

1. (Definitely needs to be on the bar) It's Discussion/, YMMV/ and Trivia/ since those are for "Stuff about the work that needs to get moved off the main page." You'll see a resurgence of YMMV and Trivia tropes without those having visibility.

2. (Should be on the bar, but can live without it)Next (barely below it in importance) come the "Other version" types- the Film/, Western Animation/, etc. ones, since a lot of stuff is still soft split anyway. Of course, since we're in the process of moving everything to its namespace, perhaps this should be top level "Must Stay" as well.

3. (Fairly important, can go either way)Then Character/. Analasys/ and Synopsis/ fit in somewhere between here and WMG/ etc ones.

4. (Not that important)Then WMG, Headscratchers, Fridge, and the Awesome, Tearjerker, etc ones.

edited 14th Nov '11 11:44:13 AM by Wulf

Every namespace if it exists or not? Really? That is useless and far to cluttered

Not everyone needs a Personality Blood Types or an Adaptation Dye-Job page listed in their drop down list. (Or any of those other overflow namespaces.)

Character, YMMV and Trivia only IMO.

edited 14th Nov '11 11:38:53 AM by Raso

I think the "moments of" should be grouped together in the drop down menu at least.

I would rank Characters/ with Trivia/, YMMV/, and such—once it's there, Character-related tropes shouldn't be on the main page, at all.

edited 14th Nov '11 11:37:18 AM by RainehDaze

I'd like Character Sheet to stay. Even with the icon and note saying "character tropes go on the sheet", there's still a lot of duplicate examples and there'll be even more if people can't see it.

This. I rather not click on a sub-page and find it empty.

@Raineh Daze- Honestly, I think it depends. There've been other discussions about what the rule of thumb should be, and I think it came to "For the obvious Character tropes like The Hero, The Lancer, etc only list on the character/ page, for stuff that is about both the character and story stuff like 'I Just Want My Beloved to Be Happy' or 'Mayfly–December Romance', list on both emphasizing how it affects the work on the main/ one and it affects the character on the character/, but use your judgement in either case.'

The thing is, before the dropdown we could see all sorts of namespaces and see which ones had pages. So that easied the process of creating a subpage/relatedpage when needed. From an accesibility standpoint he dropdown should not lose that. That's why I suggested a visual indicator.

As for avoiding cluttering due to the amount of namespaces, yeah, that's a good point. However beyond including a second dropdown somewhere else in the page, or a titlesearch shortcut in the sidebar, I can't think of any *usable* way of handling that.

...Yeah, I don't like this new system. Its a little harder to navigate the various pages, can't open up a new tab, and its not noticeable...

I don't mind if we keep the dropbox, but it don't think it warrants taking away the buttons.

There should be a list of "official" subpages somewhere, and creating new ones without discussion should be discouraged.

As for the empty/used indicator, I'm not sure if it's possible to apply formatting to the rows of a combo box without custom scripting. An asterisk or similar symbol might work.

Ultimately I think we need all subpages to be attached to the main article just like Discussion so we get rid of subpage collisions entirely.

I need to get used to it before I can come to conclusive result, but two things:

1. The work pages/ main sub spaces need to be at the top of the list! Especially for people who are not familiar with our name spaces, the alphabetical order is extremely confusing. Over the years we got a lot of just for fun name spaces and if you just want to check out the tropes for something, it is really off putting.

2. It looks odd that we have the entire interface on the left and the top and only this single item on the right.

edited 14th Nov '11 11:49:34 AM by eX

Given the sorting suggested above, what about having a few drop-down menus (with labels and icons) to stop the existing one from getting cluttered? We could have one for media namespaces, one for language namespaces, one for Moments, one for example pages (Character, YMMV, Trivia, etc.) and one for more in-depth consideration (WMG, Useful Notes, Analysis). The entries for the "standard" namespaces (such as YMMV) could be greyed-out if the pages don't exist yet, while the "non-standard" namespaces—such as the media namespaces—wouldn't show up until they exist. (Here I use "standard" in the sense that either all trope pages or all work pages could reasonably feature the subpage.)

Hey, who decided this? Now you can't see if, for example, the "Funny" site for a work has entries or not. You also can't access as easy AND you can't open a new tab. I don't know about you, but I really don't like this. How do we change this? This isn't youtube, we can change it if a majority disagrees, right? Or maybe a compromise? :|

Three things.

1. I'm still not used to this, but it was a very very stark change and I was unhappy to find it all of a sudden. I completely understand why it was implemented, but it doesn't work for me because it's
   1. harder to find
   2. doesn't show which pages actually exist or not, despite showing all possible subpages
   3. boring and sterile (more of an opinionated statement)
2. I miss the icons, they were nice and cute and added some spice to the already text-heavy nature of TV Tropes itself. I'm not saying that TV Tropes should completely redefine itself and be more image-heavy than it always was, but the loss of those little icons makes me feel like this place is getting more and more sterile. This may be more of a personal issue than a professional one, however.
3. I would like to have the option of switching the view to clutter-icon or whatever if I so choose. I prefer that method due to both familiarity and because I prefer it that way. I'm sure others would prefer it that way as well, and that might even encourage newcomers to sign up for a profile to not only get editing priveleges, but also to choose whether or not to see spoilers as well as see icons on the header of pages.

Those are the things I have to say about this.

With this new system can we get an option to attach a forum thread to the dropdown list? Like if the work in question has a forum thread open just click one saying "forum" on it to go there.

The downside with multiple menus is that things then get cluttered again...

It's also bad when you have several redirects, since now we have a text clutter rather than an image clutter. At least the latter is colourful. XD

From my, like, 5 minutes testing this feature, I have one major dislike that I have seen elsewhere — you can't open new tabs from this, so it makes Wiki Walking and such activities harder. Also, supporting eX's idea that the dropdown should be in the sidebar, though I can't figure whether it should go on "tools" or right before "main index".

Finally, having different dropdowns according to namespace creation criteria (for mediums, for not-on-the-main-page, etc) seems to be a nice approach to avoid cluttering. Not all dropdowns need to be together, which avoid re-cluttering.

As Fighteer says, there's no (standard) way to stylize dropdown items, so a marker character for inexistent pages would help in that sense. I'd suggest against using an asterisk though because the asterisk is intended to denote importance — if anything, subpages like Characters/ or Discussion/ should have it. I'd suggest instead a black box marker or the standard "no/wrong" checkmark (✘).

Fair point, I was thinking of marking the pages that didn't exist...

edited 14th Nov '11 12:00:06 PM by SilentReverence

I was thinking an asterisk for pages that do exist, not ones that don't. Groups/separator bars can help solve the importance problem.

I'm not really liking this. There should at least be YMMV, Trivia, Characters, etc. always visible. Like several people have said, it would be good to have a profile setting to change it. And... I've always liked having the 'moments' pages easily visible.

Yep, I don't like this new sistem. Like others have said, now we can't open the subpages on other tabs (making wiki walking harder), it's barely noticeable (and new users might probably miss them altogheter), and it just makes the articles seem more plain and text heavy than before (those tiny icons had their charm).

Noticed a problem with at least one page with the new system.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/PokemonMysteryDungeon?from=Main.PokemonMysteryDungeon has its Tearjerker page from the dropdown menu redirect to Tearjerker/Videogame.

edited 14th Nov '11 12:18:16 PM by lalalei2001

Huh? It works well for me.

Must just be me, then.

Either way, i miss the icons. They were easy to access and looked nice!

I'm having a similar issue when navigating between subpages. Main.Works Page to Namespace1.Works Page works well, but Namespace1.Works Page to Namespace2.Works Page takes me to Namespace2.Namespace2 instead. In particular with multiple-word namespaces like Drinking Game and Image Links.

edited 14th Nov '11 12:24:27 PM by SilentReverence

^^ I second this. I don't want to become tvtropes boring like wikipedia, I want it to retain it's charms.

edited 14th Nov '11 12:26:13 PM by LeahCinnamon