The recent Google incident caused us to look around to see what they were talking about in surprise. We had thought we had been working hard to make a clean site where we could talk about the ingredients of storytelling in an entertaining way.

It turns out that some of the articles had edged over into subject areas we do not need to discuss in order to understand how tropes are used to tell stories, and some were about stories we don't need to expose the innocent to, for any reason.

We are not going to host that sort of material anymore. It needs to be purged from the wiki, and we all need to be vigilant in keeping it from reappearing. We're retiring our old rule about our article, as long it is not porn-y itself, can be about something porn-y. We do not need porn to do what we want to do here. We don't need to describe it or recommend it. We don't need to describe porn's tropes. This goes for hentai, western porn, fanfics, web originals... the whole magilla.

Next comes the thorny question of how to identify the material we don't want. You can't make up hard and fast rules. "So many square inches of skin allowed and no more." "A scene becomes 'explicit' when gonads are mentioned or shown, " and so on.

The Supreme Court of the United State's best attempt to identify porn came down to "You know it when you see it." Since we know that there are people who are completely blind to it, we need to find some individuals who we know have porn vision, people who can spot it.

The mods have nominated a certain number of people who we think can be the arbiters, people who can say "That's porn" and "that's not porn." We will be announcing this council's makeup after we have had a chance to offer them the position and get their agreement to serve.

They will be our judicial on this matter. What they say goes.

---

There will be people who feel it necessary to discuss certain works in order to understand some genre or the other. Well, we are about stories, not genres. Defining genres is not our mission. The only thing they have to do with us is that are convenient ways to organize lists of works. Some less publicly accessible forum will have to be used to further define them.

I know this will cause some tropers to throw up their hands, shout about censorship, and eventually stalk off for good. Sorry for that, but this is the way it has to be.

edited 14th Apr '12 7:18:10 AM by FastEddie

In short, we are no longer about porn, and what the Porn Watch comittee finds to be mostly porn must go?

We've never been about porn, but the rest is right.

edited 14th Apr '12 7:49:53 AM by FastEddie

If we can convince the Fetish Fuel Wiki to let us host that kind of thing on their site, will you provide the sources of the pages you cut?

If there is a better place to discuss this, please let me know.

edited 14th Apr '12 7:33:53 AM by Discar

So does this mean that we cannot have any pages on erotic fiction on this wiki anymore, no matter how well-written or plotful they are? That we cannot have any Recs on Lemons or other sex-related fanfics anymore, no matter how well-written they are? Whatever happened to No Lewdness, No Prudishness?

As a troper who enjoys erotic works, this is saddening.

I think the point should be that if there is little but porn there, it will go.

But we need to know the Porn Watch Comittee's setup and rules before we can make any judgments about the matter.

So NL, NP isn't a policy anymore either?

Yes, it is, but there is a "No porn" rule there too.

It is. We still don't want drooling over examples or denying sexuality.

We just don't seem to be able to trope things that are solely or mostly pornographic.

Oh.

Well ok then I guess.

I'm okay with this. It's a bit of a pity that we have to cut stuff, but I can understand the rationale behind it. I just hope that the council is reasonable enough to not cut stuff that doesn't deserve to get cut.

Amen.

I have never been interested in sex or porn, so while stuff getting cut always upsets me, I really sincerely do not care.

That is, as long as the "no porn" rule doesn't slip off into "no romance" or "no work with a few sex scenes, but there is far more to it than that".

edited 14th Apr '12 7:46:53 AM by SeptimusHeap

^And that is where we need the panel to make the call. They have to exercise judgement, not just react to rules.

Sounds good to me.

About the recent blanking and locking of the Fan Fic Recommendations page (which has not appeared on the Cutlist for some reason):

I'm given to understand that this is an effort to pore through all of the fanfic recs for the various works and weed out the most explicit ones before bringing it back. Would I be correct on this?

Yes

Will the committee be available for suggestions and open examination? Even them might perhaps miss some detail, and at the same time there might be public (as in, non-committee) discussion about a work that might be useful, yet they (the committee) don't need to be distracted by (offtopic, do we don't have that trope).

Is it possible to downsize the message on the Fanfic Recs pages so that it looks less shouty?

I am sure they will. After all, not everyone reads everything (or wants to read everything)

Just a suggestion here... take it for what you will.

Instead of chipping away at problem areas as fires spring up... might this be the time for that larger review of what TV Tropes wants to be?

I really don't have a problem with purging "porn" (as long as there's some general agreement as to what "porn" is) — keeping the libertines from going too far while keeping the bluenosers from cutting too much will be a problem, of course — but rather than approaching the issue from that angle, maybe this committee needs to work out with the Fast One and Janitor what this site is... and then adjust all of the site's content to match.

For example:

• What age group is the site aimed at? (This is a non-obvious answer — it may turn out to be too much trouble to maintain both Disney and adult tropes on the same site)
• If this is a site about fictional tropes, should all Real Life examples move to a separate namespace (like YMMV), or be deleted?
• Is there material that might better be moved to another site (like Fetish Fuel was)?
• Do Darth and Sugar fit any more?

While the site probably doesn't need "rules" (or rules lawyering), it may be time to clarify, state, and enforce a few core guidelines. Take the opportunity to shape the site for the future — don't just put out this fire and assume "it's all good".

You may now resume the previous discussion, already in progress.

edited 14th Apr '12 8:41:54 AM by robster2001

That is a very wide thing. Methinks you want to make a thread for each of these topics.

Indeed. Let's keep the focus of this thread where it belongs.

If I could maybe put my own two cents in: If people are worried about the content of the Fanfic Recommendations page, should it maybe be moved onto its own wikia site, like what happened to Fetish Fuel and Troper Tales? Then the content issue would be a non-problem (I think?).

Also, how long would it take for the panel to go through all the recs? There was a ton of content on those pages, and I'd hate to the the group of people who has to go through all of that.

edited 14th Apr '12 8:43:32 AM by Margo196

If cutlocking Fanfic Recs was a move to give the potential future committee some food to work on, that was just a really dirty move. Not all of Fanfic Recs is porn or explicit. It just strikes me as FE's MO of "let's kill this thing and have them beg".

A lot of that is and there is the "no recs for explicit sex under 16" rule. Restarting from scratch is probably the only way to enforce that.