YKTTW entries are overflowing

What is going on is that I am stuck ATM on a iPhone with autocorrect. I'll look up a way to turn it off immediately.

ETA: Fixed. I apologize for any inconvenience resulting from the issue.

edited 30th Nov '12 12:41:20 AM by SeptimusHeap

...I'm not sure why an iPhone would correct capitalization.

Depends on implementation. I don't see why the interface necessarily needs to be "cramped". It could work like YKTTW works now, it could work like Lost And Found, it could be just another forum, or it could be an expandable list of initial posts. I could demonstrate what it might look like if you need a visual aid.

This isn't entirely a new idea, incidentially. Look through the first few pages of the last "let's-fix-YKTTW" thread I linked. The main point is to have a draft that actually works like a wiki page alongside the YKTTW discussion, without serving the dual purpose of being part of said discussion.

By the way, take a look at Lost And Found and think: if it turns out we don't have any of these, how much work will the O Ps need to even get listened to in YKTTW? In particular, compare ereg's entry to the resulting YKTTW, using History to go back to the first version of the YKTTW if need be.

What exactly do you mean? That non-sponsors don't feel like getting entries into a launch-worthy state? Considering that one of the benefits of the "sponsor" system is to have someone who feels committed enough to an entry to prepare it for launch, I'm not sure I like what that says about the health of YKTTW. Perhaps that suggests that a large-scale overhaul is in fact called for.

I think my proposal would put some pressure off the system. Threads without drafts would probably have more pressure to either get to a draft or be discarded. On threads with drafts, the existence of a draft would make a page feel more tangible, motivating everyone to get it closer to completion, and getting examples off the thread could motivate more discussion of aspects that actually warrant discussion, especially if having something that looks like an actual wiki page calls more attention to the draft's flaws. If the page is fundamentally the same as it would be on the wiki, that could make it easier on the launcher as well; in fact, maybe we could have the ability to add "ghost links" on wiki pages, or at least indexes, that would be hidden until launch but magically appear once the page is launched.

edited 30th Nov '12 12:49:44 AM by MorganWick

You guessed the meaning right - most sponsors can't get a trope launched without some feedback, let alone discarded.

I'd be happy to change the interface to something more like a forum, but I don't know how YKTTW's current users would react.

edited 30th Nov '12 12:56:42 AM by SeptimusHeap

I'm not necessarily proposing a forum-like interface, I'm completely neutral on what the specific interface would look like. YKTTW would work more like TRS, but that doesn't mean the interface couldn't be made palatable to YKTTW regulars who hate forums.

edited 30th Nov '12 1:00:32 AM by MorganWick

You don't need help to start a YKTTW. You need help to get one launched. And most YKTTW that get discarded don't get discarded by their sponsor. Thus, in the absence of interest backlogs tend to develop.

Oh, and under your YKTTW namespace idea - how would the YKTTW draft display on the thread?

edited 30th Nov '12 1:05:33 AM by SeptimusHeap

You obviously don't need help to start a YKTTW, but the result is that your YKTTW could take a variety of forms. YKTTW gets a number of half-formed trope ideas that usually end up frustrating everyone when they attract any interest at all. I think making it more acceptable to not have to draft an entire page to get any hearing from YKTTW at all could make it easier for the half-formed ideas to get somewhere, so long as it's clear what you're getting at, and could also lead to more ideas coming through YKTTW as a whole - we don't know how many people are scared off by the perception of just starting a YKTTW representing a heavy workload, but there's at least one Lost And Found thread suggesting it might be the case. We need more people to take an interest in putting a trope through its earliest development stages, and having a YKTTW format that doesn't presuppose that those stages have already been completed could help.

Again, I'm agnostic to any ideas here. It's possible there'd just be a link to the draft from the thread and you'd have to open that in a new tab. It's possible it would be more like the thread displaying on the draft.

If I had to put my idea in a tl;dr form, it would be: Separate the draft from the first post and the thread as a whole, and make it so that you don't have to have a full-fledged draft until you're ready for one.

edited 30th Nov '12 1:29:18 AM by MorganWick

I did say a few posts ago that lack of interest is an issue. My previous post explains how it leads to backlogs.

I guess my problem is that I'm not sure what you mean by "lack of interest". Lack of interest in YKTTW as a whole? Lack of interest in specific trope ideas? Lack of interest in specific parts of trope development?

How much interest do you think people should have that they aren't having now? Because it's not like nothing happens in YKTTW whatsoever.

If it's lack of interest in specific trope ideas, that's mostly a cultural thing that this thread probably can't solve directly. I think the whole "sponsor" thing may be part of the problem here, actually. It encourages people to nurture "their" trope to launchworthiness, but it may also discourage people from nurturing tropes that aren't "theirs" unless they've been declared Up For Grabs.

edited 30th Nov '12 1:46:05 AM by MorganWick

Lack of interest in providing useful feedback to others' YKTTW. No, the interest is not enough for the current number of YKTTW (yes, these issues can exacerbate each other)

edited 30th Nov '12 1:48:32 AM by SeptimusHeap

Define "useful feedback". Asking questions on tropeworthiness? Defining boundaries with other tropes? Improving the description? Improving the name?

Does this basically come down to "YKTTW is an examples sinkhole" again? Because that brings us back to how to bring the TRS regulars, who might actually provide such useful feedback, into the process.

All of that, but also examples.

Again, YKTTW isn't a complete dead zone. Are you saying there basically aren't enough people using YKTTW compared to the number of trope ideas created there? Because that raises the question of 1) whether YKTTW's format drives away people who aren't already using it (regardless of their current level of participation on the rest of the wiki), and 2) again, whether we need more TRS regulars in there who don't have the mindset of "creating ideas is easy; actually working on them is hard".

Or perhaps you'd rather go in the opposite direction of my suggestion and make it harder for people to create YKTT Ws, but I don't think that's the problem. I'm fairly sure we still want as many tropes as we don't already have; the problem is throughput. I don't know if we can make it easier to actually work on YKTT Ws - it may still be a cultural problem we can't solve directly - but we might be able to clarify YKTTW's focus if we feel the need to.

I'll reply once I get to a place where I can write up something more than what I can write here on an iPhone.

Ok, yes, there are too many ideas there for the number of users. I didn't say "dead zone", nor did I immediately suggest a solution for it.

edited 30th Nov '12 6:24:04 AM by SeptimusHeap

Well, I was trying to make sure you weren't saying next to no feedback occurs in YKTTW, only that there's not enough of it.

Basically, the question is whether the solution is to get more feedback-providers in YKTTW, put up barriers to discourage people from throwing out more ideas than the system can handle right now, or be quicker to discard entries that aren't attracting interest. I'm not fond of the middle option; the last option is probably the easiest and the one requiring the least change, but I wonder if the way YKTTW works right now, the mere existence of a YKTTW implies enough effort went into it to legitimize it, so there needs to be something actively wrong for it to be discarded.

I see the issue as being that there are too many active YKTTW's for the number of people who contribute. People probably would clean up the older ones/backlog IF they ever saw them. At this point, people see the ones on the first couple pages and then stop. Considering that, during peek times, the entirety of those pages change and tropes get lost in the shuffle, it is hard to keep meaningful discussion going and prevent a particular YKTTW from falling down the pages until it just adds to the backlog.

Yes, we have flags and filters. They just don't work very well unless people regularly use them. And we don't want to force their use because we want a system that is easy to use.

How about we set up an auto-PM that goes to the "sponsor" and reminds them about the YKTTW they started if there has been no activity on it for a month? After another month of no activity, it is auto-tagged as "up-for-grabs", has its sponsor removed/set to "Unknown Troper", and is bumped with a message saying "WARNING: This trope is non-active and will likely be removed if there is no activity." If it is still inactive a month after that... well, we tried. It can be flagged for review and probably discarded. (the programming can look for the "Unknown Troper" sponsor and "Inactive for a month" to add the review flag)

I have no idea if this would work, but it is a process that would keep the YKTTW in the system for at least 3 months and the "real person review." Note I did not say "mod review" because we would probably need a couple people (more for the initial clean-up) who were focused on YKTTW. They could even take over the Workstation thread to post/keep a list of the YKTTW's that have reached the point of being flagged and they believe just needs work.

the 2nd: How about a new filter for # of comments? Most of the ones with 0-3 comments and any sort of age could probably be free discards.

The problem with that is that sometimes you need to let YKTT Ws go dormant for a while. For whatever reason, letting them lie dormant for months and then bumping them back up again is far better at getting replies from new people than just keeping bumping steadily. I've had a lot of luck with this method in the past.

So instead of "one month" you use "two months" or "three months" for the initial PM. The point is to remind sponsors that they have a YKTTW that needs some attention or should be discarded if they don't think it is viable any more.

Maybe an active YKTTW could have an alert on the sponsor's watchlist (like to dos) to make sure they don't forget about it?

There's already a YKTTW watchlist.

True, but it just sort of blends in with the other buttons (I can't speak for anyone else, but I usually forget it's even there, unless I'm looking for one I posted in and can't find). I meant something like the "You have X to-do(s)." message, except to remind the troper that they have an active YKTTW to reduce the chance of them being forgotten.

I'm not fond of any system that gives any more formal power or elevation to sponsors than is necessary. Improving the flagging system would help. The "sort by oldest/latest replies" toggle doesn't seem to do anything, and none of the controls seems to change the URL, so there's effectively no replacement for the old "flagged and new" function.

I've only skimmed some of the posts above to try and give an unbiased "report" of my experience with YKTTW and why I'm personally backlogged.

When I was just starting as a contributor in 2007 I'd launch tropes with a modicum of feedback (3 or 4 replies) and three examples, and quite a lot of those thrived. However I've seriously throttled back since TRS came online because of issues regarding trope duplication, overlap, title problems, etc. Now I'll only launch a trope if I can guarantee 15+ inbound links and a solid name, which resulted in going from launching 80% of my YKTTW's to maybe 20%.

That's not necessarily a bad thing, I think my quality is up and I don't worry about wasted effort on everyones part for the TRS process ... but my "creativity" for new YKTTW's hasn't really improved (since I started working I'm probably proposing 1/3 of the rate I used to) and the lower launch rate means I have something like 40/50 flagged YKTTW's on the backburner. Heck, I had no idea the glut was negatively affecting others, so after reading this thread I went back and easily purged 23 stagnant proposals of my own.

As a regular in YKTTW, the things I need to feel confident when launching a trope are the same as always: a good name, examples, and related tropes to link to/from. Give me those things and I could launch a trope a week.

The tags help some, but mostly my problem keeps being a lack of feedback on names, enough examples and related tropes. There's no point in launching a trope if you can't guarantee good health.

However a lot of the time I hold back because an someone raises a reasonable objection like "Isn't this X but with Y?" and when someone else or me counters the objector doesn't say whether or not it's a satisfactory counter. The specter of seeing the trope end up in TRS is enough to keep me from launching, so it goes stale.

This is especially common in the 20+ reply ones, which makes me ache on the inside because they have so much juice but there's enough dissent to make a viable future tenuous.

So if there's any "feature" I could suggest it would be having some kind of "I want to launch this, but X needs to be verified". Hmm. maybe a launch countdown tag paired with a "please OK this" to put objection to rest?

Hope this helps.

edited 30th Nov '12 9:32:46 PM by Earnest

Semi-random idea: I notice that the "show hats only" button shows all entries with any hats. Maybe this is useful, maybe it isn't, but I suspect it dates to the period when the hats were new and seldom used. I could see how it could be useful as a way of saying "someone thinks these entries are ready to launch". But what would also be useful would be a list of entries with all five hats, to help put eyes on and focus effort towards those entries that are closest to launching.

And to expand on ^, a tag "Needs Hats/De-Hats" (or just "Needs Hats") might be useful.

Not sure how; in fact, it could do some harm. The only real situation I could see it being used is by sponsors begging for hats, perhaps overlooking flaws with the trope that have been pointed out to him. I guess you could interpret it as "give me either a hat or advice for how to get one"...