We Need to Clear Memory in Yack Fest Additional Information Here

We might kill some article histories; apparently those things eat up a whole lot more space than you'd expect.

They are already dying in some places, long before the 28th April Crisis.

Let's see aside from YF, this is what I think would be a good list of clearing priorities, going from biggest to smallest (doesn't have to be all these listed of course):

IJAM (>20 pages of it fit past the threshold) would be first, Forum Games, OTC (easily the most egregious case, perhaps even more so than any Just For Fun subforums), A couple Media subforums (especially Video Games), other "Real-ish" subforums, Role-Playing signups (RPs not so egregious compared to other subforums), everything else (especially since some don't have that many pages) that's not workshops or morgues (both of which not going anywhere).

edited 29th Apr '13 11:45:27 AM by EarlOfSandvich

So, is anybody going to make an archive of the stuff before it's deleted?

Well yeah, some people already went to make their personalised archives of stuff they treasure, plus there's submitting them to wayback machine idea upthread.

Oh also, I think it'd be better to make a bigger announcement about this thread. Perhaps make a thread in YF itself? (thread locked with just the announcement and link here, pinned for the time being?)

a) This thread is in Yack Fest and b) there is a wiki-wide Headline about this.

Oops x2. Got linked here and didn't check and didn't see the headline beneath the ad XD Alrighty then, I'm off beating my derps per evening record somewhere else :V

Just because the RP Forums are different doesn't mean it is more useful to delete from there than anywhere else. What TV Tropes has is a memory issue, which means that we've got to free up memory. Save for your initial point, I could list the same points for other forums. OTC and IJAM don't really add to TV Tropes mission statement any more than the RP forums do since they are neither talking about media specifically (which would be the domain of the various media subsections) nor involved with the actual running of the site itself. Few topics in general are really going to be revived after a year and a half and even if there was a retread of material, it would likely be better to have a new topic anyway in most cases. However, I can actually mention a good reason why topics in the RP subforums would be revived and why pruning it may be a little more complicated than other forum sections.

As you've mentioned, there are three RP subforums... the RP subforum, the RP Discussion, and the RP signups... Because each RP has one topic in each section, the mods need to be sure that they aren't deleting only parts of an active RP. By its very nature as a signup forum, the topics in the RP Signups are going to be dead most of the time since it's for just posting signups and getting approval to enter. A very active RP could have a very dead RP signup because no new people are entering it.

Now, I'm not asking that you avoid cleaning out the RP Forums, since even I'll admit that it needs some cleaning, but if it must be done, I feel it should be done with caution and respect to the various RPs within. They might be the most prolific posters on the board and make little edits to the tropes themselves, but an RP is really just a collaborative writing session with a few rules and regulations to keep it somewhat controlled. The rest of the forums might be more active in creating and editing tropes, but the RPers are the ones actually writing stories and putting those tropes into practice. Sometimes, I feel people who don't visit the RP subforums miss that.

Either way, I've said my speech, and would be glad to help you in finding which inactive RPs to purge should the purging of Yack Fest prove ineffective. We over at the RP subforums do care about the rest of the site, we just enjoy writing stories and using tropes rather than editing the site and creating them.

edited 29th Apr '13 1:34:47 PM by GameGuruGG

RP writes pages, yes, but in the grand sceme of things that doesn't matter much. Only enough to make it a lesser priority than Yack Fest, I'd imagine.

edited 29th Apr '13 1:35:06 PM by SeptimusHeap

...That's like saying any one work of literature means little in the grand scheme of things.

Our data has repeatedly shown correspondence between frequent wiki editors and OTC posters, meaning that OTC is more useful in keeping the crowd that edits the wiki around.

But aside from that, we are not planning to purge anything but Yack Fest at the moment.

edited 29th Apr '13 1:49:53 PM by lu127

Especially considering how chances are, cutting Yack Fest's pre-2012 threads might be enough.

Can I put forward a motion to call it a "nuke" instead of a "purge" in the name of awesomeness?