Big Things Happening on TV Tropes

I haven't been here for too long. Maybe two years, give or take. But I suppose I should thank Fast Eddie for all he has done to this website. And also a nod to the people involved with the ARG, which includes him, if I remember well. That was an awesome experience - and still is.

Welcome, new overlords! May I be of use! Though I can't contribute with money, I'll give you all of my moral support!

I guess that's it. The only other thing I can think is still worthy commenting here is that the button for the Kickstarter message hangs exactly above the "Watched thread list" of my "Thread Watch". Not a big issue, since I rarely go there and it should disappear once the button is gone, but I noticed someone else complained on this thread about it. I use Chrome and my resolution is 1280x####somenumber, if that's useful for anyone.

I finally donated (money was tight when it was announced).

To quote UHF "Now we all own the station!"

edited 17th Dec '14 8:17:47 PM by pittsburghmuggle

I leave the site for a month and suddenly you guys announce all this stuff. Anyway, after all these years of time sinking you have given me, it's only appropiate that I'd donate some bucks to the cause (also, beta testing).

A salute to Fast Eddie, and looking forward to what our new overlords have in store for us.

Tell me, will they fix the terribly annoying thing where ads open up the App Store constantly on mobile devices?

It happens exclusively with this forum, so I suppose it's somehow linked to this.

Yes.

I'd prefer if the ads weren't such a memory hog. I've never installed an ad blocker, but I regularly find myself closing the Flash process (in Firefox or Chrome) or the page process (in IE) after not very many pages. Unfortunately, once you factor out video ads (autoplaying or no) the biggest culprits seem to be the most legitimate brands...

In general, TV Tropes seems to suck a lot more memory than you might expect.

You know, on Bulbapedia, those logged in don't have ads while those who are not logged in do have ads. Why don't we try something like that on TV Tropes?

Wikia does something similar. In both cases, a cookie that serves a "don't show ads" toggle is added when you log in, thus preventing the ads from loading up for logged in accounts.

It should be trivial to add coding wise and a very good idea.

Well, how does that affect revenue? The reason why ads are there at all is that they yield the money needed to pay for the site running costs.

Given that 2 of the Kickstarter reward tiers are 'No Ads' (1 year, and forever), I sorta doubt that just going to "logged in = no ads" is going to go over particularly well with those who have pledged at those levels.

Maybe 'less ads'? Even sites like gamefaqs have about half the ads for registered users vs those who don't.

TV Tropes' ad policy is great. Flash is the problem. That small Flash ad isn't in my way or screaming at me, per our policies, but then the software randomly decides that it's the most important task for my computer. That's a problem for everyone who runs Flash, and I don't know how feasible it is for anyone not to run increasingly inconvenient Flash ads.

Yeah, and what is worse apparently one gets more ad clicks by making 'em as annoying as possible. Thus, we get paid extra for these ads.

We are in the final week of the Kickstarter campaign. To date we've raised an impressive $67,000 and we still have some time left! The excitement has jump started our motivation. We have been coding non-stop over here and we will have something for all the beta testers to try out at the end of the month when the campaign ends. Some things that we recently finished that are on the development server:

- There is a consistent template with the new design and we can now easily make global changes to the site based on the feedback we get from the beta testers

- An option to toggle spoilers is now present on all pages and yes it works on mobile

- A customizable random button now makes it easy to traverse random tropes, media pages, quotes, tropes with images or without, whatever you want.

- The image upload tool has been re-done to make it easier to crop and upload larger images without having to first use photoshop

Also, the new design will absolutely have less and safer ads as I know that was a big concern. Anyone who pledged $10 or more to the Kickstarter campaign will receive access to our development server at the end of the month. Be ready to start testing!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tvtropes/the-tv-tropes-revitalization-project

Question; will access to the development server just let us edit a sort of sandbox, or will it allow us to edit the site itself with access to the beta features?

As far as I know, it's a sandbox.

Is/When is there a open beta after the closed beta? Money's a bit tight for me, sorry

Glad to hear that things are getting along!

edited 23rd Dec '14 7:33:09 AM by FELH2

Seeing 69000$ on the Kickstarter now.

Given how late bursts work on Kickstarter, it should finish at right around 75K. Pretty good, all things considered.

I still haven't seen anyone completely lay out the nitty-gritty details of how all this is actually going to work... I mean, some things have been hashed out in this thread, but I feel like a lot of people are going to be blindsided once the beta opens.

It's not that complex. The improvements to TV Tropes will come in a couple of phases.

First is the overhaul of the site's current design. This will involve new backend code, new CSS, new tools and a more consistent, easy to understand layout. This is what you will get the opportunity to beta test starting next month. User feedback will be critical to the beta testing process in terms of how you like the new look and feel, reporting bugs and annoyances so they can be remedied, and so forth. Part of this process includes a vetting of the tech wishlist for items that can be easily fixed or implemented with the new layout.

The next phase will go on over a longer period of time and will involve the rollout of entirely new features that have been paid for with your Kickstarter donations. It seems that the new admins will be doing development on a separate server (rather than live, as Eddie did), and therefore there will be more beta testing opportunities.

Somewhere in this phase (or phase three, depending) will be the complete rebuild of the site to be database-friendly. Considering the amount of planning work that will have to go into this, I wouldn't expect it to become even available for testing before late next year, and we'll be having a lot of brainstorming sessions.

edited 23rd Dec '14 12:36:03 PM by Fighteer

Regarding the beta, my understanding is this: once the kickstarter finishes they'll setup up a prototyped version of the website. Everybody who pledged the sufficient amount ($10, I think) will get a code to access it for beta testing purposes. I.e. they'll put up a proposed version of the site on the beta, get feedback from the testers, and then eventually once they have a design ironed out they'll switch the site over to that format. I'm assuming that the current site won't be changed until well after the closed beta has been going.

edited 23rd Dec '14 12:36:55 PM by JapaneseTeeth

Does this mean we're finally dumping the PmWiki code? Because we get DDOS'd a lot.

First, I don't see what DDOS has to do with PmWiki; it's a server issue. We haven't been attacked in quite a while (knock on wood). Second, as far as I know we aren't completely replacing the software in the first wave. But I could be wrong; it's not my code.