All-Purpose Policy and Meta discussion: Administrivia.Trope Repair Shop

My discussion is awaiting opening for quite some time. What's holding up?

I've opened it, also because we had internal discussions about this issue.

Do we have a discussion about linking up the Transsexual page with the Useful Notes page on transgender? Because bringing the two in line terminologically—having the main page renamed to "Transgender" and then having the Useful Notes page directly linked from the trope page—would be immensely helpful, particularly considering that the main page already primarily uses "transgender" and "transsexual" is actually a pretty narrow term.

"Linking up" as adding links between the pages? Can be done by everybody.

No, I mean having the Useful Notes page listed as the Useful Notes page for that trope, and renaming the page to reflect the prevailing terminology, which is a bit more extensive than that, I think?

Can I ask here about my Doujinshi thread? Since it involves multiple pages I'd originally considered posting it in Short-Term Projects, but I'm not sure where the dividing line is for that.

So I still haven't received a real response on the issue of the "transsexual"/"transgender" thing, which is annoying, but I have found another concern, maybe less important but dear to my heart nevertheless.

So...

The page on screamo is a complete fucking mess.

I mean, it tries to address the conflict between fans of contemporary screamo and old-school "skramz" but it somehow manages to merge the two at the same time and makes no mention of seminal bands like Pg. 99 or Envy or smaller crossover genres like emo violence which, if you're going to wade into that quagmire at all, is absolutely unforgivable. It's really just shoddy and historically inaccurate and on top of it all it just reads really badly. Seriously.

So... either fix it yourself, or open a thread for it? Not sure why you're pointing it out here.

Because I'm trying to see if anyone else would be willing to get involved. This is going to need a lot of work and I'm just one person with a moderate interest in the genre.

I've tried to create a TRS thread twice now (yesterday and today), but it looks like the forum ate them both times. Is this related to the site updates or simply a matter of the TRS being too crowded already?

Site updates problem. Apparently something in the approval function is funking up new threads.

Same here. I thought it was due to to character length (the wickcheck for it needed to be huge), so I tried to make it as short as possible, but all I get is a blank screen with this url: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/create_shop_thread.php

So it turns out it's nothing to do with word count...

Got it too trying to post a new thread. Reported the issue to the bug list.

Does anybody else feel TRS fails to deliver? Things are not moving along. Has there ever been a time when it actually worked out? What are the reasons for this? I would say lack of motivation/ownership is a big driver. It's hard to find two users caring enough for the same subject.

What about this suggestion: We can assume that the proposing user is the one caring most about the issue. Why not make him do more of the legwork and anybody else can just cast their vote in a crowner. Hence, in order to open a TRS thread, a user must propose a fleshed out solution already. A crowner will be automatically attached to the thread once it's opened. User can then vote for or against the change. Or they have to propose a full-blown proposal of their own. If a crowner gets enough positive votes, the change will be implemented as proposed.

Opinions?

edited 26th Feb '16 1:44:43 AM by eroock

I agree that the current method isn't really working.

While lack of ownership adds to the lack of activity, the biggest problem I think is that the thread cap is too high, which primarily serves to divide everyone's attention. In the IP forum decisions are fairly simple because they're based on clearly defined criteria, but the complexity of TRS threads (first hammering out what the issue is, then getting one or more crowners to decide on a course of action, then cleaning up the pages and hundreds of wicks if it's a big trope) makes focusing on all these threads far more difficult.

There also seems to be hesitation to both close old threads and open new ones. All threads with no recent activity should be clocked. All the unopened threads in TRS are just taking up space as well at this point.

edited 26th Feb '16 8:26:12 AM by Morgenthaler

Most of the time I've been interested enough to do the legwork, it's been hindered by people who just want to throw it away, toss it back to YKTTW (which I've increasingly felt is just an excuse to cut the trope while pretending it's constructive work) for the exact same work I was prepared to do in the first place, or other bureaucratic holdups. That's one of the main reasons I don't really do TRS anymore.

My recentl lack of contribution is due to IRL stuff getting in the way. I haven't forgotten about cleaning up Executive Meddling.

I think the issue is partially due to the sheer number of threads, as I've stated before. Toning it down to 15 or something would help focus efforts in projects.

The other part of the issue is the lack of people willing to help or only helping selectively. I personally avoid helping with massive description rewrites because I get huge writer's block really easily for anything resembling an essay (I never get it for example write-ups, oddly), on top of concentration issues.

From looking at the forum, we've currently got 95 threads going, but nearly a third of those haven't been opened. And some of those are nearly a month old. Given that there's no reason given for why threads aren't opened, there's no way to tell if the mods think that it's a non-issue or if there's so many open threads that they don't want to open another thread or if the quality of the post was bad or whatever.

I can't see anything on what happens with unopened threads in the "Welcome to the Trope Repair Shop" sticky, which makes me think we should re-visit what happens with unopened repair shop threads. Closing the threads that aren't legitimate TRS issues, would at least make the TRS list shorter and less daunting. And knowing if there's too many tropes being worked on to open new ones even if the issue is legitimate, would at least let people know if the mods think the opening post is good or not.

I've been very reticent lately at opening TRS threads because I do think people need to spend more time at fixing already reported issues than at reporting new ones.

One thing that would help would be getting crowners called in a more timely manner. The Hey Its That Guy/Voice thread has a stable crowner and several volunteers ready to implement its decision, but we can't start because the crowner hasn't been called.

There's also the fact that we really want to wait for 2.0 to do much of an overhaul here to the TRS itself. We have a lot of site changes coming in the pipeline that are going to effect how things work and too many system overhauls and no one knows how things work.

That said, a lot of times if a TRS thread is left lingering unopened it's because I either need time to double check the problem, or I'm waiting for the OP to flesh things out better.

My "Ranged Emergency Weapon is not a subtrope of Emergency Weapon" thread was sent to the morgue for not including a wick check in the OP. Do I start a new thread, or edit a wick check into the old one and ask for it to be reactivated?

Also, what exactly do I need for the Doujinshi thread to be opened? Wicks aren't a major issue for it, since they're either in the Main namespace (and not a lot of work to fix) or will still make make sense after the redirect-shuffling. I gave my opinion on how the issues should be solved, though I'm not 100% sure about a move to Useful Notes.

^^ Do you let users know about the missing expectations? According to above's post, this is not handled well.

Yeah, at the moment, we've got 95 TRS threads and 33 of them haven't been opened. That... doesn't seem right.

I'd suggest that we get the number of active TRS threads down to something a lot lower. Like, 20-25. That's enough so that TRS as a whole won't stall because of a handful of long-term fixes, but few enough that it's unlikely for things to languish at the bottom of the list for lack of people noticing them. Of course, the downside of that is that whenever we get below that number, it becomes a race to see who can open a new thread first. Maybe we could use un-opened threads as a sort of queue? You can make a new thread to call attention to the issue, but it can't actually be worked on until a space opens up?