DRAGON Overhaul

Talk about the upcoming DRAGON overhaul here.

How to access it.

edited 5th Feb '16 1:01:48 AM by Karxrida

One important thing in DRAGON is that bug reports and wishlist requests are moved to a wiki-side venue. And that both the venues for these and Ask The Tropers allow for "private" reports.

Private how? Like reports on other Tropers in ATT, but only only mods can see?

edited 5th Feb '16 1:33:28 AM by Karxrida

Yes. Private reports by default are visible to the person who posted them and moderators. Moderators can change the report status, something I plan to do whenever someone picks the wrong status.

Let's see...

• Watchlist is out of order
• I have no idea how to use the favourites function
• All the subpage icons are different for some reason?
• The "More" button at article top has some problems:
  • Image uploader is here for some reason?
  • Reviews should be more visible
  • Wiki Word has a misleading name
• Forum watchlist just doesn't work
• Review are very very broken
• Editing profile resets box display options

edited 5th Feb '16 2:27:23 AM by Hylarn

I see there's a "lefthand sidebar" option now in the profile. (or was it there before?) Great!

I think the header looks too bland when completely white. The blue header we have right now look OK. I support changing the header color to blue (or failing that, some color that changes by season.) In addition, I feel the home page is too colourful. At once we're attacked by splashes of blue and red and green and yellow, and it looks like a mess without its own identity.

The Dragon website on the whole seems a lot slower to load. Not sure if it's the server's fault, or the page being a lot more cluttered.

The Random Trope/Random Media buttons look slightly less cheesy with the cute handwritten labels, but I still prefer the old dice graphics.

The forum thread list is a bit cluttered, with the spacing between individual thread titles being too small.

And on a minor note, why is the new WMG icon some walking guy? :P

It looks cool, but the information is out of date. Also, more blue is needed.

According to Fighteer, that's just because the test site is using an older version of the database. When they switch over it'll use the new code, but keep the current database from this site rather than an old version. I'm assuming that means everything should be up-to-date. Aside from a few glitches that are par-for-the-course with stuff like this.

And for another random question: is the "date joined" date on the profile accurate, or is it just a default date? Because if it's the former I've been around longer than I thought.

More importantly, when will we actually change to a relational database rather than individual pages?

Not in this update, so let's keep the two ideas distinct.

The recent outage is part of migrating to new, more powerful servers to host this mammoth of a wiki. We didn't plan for it, but sometimes when you dump and re-sync a 500GB database funny things happen.

My only objection to this new look is the side boxes. I like that they can still be moved to the left hand side, but I have become used to the "Classic View" option that has a minimum of wasted space. If it is not possible to preserve this mode in 3.0, can we at least have an option to minimize the side boxes so that a quarter of my screen is not empty whenever I scroll down in long threads such as the ones I manage?

(Apologies if I am on the wrong forum, this SEEMS to be the place for this comment)

I really like the look of the new site. I was never a fan of TV Tropes 2.0 as in my opinion it is a very bland, very clinical looking thing. But having comments on the main page is a recipe for disaster. I realise that they will be moderated, but the potential for a bunch of racist, sexist, foul-mouthed twelve year olds being the first thing that anyone sees (and that includes the ad companies) may make many people turn right back around again. My one hope is that such a system can be used to convey site news. I know that such a thing doesn't seem to be popular, but the mention of subjects that affects the whole site would be very welcome. I seem to remember that on TV Tropes 1.0 Fast Eddie would occasionally talk about things in the upper left corner of the main page.

edited 5th Feb '16 1:45:12 PM by thatsnumberwang

Things I like (good news first )

• Much improved Home Page! I've been quietly griping for a while now that the current one is all "Welcome to TV Tropes; stop doing X, Y, and Z." If you're looking to make the site more inviting, this is the perfect way to start. The first thing you see is a proper explanation of what the site is (rather than what it's not).
• Darth Wiki and Sugar Wiki look really good. (Well, I'm kind of a font nerd, so that helps somewhat.)
• I like what you did with Ask The Tropers and the related pages. I mean, my original call was for those places to be better defined, but at least now that they're all in the same overarching space, it's less likely for people to be in the wrong place.
• The logo looks good, too! Understated, yet fitting. I like how it's incorporated into the "no avatar found" forum posts as well. The lampshade's become our Iconic Item; if any trope deserved that, Lampshade Hanging would be it, because that's what we do ^note One thing to fix, though, is that when you activate Wide Load, the logo moves to the very left edge of the window, nearly cutting it off. Maybe give it a little buffer.
• I like the white header, actually, if only because the blue clashes somewhat with my avatar but I think we'll eventually get customization, since that seems to be a major Troper bugbear.

Things I didn't like so much (mostly bugs —- I don't know if I should post them here or in the regular Bug Report area):

• Spoiler font doesn't work in header text (which is a problem in such pages as WMG). The font becomes much lighter, but not unreadable.
• Sometimes a link is highlighted in red when you hover over it. This is not a problem in and of itself, except that only some of them do that, for the life of me I can't figure out which ones do it and why. Some tropes do, others don't. (I seem to be encountering this only on subpages like WMG or Funny Moments, though.)
• Navigation got a bit more confusing. I'd click on the "Darth Wiki" button on the Home Page, and then that header shows the edit boxes and such. I'd prefer a bit more consistency on this front, because to a new Troper that kind of thing would cause issues as to what exactly Darth Wiki and Sugar Wiki are supposed to be.
• And another thing — if we created Darth Wiki and Sugar Wiki to keep problematic tropes off the main wiki, should be be advertising them so prominently on the Home Page?
• Also, when you scroll down, the top bar contains what I presume will be the navigation scheme on TVT 3.0 when we get the relational database up and running. But when you click on one of the links, it just takes you to the page you're already on. Are they supposed to just be placeholders, or are they meant to be used for actual navigation?

And finally, things I don't care about (that I feel like I have to address so that you have a second opinion on things that other Tropers seem to think are crucially important):

• Don't particularly care about the comments on the front page. I mean, I don't think they'll be useful, insightful, or entertaining (my opinion of the Internet being what it is), but it seems to just be a community thing to talk about what we put on the front page. At least you have to scroll down to reach it. It concerns me more that early detractors believed that they would be present on every page — while I agree that's a bad idea, it's clearly not true, as they would have figured out if they had, you know, left the front page.
• I don't care about the sidebar being on the right now rather than the left. It's there; that's what matters to me.
• One thing I noticed is that there's now gingerbread on Ask The Tropers-type pages. I personally don't mind that, but a number of Tropers are intimidated by gingerbread such that they won't use the forums (at least that's what I understood from them).
• I would have thought we would have seen more positive feedback on the colorscheme and aesthetic, because it looks less like a "Facebook clone," and that was something a lot of Tropers complained about at the last update.

Overall, this is the easy stuff to fix; the hard part is getting the relational database up and running, and anything that gets us closer to there is okay by me

I don't think they'll be useful, insightful, or entertaining.

I mean this with the greatest of respect, but anything regarding this site update that can be described like that is a valid cause for concern and criticism. Unpleaseable Fanbase is not something that applies in this case.

edited 5th Feb '16 2:23:17 PM by thatsnumberwang

Regarding the comments on the main page, I wonder if having them being moderated before they can appear is a way to prevent incidents. Plenty of websites do moderate stuff before it becomes visible.

That would mean more work for the mods as you would have to manually approve comments

A system whereby the other users can flag problematic comments would be an absolute minimum in my opinion. Youtube used to have a system in which enough downvotes would blank out the comment from view which would also work.

edited 5th Feb '16 2:49:46 PM by thatsnumberwang

Flagging is much too slow on such a high traffic page as the homepage. drewski through has said in our private discussion that the comment section will be removed for now as it's not ready.

So, this isn't something particularly related to Dragon, but it's something I thought of while browsing: The "Media" namespaces should really be pinned to the top-left in the namespaces bar, rather than being in alphabetical order.

Go to Lampshade Hanging. Right underneath the title are the subpages. It starts with "Main", then the next is "Laconic", the next is "Quotes", etc. The relationship between the different pages is very clear, even to someone brand new to the site.

But now click on the image for that page, which leads to The Order of the Stick. Now you're on the "Webcomic" subpage, which is 15 subpages down according to the top bar. The first subpage, which the user has associated with the "main" one, is now some weird thing called "Awesome".

This would all be a lot more intuitive if the namespaces associated with mediums always came first (the same way that Main does) and perhaps separated with a divider from its subpages. So, the top bar for The Order of the Stick would go: (Webcomic) | (Awesome) (Characters) (FanficRecs) ... etc.

I tried logging in on DRAGON with my normal username and password and it didn't work.

There are two logins. You need to authenticate with the tvtropes105 account mentioned earlier and, once you're there, you use your regular TVT account to log in to the wiki itself.

I tried both of those and the second one didn't work!

Haven't looked at the new site too much yet but here are my thoughts.

• Not sure why the top buttons disappear as I scroll down the site.
• Needs more blue coloring.
• I'd still like an option to move all the stuff on the right to the left.
• The depictions stuff looks somewhat interesting, but I wonder if the main pages should somehow link to that stuff.
• For the forums, I think there should be buttons linking back to the main sub-forum when you're browsing through a particular thread.
• I'm not sure what the subscribe search bar is supposed to do.

By the way, what's the origin of the DRAGON name?