Bring back Troper Tales?

I get that many Troper Tales used to be ridiculous and/or deranged. I myself used to be glad they were gone.

But I've been thinking about it more since getting back into this site, and in hindsight, the problem wasn't Troper Tales itself so much as the individuals posting the most ridiculous and/or deranged ones. Perhaps, in hindsight, to suspend those individuals' editing privileges might have been more constructive than removing Troper Tales from the website. I'm kind of left wondering if choosing the latter might be part of why other aspects of the site are still so flawed. After all, if those individuals could be so wrong in their judgment about what to say in Troper Tales... what else could they be wrong about?

So the question becomes, if we bring back Troper Tales, and use people's behaviour there as a gauge of whether or not to suspend their editing privileges until it improves, would we improve the rest of the site in the process?

edited 12th Jan '17 3:28:07 PM by neoYTPism

The only thing that could theoretically be worth bringing back are the ones about experiences in interactive works, e.g video games. Everything else is dust-boring or annoying.

Creating intentional troll bait strikes me as an extremely bad idea.

However, I do agree with Septimus that certain interactive media could have a legitimate basis for troping user experiences. While it's questionable whether it'd be worth the effort to police them, I honestly think it'd be more so than something like Real Life.

I believe Troper Tales was one of the reasons behind a potential google ads ban a few years back because of website content.

I agree with the idea of encouraging stories and communication between tropers regarding various media professions. In the back of my head I was thinking of a sub-forum dedicated for that purpose, creating general discussion rather than a wiki tab where the stories are permanent and useless.

Who's gonna police that? The wiki can barely keep track of on-mission stuff like trope misuse and the like. Who's going to dedicate their lives to reading troper tales (ugh) and gauge if it reaches the creep level needed to ban someone?

Seriously, TT is dead and we're better for it. If people want to talk about their lives, make a blog, or a forum post. I see no added value to bringing back Troper Tale.

Hell to the frak no. Troper Tales was a cancer. It contributed nothing to the understanding of tropes and made the site look absolutely pathetic, with insecure teenagers braying about their Biggus Dickus and everyone calling themselves a Badass Bookworm. Such unbelievable foolishness.

Tropes exist in narrative. Not in people's lives. The harder we work to make this clear, the better we'll all be. Tropes are found in the conscious choices made by creators of all kinds, and occasionally in the memes they subconsciously absorb from the culture around them. Tropes are not added by the audience. Those are Audience Reactions, and they are a distinct phenomenon. Subjective Tropes are usually intended by the creator but the degree to which they succeeded varies according to the audience.

Narrating video game playthroughs is also outside the scope of how we define tropes, although...

• Let's Play is a type of work, which permits tropes, but we generally don't trope individual LP's so much as the overall bodies of work of the more popular LP'ers. (That said, Fanfic Recs can be used to recommend specific LP's.)
• The liveblogs section of the site is intentionally set up so that people can blog themselves playing games or whatever.

edited 12th Jan '17 8:31:59 PM by Fighteer

Posts 2 through 5 seemed to miss the point I was making; if an individual is wrong to post an especially ridiculous and/or deranged troper tale, what else could they be wrong about? It would be better to stop that problem at its source.

Now post 6, I think, raises a more interesting point; the very concept of troper tales undermined the message that tropes exist in narrative. But how far would we extend that? We wouldn't nuke every real life examples folder from orbit over that; just those of specific pages, even though having real life examples at all contradicts that just as much. But those remaining real life examples are considered worth it for being interesting enough; so why wouldn't slightly undermining the message (one that shouldn't depend on the messenger in the first place) be worth it if only for the sting-operation value outlined earlier? (Well, that and a strange sense of compulsion to see if we can get it right this time, though I'm not sure I speak for anyone else on that matter.)

edited 12th Jan '17 8:57:00 PM by neoYTPism

I am not interested in bringing back Troper Tales as a honeypot so we can ban idiots, either. That's a waste of our time.

I'm not interested in bringing them back either; way too much potential for trouble.

"We should tempt people to misbehave in order to find the ones who are more likely to misbehave". No. Just no. That's generally called "entrapment".

It's also just a terrible idea.

And That's Terrible!

I think that's all that needs to be said really

edited 13th Jan '17 1:49:13 PM by Ultimatum