Pages with red text can be substituted.

Some pages are locked because they have outdated markup and if they were edited, it would disappear, ruining the joke. Well, I think that in some cases, we don't need to keep it if we can subsitute it. Here's an example: red text. I've tried discussing it here, but my question was misunderstood. I don't want to make new pages with red text, I want to change them.

And the solution would be to just swap red text with red links, like It Looks Like This. I mean, red links are still red text! So what if it's a sligthly different shade of red? It's still red! And we don't have any problem with making pages with intentional red links, just check out All-Red Entry. So my plan is to replace the red text with red links, and then unlocking those pages.

There's currently 3 pages with red text:

• Laconic.Rainbow Speak
• Laconic.Traitor Shot (Then again, is the red text really needed here, like, at all?)
• SelfDemonstrating.Red Alert (And this one should go to DarthWiki.Red Alert instead, so all links can be red!)

I think there was a 4th one, but I don't remember it at the moment. Please don't lock this thread, because I'm in Serious Mode right now. Thank you.

Currently mostly inactive. An incremental game I tested: https://galaxy.click/play/176 (Gods of Incremental)

No, no, no, no, NO. Deliberately redlinking makes it look as if there's an article that should be created at that URL. That is not the point of the color markup in most places where it's used.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Then maybe leaving a hidden for readers comment like:

%% Note: All the red links here are intentional. Please don't blueshift them, since that would ruin the joke.

That would probably succeed! I mean, it works for pages from NSFW works (Try reading that, without using NSFW as an acronym, three times fast), like Caramell Dansen Vid:

Troper: Hey! This image doesn't pothole to the work it came fro... oh, okay.

How about that? Comments can, in fact, stop people from doing action they think is "good", when it isn't.

edited 29th Sep '17 6:58:59 AM by Piterpicher

Currently mostly inactive. An incremental game I tested: https://galaxy.click/play/176 (Gods of Incremental)

Eh? Why do you expect tropers to read the source of the page hosting the redlinks?

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

We aren't going to get rid of one workaround to use an even worse workaround.

There are two ways this ends up: (a) we keep the pages locked and as-is, or (b) we unlock them and sacrifice the color markup. That's it.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Third way would be to re-allow colour markup, but that's a low priority change and we'd need ways to control its use so that people don't spam it all over the place.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

I don't think I was ever around when color markup was being abused to provide any good insight here considering how badly it was abused, but I think that it provides such a marginally small benefit to have access to that it's not worth re-implementing for the wiki.

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody remembers it, who else will you have ice cream with?

There's almost barely any pages where it's useful as is. The color-related pages, namely Color Coded For Your Convenience could have it applied as part of the trope's definition, and maybe a little bit in the Elemental-related ones. I can't see a healthy way to enforce it, though. Best I can think of is to have the definition pages locked with no examples on the page itself(instead having links to examples down the page, like "Video Games" "Manga/Anime" etc.) to preserve the markup solely for that kind of page.

But unless that can easily be done, where it's turned on for only some pages, it isn't actually worth it. I do think they can actually make color-related pages far more enjoyable to read, but only if they cannot be abused on other pages.

I can only think of it being doable (as in, "not abused") if it were specific to mods. That is, when editing the page, a mod account doesn't break the parsing of the color to the text. Not sure if that's even code-able, though, because IIRC the current issue is that the color stuff has just been undoable for the new(er) wiki software, not for specific account types.

I can see it as being useful, though, for any of these pages that have color text already. That is, if a mod can edit the page to fix some long-standing problem without breaking the color text. While I think it could be useful for that, I don't know if there's enough problems on enough of these old pages to warrant that even in theory.

Look at all that shiny stuff ain't they pretty

Yeah, that way it won't work. Allowing colour markup on a per namespace and per page basis would be the way to do this.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

I think almost all gain from using colours is "for fun". The practical use would probably be less than something like the image on Creepy Changing Painting.

That said, if possible I don't mind the function of coloured text. However, I've seen what people like to do with the tools they have available.

Check out my fanfiction!