There are big problems with the forum and discussion systems.

What's the problem?

TV Tropes is a wiki. Yet, sometimes I feel that it's run like a big fan community. I've been in fora before, and I prefer to stay out of those websites, at least right now. Fora require the user to be active to participate, and I don't want my points to get lost just because I wasn't there to defend them. Posting in a topic that isn't one of the few that's active will make me feel like a Thread Necromancer, and I'd rather not have that pressure. Wikis are all about editing pages, either brand new ones or just as importantly—the old forgotten ones.

Fora is meant for straightforward discussions. If somebody makes a gazillion points at once (like I'm doing right now), you'll have to address each one at once. If you don't, they'll get drowned out and half of the discussion will go nowhere. Yes, it's true that some things just won't ever get responded to, but the forum system makes it worse than it needs to be. This is really bad for big projects like thousands of pages of a Complete Monster cleanup. Many new forum users would probably feel intimidated by such a loaded thread—I've been here for years and even I don't want to get into that. It would be like planning to build a city, giving new workers a guide on how to build, then handing them the audio logs of hundreds of city-planning meetings.

The forum gingerbread seems to encourage self-expression over helping the wiki. Now, I'm not against avatars, but the rest is more fit for the Just for Fun stuff on the fora than it is talking about Serious Business on the wiki. A good chunk of the page height on the forum threads comes from all the signatures, separators, and forum gingerbread. (I just remembered and enabled the option to remove gingerbread, but it hides avatars too, which is unfortunate.)

From what I know, discussion pages don't impact the wiki nearly as much as the TV Tropes Forums do. Most big wiki stuff happens on the fora. The only way to know if a page discussion is active is to check it yourself, or keep it on your watchlist which isn't useful most of the time. Discussion pages are in a tiny bubble: lonely, non-indexed, and filled with cobwebs. This also has a side effect of discouraging non-English-speaking users from speaking up, since anything that matters will happen on the English wiki. This may change a little bit when 2.0 gives us element-specific discussions, but that's not coming anytime soon, and that alone may not fix the problem. I'd rather have this be talked about before people start working on the update.

Forum topics go on very separately from the wiki. Even if you pay attention a trope's page, watch its discussion, and put it on your watchlist, you won't be able to see any related forum topics to it besides those on the Image Pickin' or Trope Repair Shop. Trope Talk, Wiki Talk, and even Projects threads aren't connected to their source tropes. This is a smaller problem than the others, but I do think it should be noted.

It is not possible to edit other peoples' messages. You'll have to holler if you want something done about spam or flaming, and if something is done, their entire post is hidden. Did somebody bring up a good point? Well now, their thump hides any good things they wrote. It is odd to me that Dethroning Moment of Suck of all places more trust in users. It seems that the Dethroning Moment pages appeal more to me than the fora...

To summarize:

• The fora have speedy, linear threads not suited for a long-term wiki. The wiki has slowly growing pages.
• The fora lets users organize things however they want, making things hard to find sometimes. The wiki seamlessly organizes by what comes naturally.
• The fora celebrates self-expression and independence, which are not what TV Tropes is about. The wiki that celebrates seamless edits and cooperation.
• Discussion pages and forum threads are mostly hidden off from the main wiki. Wiki pages are indexed and easy to find.
• The TV Tropes Forums are controlled by administrators. The wiki trusts users to do what is best.

I'd say that at least 95% of my help on TV Tropes right now is from wiki edits rather than communication. It's unfortunate, because I think I would communicate more on this website if it had more welcoming discussion or forum systems. Discussion pages aren't active or useful, and the system behind TV Tropes Forums simply isn't fit for an organized wiki in its current state.

Do we really need to fix this?

For the years I've been here I mostly just stay in the wiki making edits. Just as I would think you do, I want the wiki to be better. The proposal I am making is big, and after searching I couldn't find anything about this. So I want something that solves ALL the problems about fora and discussion pages above in one big swoop. This would mean:

• The system should be fit for gradual, organized projects.
• The system should not bloat over time.
• The system should motivate cooperation over self-interest.
• The system should be easy to find and sort through.
• The system should put more trust in the users just as the wiki does.

Yes, we can keep our system which does not fit those qualities. But I don't think it's a good idea to keep things that way. Just as you can keep manual Namespaces, Cross Wicking, quote formatting, hard splits, and moves, you can keep the TV Tropes Forums how they are now without much more hard work put into them. But the wiki will be changed up with 2.0, and this is a very good time to talk about changing up the forum system too.

Alright, what's your proposal?

A page can have a discussion page attached to it. Users can edit it just like they can any other page. They can sign their messages with a bullet point, a message, and some text that automatically creates a signature. The signature has information attached to it, such as a username, avatar icon, and the time it was sent. Once the 2.0 update comes around, I assume there will be a user-friendly way to add examples, like a button that generates a small form. Something similar for discussion pages would be helpful.

Until 2.0 comes around, I imagine the easiest way of doing this would be to create a special namespace for this, like Discussion.Complete Monster. In most cases, I think it would be fine if different namespaces shared the same discussion page, although this would not work medium-specific trope example sub-pages such as Monster.Anime And Manga. They would have to go on the main discussion page, Discussion.Complete Monster. If that page gets too big, it could be split, like Discussion.Complete Monster Anime And Manga Examples. This isn't ideal, but it's better than our current discussion pages.

Discussion pages would be either moved over or archived, with the latter already planned for the changes in 2.0.

More index pages would be needed to support new types of discussion pages. this would REPLACE the forum we have now. Here's how I would go about it:

• Wiki Talk and Project threads can be manually archived, with the generally important stuff being moved over to new discussion pages. Most of the posts in the latter are outdated and just talking about single examples anyway.
• For Trope Repair Shop and Image Pickin', just stop users from creating new topics, and wait until all the topics are archived. We would need new indexes to tell users when something needs help.
• Questions and Answers can be moved to new Q&A wiki pages. This could also serve as a replacement for Ask The Tropers.
• Content Violation Discussions and Translations are small and inactive, so they can be archived or manually moved to the new discussion pages.
• The rest stays how it is.

What are the advantages for such a system?

• Editing in nested discussions makes things easier to find in large projects.
• Points brought up in the wrong place can easily be moved.
• Wikipedia Updaters will find this system more familiar.
• The weird split between wiki pages, discussions, and the forum will be mostly fixed, making the wiki more consistent overall. Right now, we have discussion pages, the TV Tropes Forums,^note which includes Q&A, Wiki Talk, Trope Talk, Image Pickin', Trope Repair Shop, and another place for Wild Mass Guessing, plus some other stuff like a topic about quotes which most editors don't know exist Trope Finder, You Know That Show, Ask The Tropers, Wishlist, and Bug Reports with at least three unique systems between all of them.
• Searching the forum for a certain subject won't be as much of a problem anymore, as you won't need to search for related keywords and hope you find it in a Long List (plus dig through unrelated fan discussion under the "Media" category).
• Discussions don't need to be hidden away in an obscure page (for redirects) or destroyed (for cuts). Of course, this won't be needed when 2.0 gives people the ability to rename pages.
• Spam and flaming can be handled by regular users.
• Discussion pages can be sorted and organized into indexes for easier maintenance.
• Points won't get buried like they do in forum topics.

Possible problems:

• Moving forum topics over would interrupt the flow of current conversations.
• This is too much work to keep up.
  • Perhaps it is a lot of work, but in the long run it would just decrease the amount of work needed from the staff.
• Tropers would have a hard time adapting, and wouldn't like it.
  • The whole 2.0 update reimagines the whole page editing system already, so change isn't too much of a problem for the staff to do. The complaints from a few editors who couldn't adapt would be exchanged for a new system which may help the wiki out a lot.
• Wiki Vandals will take advantage of this and start an uprising against us by messing with our discussion pages. We are doomed.
  • Any major vandalism on a talk page is also possible on a main page.
  • Smaller vandalism will likely be spotted if it's offensive or changes the direction of a discussion.
  • An automatic system could be made to notice changes to other users' messages, particularly with the 2.0 wiki revamp.
    • This would take too much work!
• People are more used to linear forum threads than nested ones.
  • Wikipedia and Reddit, some of the most visited websites in the world use nested threads.
  • It's more helpful to attract people who edit wikis than those who post on fora.
  • The number of user affected is a fraction^note users who help the wiki by posting on the TV Tropes Forums or discussion page of a small fraction^note users who help edit this wiki of people who go on TV Tropes. Those people are probably dedicated enough to TV Tropes to get used to an unfamiliar system.
  • TV Tropes already has heavy use of nesting in our example pages. It should come fairly naturally to most users.
• We shouldn't become more like Wikipedia.
  • We already share many basic systems with Wikipedia, such as edit histories, talk pages, and the ability for everybody to edit main pages. Wikipedia is the most successful wiki in the world. If it has a system that works, why not consider imitating it?
• This is way too ambitious.
  • Probably.

What will happen in the future?

The page for the 2.0 update mentions under Purpose that "Conversation in the Main Page would be diverted into comment threads". This raises lots of questions.

Will there need to be multiple indention levels in discussion threads to fix Conversation in the Main Page that's in multiple levels? Or will they all just be flattened into a single level? Will it be possible to edit and move around those threads? I don't know. But I do hope that those who work on the 2.0 update help the future of the wiki by improving the forum and discussion systems.

I had a large write up but I realized that isn't exactly needed here. I can simplify the bulk of what I want to say so we don't get this increasingly ridiculously sized convo that gets hard to track.

A lot of what you have suggested is frankly not a practical solution. Many of the communication problems such as large posts with multiple points, difficulty in following a fast flowing discussion, and other issues will still exist. That is mostly a human issue not how we are using the forum or other means of communication. All you would do is shift it to a communications channel that is actually more clumsy to use. Given how the wiki pages work it is not a very practical alternative.

Especially the part where someone can alter anything anyone has said in any direct manner that is not a mod or admin. There are so many levels of bad idea in this I am not sure where to begin. Namely it would allow anyone to undermine someone else or vandalize what they have written. The forum at least allows us to guarantee that we have positive control over what you say and prevents others from sabotaging your efforts or trying to help and only making a mess.

The forum handles a fair bit of what you suggest but it would be great to be able to more throughly link the wiki to the forum in a meaningful manner. IIRC that is on the technology wishlist as are numerous changes to organization for the wiki as well as new tools for the users.

In terms of rules and enforcement I have to disagree completely based on long experience with this site and participating in many changes along the way. First and foremost is the users have repeatedly shown they cannot be trusted with a free hand. The various rules and regulations were put in place because the users showed they were not able to handle the responsiblity the freer hand implied. In fact I recall a time when both the forum and wiki were left largely to the whims of the users. The term chaos and a hot mess comes to mind. It was only a matter of time where it became a necessity to bring more control to both. Rather than hurt the site it has notably helped it over the years. Both the quality and organization of both forum and wiki have improved notably. As things are we are doing quite well on that front and there is no need or reason to turn that over to the users.

As for enforcement the last thing we need are the users doing that. It is not a thing we want to do given how easy it is to have that turn into mob mentality or create little isolationist pockets and echo chambers of sub-communities that tend to block out anyone who is not one of them. That is common problem you see on Reddit with little preventative over site or controls that keep them from turning into a problem. Throw into the mix the mods and admins have access to a number of tools that are rather powerful in their capability that would easily cause untold damage to the site should the wrong set of hands get a hold of them. No, the enforcement, creation of rules, their tools, and related duties is definitely best left t our moderators and admins with the input of the community. It is no small thing to note this site is one of the best moderated sites for forum and wiki on the net. It helps that the mods and admins are just as often forum goers and editors as well as their big hat roles.

I feel that a good chunk of these problems would be resolved by linking the forums to the wiki properly and the overall organizational improvement 2.0 would bring. But I also would argue we need to see what we are actually getting not just at launch but several patches down the road to address the issues that will crop up from the new system. Then we can revisit topics like this and see what we can actually do.

Don't get me wrong your rather ambitious idea has some merits but it has its problems a lot of which just shift existing problems to a new area and ultimately still require the same amount of work to deal with and I feel the nested conversations become increasingly clumsy the longer a conversation goes on. While the linear structure of the forum keeps a conversation from not only wandering away with sub-conversations but also keeps everyone more or less on the same page. However I can see hwo that would work just fine for discussion pages roles with minimal issue.

There is more that can be said here but I feel others and the mods and admins are better suited to saying it.

Who watches the watchmen?

This proposal in short is basically to use Wikipedia's discussion system for TV Tropes.

The idea to making all posts publicly editable is not as crack-brained as it sounds - that is more or less how Wikipedia talk pages operate. It does create a large maintenance burden since you need to watch out for vandalism and you need to have a page history, though.

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

I am not a huge fan of letting anyone outside of mods or admins mess with another users post. That is just inviting trouble and I can already see the train wreck that would lead to.

Who watches the watchmen?

I agree with , the risk is just too high.

edited 23rd May '18 2:30:03 AM by Piterpicher

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

Regardless of any other issue, I would be in favour of having discussion pages that actually work

For a lot of the other issues, there's a few unique things that should be kept in mind about TVT:

• One goal is to make all pages appear finished. Throwing around "stub", "sources needed" and other templates is thus discouraged
  • We don't really have the tech for templates anyway
• The active pages to active editors ratio is really high. The workshop forums are there to a large extent to force people to actually focus on a specific pages long enough to actually accomplish something
• Having multiple systems handling things is weird and annoying, but most of them are built for their purpose and function better than regular pages

Perhaps a compromise would be to have each message be an independent element. Like, if I made a comment, the comment (excluding bullet points) and identifying information be on the page under the code [[d:413987]] and it could be placed or removed on any discussion page in case there's a better place to put it. This would make it easily sort-able, but at the same time, hard to mess with other peoples' comments.

The only problem with this is that it would be impossible to split a discussion comment if it makes multiple different points, which I imagine would happen quite a bit in bigger discussions. Some possible solutions include:

• Let users sort comments, but only those with permission from administrators.
• Let users edit or add comments, plus an indicator that the comment has been edited or added by another user as well as a mini-history for each edited comment. It's possible that an administrator or the original user could confirm the edits and remove the warning.
• Add a soft-edit option that could let users move certain parts of text around the page. This seems like it would be the hardest to do.

We used to have discussion pages as wiki articles. It was a disaster. The current threaded "forum-lite" system is much more effective at communication, which is the point of discussions.

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

Why was it a disaster?

It was really really messy,i think I recall seeing pages like it

New theme music also a box

Difficult to follow conversations, no ability to see what was new without checking the history function, people editing each others' comments, visual clutter as people added bullet after bullet after bullet....

edited 25th May '18 11:52:11 AM by Fighteer

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

I still simply say no to letting others edit anyone's comments in any form outside of the staff for discussion or forum pages. The ability even being present will be used to create a mess sooner rather than later. Especially if anyone starts touching on any contentious subjects in regards to a work. People start taking absolutely trivial things rather personally and it tends to go downhill from there.

I had forgotten about the old discussion set up it has been so long since I saw it. I do recall it being somewhat chaotic.

It would be nice to get people to use discussion more often though.

Who watches the watchmen?

From what I recall, the big issues with wiki-style discussions were that we didn't (and still don't) having any sort of signature code, and there wasn't any good way to deal with lengthy threads (no outdent function)

And, of course, these days lengthy threads wouldn't even be possible, which would be kinda awkward

This is partly why I think we need to wait for the 2.0 Update for any real or meaningful attempts at reorganization. IIRC in past discussions one of our most common hurdles to implementing a lot of suggestions is lack of ability due to current set up of the site. That is we need the tech to support possible re-organization specficially changes in how the site was originally coded and what sort of coding based options we could possibly leverage.

edited 25th May '18 8:29:25 PM by TuefelHundenIV

Who watches the watchmen?

I think nested threads are generally pretty awful, especially the Reddit format. It very quickly devolves into entire discussions nested in comments to other discussions which themselves are nested and so on, resulting in the reader quickly losing track in bigger discussions. It also makes it really hard to find the newest posts at a glance.

One major problem with the forum I have not seen mentioned is the search system, which does not work very well. The main problem seems that it is too dependent on punctuation. For example, when searching for "Assassin's Creed", the search function finds absolutely nothing. But when I type in "assassin", it does suddenly find all those tropes, including the one that is spelled like the former search item. Even more baffling, if I then copy paste the title of that particular page and search again with it, I find nothing again.

On top of that, it would be useful to be able to search through discussions themselves, rather than just titles.

Optimism is a duty.