As your friendly neighborhood Admin Team, the gang here at TVTropes HQ is always working to improve the site.
Many of those improvements begin with suggestions posted right here, on the Community Wishlist. Is there a feature you really want on TVTropes? Post it.
Is there something we could be doing better? We want to know. Do you think we look fat in these pants? We were totally afraid of that. See a bug? Report it.
Important things to know:
- We're all about that content-creation life! The top contenders for our attention are ideas that'll create more content, like the video uploading feature, or speed up launching new pages. On the flip side, design or layout tweaks won't be our top priority.
- Help us dig through the goldmine of old wishlist items! If you have an old request gathering dust or spot one you're totally on board with, give it a bump and a like. There's a treasure trove of 6+ years' worth of ideas just waiting to be rediscovered. Items without enough love may not make the cut and will be closed.
- Was your wishlist item locked up without an explanation? It was most likely disapproved or just too big of a task versus the benefit it would ultimately have. Time is precious, and we want to focus on updates with the biggest bang for the buck. Don't be discouraged though! We appreciate every idea and we're always listening.
Make a Tech Wish:
workingFixing the video rating system
The current video rating system is rather clunky. If you sort by "Highest Rating", you'll notice that videos are clustered together by rating, and in each of those groups, videos are ordered by number of ratings.
If that wasn't very clear, let me bring up an example: the Toy Story video ("YOU! ARE! A! TOYYYYY!") on Punctuated! For! Emphasis!. That video used to be among the highest-rated videos at one point, only for its position to be toppled by a single lower rating, bringing the total score down to 4.99. As a result, a video with 5 stars but only 4 ratings technically has a higher rating than a video with 107 ratings and a 4.98 score. This is, to put it simply, very strange.
I'm not sure how a revised system would work (no technical expert here), but rankings ought to account for both total rating and number of ratings.
(Also, let's be real here: barely anyone rates videos anything other than 5 stars or 0 stars. Should we just keep the 5-star rating for the accumulated scores but switch individual ratings to a thumbs-up/thumbs-down system?)
Edited by jandn2014workingQuick Reply function for forums
Allow an option for a Quick Reply function in forums as an easy way to add a post without having to leave the forum page. I created a userscript for this purpose but it would be nice to have this as a built-in feature.
It would look something like this (on the bottom)
Edited by eroock
workingEmphasise the "Moderator Post", not the user name, on mod hat forum posts
Some users on the policy thread have commented that it's hard to keep track of which moderator posts are 'mod hat off' personal statements, and which are speaking for the team.
Mod posts are currently identified by colour coding, but not everyone understands what that means — and if you link directly to the post (or it's the latest one in the thread) the blue background overrides the usual orange mod post background, so only the border colour signals its nature.
There's also the 'Mod' icon, but apparently it's small and easily missed.
Proposal: Add 'Moderator Post'' or similar text in bold for 'mod hat' posts, emphasising this over the name.
So, for example -
- Moderator (Mrph1)
Instead of
- Mrph1 (Mod)
workingPreserve Display Option Switches When Logged In
I often use Incognito/Private mode in browsers, and it's a hassle to click on the "Night Vision" and "Sticky Header" swtiches everytime I open the browser and log in.
My wishlist is to preserve these display options when logging in.
workingA "Subpage" indicator that makes a page display another page's navigation buttons up top
Many works have so many tropes, characters, or, in some cases, =WMGs= and the like, that they have to be split onto subpages. This makes navigation a pain, as you can see if you look at eg. Homestuck/TropesAToC, or if you navigate from Characters/Homestuck to one of its subpages, like Characters/HomestuckKids — on the subpage, the normal navigation icons are gone (because the Wiki doesn't see that page as a subpage of the Homestuck work page), and are replaced by the generic 'Characters' navigation links, which are mostly useless. At best, you're forced to use your browser's back button; if you navigated into that page from somewhere else, you're forced to either hope someone put a backlink on the page (which is clunky and less intuitive than using the nav buttons, since those are otherwise the same everywhere), or to fiddle with the URL to get to the main work page.
On that page, for instance, people have helpfully put links at the bottom to go back — but those differ from page to page, and only provide two links rather than letting you easily navigate to any of the main work subpages in one click like you can on pages that haven't been divided up like that, so I feel that the ideal solution would be to just have it treated as another subpage of the main work page, with all the main work-page nav-buttons appearing up top. There's index links on the bottom, too; but they're not as convenient as having the usual subpage buttons up top, and "conceptually" things like eg. a =TropesAToC= subpage is a subpage of the main work page, so it should be fully navigable the same way.
Therefore, I suggest adding something that can be dropped into a page to force it to be treated as a subpage of another given page for the purposes of what nav buttons appear at the top of it. It'd be a string of text put at the top of the page or something that would cause the navigation buttons to appear on eg. Homestuck/TropesAToC or Characters/HomestuckKids as if it were Characters/Homestuck, letting you easily navigate directly from there to the rest of the pages on that work — basically, telling the wiki "this page is a subpage of that work, even if it uses a different name."
(I'm just using Homestuck as an example, of course. This tends to happen on any recent work with Loads And Loads Of Characters and a large enough fandom to flesh out its page to the point where it requires dividing into multiple places.)
workingNew works
It may be a good idea if there was an actual procedure to help creating pages for works. A "create new page" button, a box to insert the name, a drop list to select the medium namespace (film, TV series, comic book, etc), etc. The system of creating a fake link at the sandbox and editing it is not very user-friendly.
workingretract vote from crowner
To able to retract your vote from a crowner item. Currently you are only able to switch your upvote to a downvote and vice versa.
workingTLP specifically for works pages.
We should really have something similar to the TLP, but exclusively for people to draft up works pages.
A lot of times drafting a work on a TLP page just leads to people talking about the work in question is "not a trope" rather than helping to contribute.
It wouldn't need the hats system like TLP, since works pages are a free launch. But having a page where people can construct a works page and gather tropes for it early and quickly would be a great addition to the site.
It could be called "works workshop" or something like that.
workingStatus Field for TLP
A short, free-form text field on each TLP draft showing what's needed. Examples include "Up for Grabs", "Launching XX/XX", and "Description Needs Help". Would be cleaner than using the title/laconic and encourage users to state what they need help on and attract users who are good at that.
workingDiscard button only pressable with a comment
The new YKTTW design currently allows the Discard vote button (the bomblet) to be pressed anonymously, without giving the OP any input on how to improve their YKTTW or on why it appears to be untropable. Such passive-aggressive behavior contributes nothing to the quality of the new pages coming out of YKTTW, therefore it appears necessary to me to require leaving a comment when pressing the Discard button, especially since most users already do it on their own.
Edited by KoverasworkingDiscussion Page Blurb
Discussion pages, when they're used, are prone to misuse of people using them to complain, discuss the work, or what have you. I suspect this is in part because the title of them is vague and there's no actual explanation easily available as to what they're meant to be for. If it's possible, maybe a blurb could be added for discussion pages to just explain that they're used for discussing edits to the page, pointing people to the forums if they want to discuss other issues or their opinions.
workingLaunched or discarded YKTTW's should not be editable
This has been used for vandalism in the past. With the exception of moderators (for removing inappropriate material), this should not be permitted for regular tropers.
workingUsability of YKTTW Editor
As a YKTTW editor, I would like to add examples and other text from the comments to my main write-up without switching browser tabs/windows.
Currently, adding examples to a YKTTW write-up from multiple comments is very cumbersome. Since the edit function of the write up opens in the same window and blocks the the comments from view, you have to open the same YKTTW in another tab, so you can open individual comments' source code (in new tab each!) and then copy it to the write-up edit form in the original tab.
A possible solution would be to change the edit form so it doesn't block the comments when opened, and to replace the "show markup" button in each comment with "copy markup to clipboard". If the latter isn't compatible with some browsers (e.g. for security reasons), the "show markup" button should at least show markup in the same tab/window, rather than opening a new one (cf. old YKTTW).
workingRecord page moves in page history
When a moderator moves a page it doesn't create a new version, so there's no audit trail to record the move. As only mods and engineers can move pages, it's got limited impact, but it would be good to fill that gap.
A proposal:
- Save a new version of the page when it's moved.
- Edit reason for the new version to be auto-populated with "Moved from oldnamespace.oldname to newnamespace.newname" (including both gives us a better record if it's moved more than once)
- Edit recorded against the user (mod/engineer) who made the move, in the same way any other edit would be.
working"Upload photo" in adding a post or query
Rather than just editing a page, place an "upload photo" button when making a post or query.
workingUpdate the Namespace Filter on New Edits
So there has been one thing what has been bothering me with the namespace filter on New Edits page (you know, the thing where you can like only see Character pages). There are some namespaces like Games/ and Video Games/ what are outdated and could be deleted. And there are maybe some which would be added like YMMV/.
workingHide links on certain pages from Related To tab
There are certain pages which are archives. They are usually locked and are not supposed to be edited. One example is Archive.The Google Incident, but there are more.
Still, they have links and these links show up on the Related To pages of the linked-to page. For example, Archive.The Google Incident has a link to This Is No Time to Panic and thus shows up on its Related To page. This frequently leads to people asking for edits or having to skip the section on the Related To tab.
Would it be possible to hide the Archive/ namespace on Related To pages? And maybe create a button for moderators to hide certain pages from Related To pages too, since not all archives are/should be put in that namespace.
On mobile, when viewing a draft, the button for editing/draft history/etc and the button for personal history/launches/discards seem to be oddly placed. The draft specific button is higher up, (shown in blue) and the general button is on the bottom (shown in yellow).
This is confusing because on desktop, the general buttons are all on a top bar, nowhere near the actual draft you're viewing.
This means that on mobile I constantly click the wrong button because I expect the one that's on the bottom to be for the draft itself; it's also closer to my line of sight. I think a minor but helpful fix would just be to swap the positions of the buttons around, so that they're closer to where they are on desktop and so that it makes more sense with what people would want to click.
Edit: And I know it may make the TLP inconsistent compared to how the rest of mobile is formatted as the top bar button is always placed at that height, however I still think this at least warrants consideration.
Edited by WarJay77