Have a question about how the TVTropes wiki works? No one knows this community better than the people in it, so ask away! Ask the Tropers is the page you come to when you have a question burning in your brain and the support pages didn't help.
It's not for everything, though. For a list of all the resources for your questions, click here. You can also go to this Directory thread
for ongoing cleanup projects.
I've asked this question from a fanfic guest author's perspective in the past, and I believe the answer is "your pre-Promoted Fangirl examples can stay, just don't add any more YMMV/Trivia examples that apply to anything you've worked on."
I do some cleanup and then I enjoy shows you probably think are cringe.
My old entries might be fine, but am I correct in assuming that a new edit, even if it's from the old devs, wouldn't be allowed?
Like, say I wanted to add a character page for Alice and Bob, who the old developers created and I have done nothing with during my stint as writer. Is that OK, even though that sort of edit isn't on YMMV or Trivia?
Not saying I want to do this or anything. Promise.
"I don't have the power to reverse my destiny. [...] But I'm not going to turn away from my fate anymore." — Kiriya
Anything that's YMMV you shouldn't touch from this point going forward. If you're just adding things on Character/ pages, I don't think there'd be a problem with that.
Yeah, I don't really want to touch YMMV. Somebody else on Community Dev wanted me to add tropes for the new story content we've added, but to me that feels a bit... Wrong. It's my stuff, mostly, so if I said something like, "oh, Character X is a Hate Sink", that would sort of be like Word of God, and that would be messy.
So, as long as I stick to non-YMMV tropes and it's from the original developers' work, I should be OK?
"I don't have the power to reverse my destiny. [...] But I'm not going to turn away from my fate anymore." — Kiriya
If it's not your work, you can trope it normally (including YMMV and Trivia).
If it is your work:
- You can trope non-YMMV normally.
- You may not add YMMV, but you can fix factual errors and bring up errors/misuse for discussion.
Trivia must be based on publicly accessible information.
For more detail on the policy, see:
- How to Create a Work Page -> Frequently asked questions (it's the last section on the page) -> "Can I make a page for a work that I created?"
- The Fic May Be Yours, but the Trope Page Is Ours (this one goes into more detail)
It's sort of a weird grey area.
I didn't create the game, I just volunteered to write the story once the original developers stopped caring about doing it themselves.
So the story plot from a certain point on (late July 2023 to about November-ish) is mine, and some of the cards' Flavor Text is too, but the rest of the game is emphatically not my own work, and I am not claiming it as such.
Should I use the "not your work" guidelines for parts I didn't create, and then use the "your work" guidelines for parts that I did?
"I don't have the power to reverse my destiny. [...] But I'm not going to turn away from my fate anymore." — Kiriya
Thanks so much! I'll start working on updates to that page, then.
"I don't have the power to reverse my destiny. [...] But I'm not going to turn away from my fate anymore." — Kiriya
So, I've gotten into a thorny sort of situation recently (~6 months ago-ish).
To stop the game Spellstone from becoming one of many Defunct Online Video Games, the higher-ups at Kongregate implemented a "Community Dev" policy, where members of the fanbase can freely volunteer to assist the developers with stuff like game balance, troubleshooting, and... most importantly, writing ideas for the story. This was around late July. I was one of those volunteers, and since I was the only one who gave a rat's ass about the story, that means I more or less became the head writer (some other people have written it more recently while I had exams and life stuff, but it's like 80% me).
Ordinarily there would be no issue, except I had previously made a rather extensive work and character page (as well as a bit of YMMV) on this site for the game. This was before I became a community developer — after which, the only edit I made on any Spellstone-related pages was a small typo on the character page. I have not troped anything that I have written for the game, and have even been reluctant to finish adding in tropes for the old developers' writing (as terrible as it got pre-Community Dev) for fear of a conflict of interest. I was going to propose Complete Monster or Magnificent Bastard candidates the old writers had written, too, but I don't think I can do that either now. I really don't want to be guilty of Auto-Erotic Troping, and I don't want to get banned for my pre-Community Dev edits.
So, I guess my question is, TL;DR, I essentially singlehandedly wrote a work's page on here, and after doing all of that, I became a writer of that work. What can I/should I do to keep my hands clean?