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:
workingTroper Counter
This is kinda minor, but I wouldn't mind having the Troper Counter come back.
workingMove Resources Higher?
The Resources tab is crucial to finding New Edits, and the display options above it mean I have to scroll down more to find it. Having it back where it was in 1.2 would be cool.
workingEdit Timer
It would be nice if we had an edit timer on the bottom of an edit page as well, since the bigger edit window means that you can't see the timer anymore when you scroll down.
workingSearching in ATT/YKTS/etc. should include the poster
Would it be possible to add the posting troper to the field that "search questions" is searching? This would allow an efficient "find by troper" for ATT, YKTS and even the bug list...
workingHistory Page
I love love love the new red/green system that shows exactly where in an entry a change happened and what it was. It's a great usability feature that's already saved me a bunch of squinting to try to parse what turns out to be a minor grammar, punctuation, or wording change.
What would make it even better, though, would be if there were a way to independently toggle the red and green sections visible and invisible. That way there'd be no need for a separate "before" box; if you toggled red on and green off, you've got the "before," the opposite and you've got the "after," and both on at once and you've got the comparison view that we have now.
I have no idea how difficult something like that would be to implement; a good half-measure in the meantime might be to add a third "after" box, since as things stand right now it can sometimes be tough to parse what the edited entry looks like, and it's a pain to have to navigate back to the main page and CTRL-F your way to the entry just to see.
Thanks!
workingClose Folder function
Many years back, the folder coding provided a link that you could click to close a folder when you'd reached the bottom of it, instead of having to scroll back up and click the folder bar. I think this would be nice to bring back.
Edited by WillbyrworkingDiscard 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 KoverasworkingPreviews, formatting tools, and on-page edits on board pages
The posting and editing process for pages like this one, the Trope Finder, Ask The Tropers, etc would really benefit from an overhaul adding some basic modern-standard features already found in the forums.
Just having these would be a massive user-friendlyness upgrade:
- Previews: for initial posting, replies, and edits. Not being able to check if your links and formatting work without actually committing your reply is a huge pain.
- Some quick formatting buttons- even just the basics like italics on a hightlight-and-ctrl-i hotkey would help a lot. Collapsible note creation that doesn't require 17 key presses would also be nice.
- In page editing: the only thing more exasperating than not having a preview button is having to then make fixes on a completely separate page that still doesn't have a preview... but this time with the added bonus of not being able to see the question you're trying to answer or any of the existing replies. (Heaven forbid you're editing because you realized you misread the question and need to completely rewrite your answer.)
But especially please, please, please previews so we don't have to edit posts repeatedly just to fix simple formatting and link typos. ^~^;
Edited by Scorpion451workingTool for wick checking
Something that would be handy in Trope Repair Shop for checking whether tropes are being correctly used would be a tool that, when you enter a page into it, counts the total # of wicks, randomly selects a portion of those wicks, and generates a list of the selected wicks. That number would need to be fairly sizeable; the count mentioned in the TW thread that suggested this was either 50 or the square root of the total # of wicks, rounded up, whichever is better for the size of the page. One possible option could be for the tool to tell you the total # of wicks and allow you to select a number to pull, or default to the aforementioned rounded square root.
Edited by WillbyrworkingLaunched 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.
workingAutomatically making a laconic page for a trope when the ykttw is launched
Just so it'd be convenient.
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).
workingTroper edit history
Basically, I wonder if it's possible to change the edits by troper tools so that they point directly to the edit, not just to the history page where the edit took place.
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.)
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/.
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.
workingIf you've already added a hat/bomb to a TLP...
...can we add some indicator that you've done so? Currently, the only way to do this is by going to the draft in question and press either the hat or bomb button, prompting a message that you've already added one. With so many drafts out there, it's kinda hard to keep track of which ones you added a hat or bomb to!
workingA "Back to Top" Button
Scrolling long pages back to the top can be a bitch, especially on mobile, so my wishist is exactly what it says on the title.
Edited by alnair20aug93workingImage Uploader for TLP
An Image Uploader for TLP, as one cannot upload there and it's a hassle to load a random trope/media/forum thread just to upload there.
Edited by alnair20aug93
We've got a preview post button, so maybe a live preview? With rich text editor. And bouncing on from that, live pages. Either a notification while composing a post (eg TWO new posts) or live previews of the new posts.