Discussion Archive / TheGoogleIncident

At this point, the page is really just an archive. Edits are unlikely.

I believe that the admins are looking into becoming a non-profit foundation under Swiss law (since that's where the business-end admin lives). It's apparently quite a complicated deal. It also had something to do with picking which country's internet-related laws we want to be subject to — and that may have mitigated against the US... More details that that I don't know.

No. Anonymous editing is a thing of the past. We want to be able to know who made an edit, something anonymous editing doesn't allow. In the past, we have had to IP-ban entire blocks of IPs (in one case, an entire college campus) because of anonymous vandalism by editor(s) wh simply moved from one machine to another as each IP was banned.

I see...though as others have pointed out, that may have consequences regarding those people who would rather not want to be pressured into registering just because of all the other anonymous jackasses.

But, whichever way has the more severe consequences is irrelevant. Whatever happens happens, little point in making a hassle over it. Guess I might bother with getting an account sometime, then.

I think the main thing is, if they don't care enough to register an account and password with no email address required and no validation necessary, they probably shouldn't be editing the wiki anyway.

However, the very fact that getting known is so easy presents another problem: anyone that wants to vandalize the wiki can simply get a new account in the event they get banned. In fact, this "security measure" will honestly have next to no effect on one's ability to track down and deal with vandalism. They get banned, make a new account, and then what? If you resort to IP banning, you're right back where you started with the whole "banning entire blocks of I Ps" issue. The amount of contributers lost due to removal of anonymous editing will still likely be greater than the number of trolls discouraged by this, in the long run. And simply putting greater restrictions on getting an account will only make the problem worse.

Could be. Could be somebody who got banned for running a nanny-bot, or for edit-warring. Could be a lot of things. We don't know, and frankly, we aren't spending much effort to find out.

I strongly suspect the latter; now that we've brought their attention to us, they've assessed based on the current state and that's what we'd be expected to adhere to. I think.

Ah... Now that I reread their reply, I notice that they only apologized for unwarranted disabling of the ads, not for the NSFG complaint itself.

Well, the result is the same: Our recent system mini-overhaul passed their "family-friendly" standards.

A toast to the resolution of the crisis?

Si! Viva la resolucion!

But yeah. It looks like they found us wanting and were going to ask for things to be changed, but the system screwed up (yeah, any excuse) and killed it early. So things are going to have to stay post-NSFG, which means the Unknown Troper will sadly remain deceased.

On the plus side, at least vandalism will be at an all-time low.

From the Main page: "Use the report button if you think a page that's already on the NSFG side should be moved back to the SFG side as well. Again, give us a coherent reason."

Has Two Mommies went onthe other side of the curtain because it was on two indexes that were moved wholesale: Queer as Tropes, and Gender and Sexuality Tropes. We'll be going through things like that once the review assessment is done. As has been mentioned before, in several cases, entire indexes were put behind the curtain in the interest of getting the review started. But yes, flag it, and give a reason.

Gay alone should never be automatic criteria to put stuff behind the curtain. Practically any index can have adult entries—their mere mention on more worksafe pages should not whisk away the entire pages they're mentioned on. The mature content warning should be between the page and the mature page, rather than also between the rest of the wiki and any page that mentions a mature page.

I'm pretty sure we aren't using "gay" as criteria; we're just moving blocks of tropes en masse so that we can get the review done ASAP. Once the review is complete, we'll go through and sort through the articles more closely. For example, we'll probably move Has Two Mommies out from behind the barrier as soon as we can.

And I'm also pretty sure that linking to a NSFG page on a SFG page doesn't put the SFG page behind the warning. The warning only shows up when you click on a link that goes to a NSFG page. That and if you turn the warning off in your profile, you'll only ever have to see the warning once anyway.

There were 9 indexes that accounted for 850 tropes between them, and many of the tropes we were uncertain about whether they would meet the content guidelines. Rather than go through each of those 850 tropes, reading each one top-to-bottom to assess it, we put the whole index behind the curtain. If you think a page that is already behind the curtain shouldn't be, flag it.

If it's already marked mature and the "This page is flagged" notice is showing, it's already been flagged for reassessment; please don't flag it again.

Okay, that makes more sense. I'm just a little protective of the dignity of LGBT people.

I think a lot of people are right now, given all this suicide stuff that's been happening lately. It's understandable.

This also is ocurring with me. I remenbers of read something about need edit their profile to can see the pages with mature content.

No, it's a sitewide glitch. Editing any article will cause it do display as blank.

Exists any mode to see the pages without look to the source?

Fast Eddie has fixed it. I know it was the type of thing that has to be fixed quickly, but I didn't actually expect it to be that fast.

I reentered the Ogre Battle page and yet is displaying as one blank.

Ogre Battle should be fixed. If it still shows blank for you, try clearing your cache. If you find more pages that appear blank, open the edit screen, make one change — either something that needed to be fixed anyway or something that you can easily repair (I've been deleting the first character of the first line) and save. Then, if you need to, edit it again to put what ever you changed back to its original condition.

Thanks.

Technically you don't have to make a change at all. The system is perfectly fine with saving a "change" of nothing at all.

I have to agree that The Merch is at least one good thing to come out of all this. I intend to buy a lot of it.

It's a reality.

Edited your post to add the asterisk that nets us a referral lagniappe, Haven. That's all.

If I could justify spending twenty bucks on a mug, I'd be all over that one. At least I used the referral link.

Also, no one saw that typo. >.>

We got reported, so Fanfiction.net is safe. At least we will not dump any content.

With all due respect to the people running the site and the incredible job they're doing keeping us afloat, good. Even if the defecation doesn't hit the oscillation here, a third party site wide backup would come in handy in case the new code breaks the site, or meteors hit the server, or general pear shapeatude shows up. Best of luck.

Thanks, dude, always great in case we really do have a zombie apocolypse

We shouldn't have a problem with this, as Fast Eddie is doing his best to keep from losing any existing content.

That said, no reason not to, I guess. *shrug*

Here is the link that Fast Eddie got that tells us how to be compliant with AdSense. [1]

Thanks.

So it is third graders... Huh.

Yeah, no. It's covered by the simple expedient of removing non-alphanumerics before a handle is Known. The reasons were primarily, to the best of my knowledge, because it was causing problems with people having similar names on the forum thanks to dashes and the like.

Is it bad that when I saw this page in the new edits listing, my first thought was about Jersey Shore? And I don't even watch the show.

Don't worry, put it under I Thought It Meant...

The standards are what we need to get our advertising revenue from Google. Even in the worst-case scenario where we get no new users, the rate of attrition for our current editing base is, I'm willing to bet, less than "everyone leaves and the site collapses in a month", which is an all too likely situation without the revenue from AdSense. Personally, I think the standards will attract slightly higher quality edits, if they have any effect at all—it's not that difficult to Get Known.

I also wish we didn't have to do this, but at worst it's a Necessary Evil.

Let's remember after all - most Wikis these days do not allow anonymous editing. Wikipedia is one of the few that does, and even there it's controversial. Indeed, the site would likely be improved by denying it.

>most Wikis these days do not allow anonymous editing [citation needed]

And do you honestly think it would be improved? The only reason this site hasn't yet been completely rejected by every other Internet community is the mitigating influence of outsider traffic; people who don't give a damn about being a "Troper", who just want to read the pages and continue being unaware of the incessant back-and-forth of registered users behind the scenes.

Preventing anonymous edits will just lead to much less editing in general, and the growing list of names will cause innumerable personality conflicts and clique-obsession far beyond what there is today. Especially given the (proposed) increase in moderation - you'll have a constant stream of indignant tropers leaving comments on every other site they visit about how "TV Tropes sucks now!"

As far as I'm concerned, this site's "community" has been spiraling downwards ever since the moderators started demanding that the users be accepting of lunatics. Putting up this barrier to outside access (despite how small it is) will be the last nail in the coffin. Your userbase will stagnate, your every discussion will be infested with drama, and sooner or later your precious "Troperville" will burn itself to the ground.

Then we will trope in the flame.

To respond to the non-hyperbolic portions of this comment—which pretty much just leaves the words "sooner or later"—again, this site's "inevitable downfall" is both much sooner and a bit closer to actually being inevitable if we don't do this. Because AdSense—which standards we are trying to appease—is its main source of revenue, and without these changes we can't get AdSense.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!

Yeah, maybe TV Tropes is going downhill. But I think you're being a tad over dramatic.

Only a tad?

Agreed. What the h*ll?

Meltron is displeased with these turn of events

Well, it's Google, so I'd guess it went with the ads. Except that I'm pretty sure it was up a day or two ago, when the ads were already gone. ._.

For now, you can use this. It should be the same thing.

Check out this thread.

What Yamii said, though apparently it took a bit longer for the ban to get from AdSense to the search engine or something. Two alternatives: going to Google.com and typing in "site:tvtropes.org [query]"; or going to the menu on the left, hitting "Tools" and clicking "Title Search".

There's some guy a few topics up talking about saving the entire site to a large amount of external drives. You might talk to him about this.

"It's just motivated by greed."

Except not really, considering we were breaking their terms of service. And you do realize you're hurting the wiki as well by blocking the ads?

I'm pretty sure that the "no content warnings" isn't fully implemented yet.

Should work now. It was the last thing Fast Eddie turned on.

Question. If this site can utterly sidestep The Situation and get an ad company supporting the site who doesn't insist on imposing Bluenose Bowdlerisation, can the NSFG policy be eventually rescinded?

Honestly, I loved this site for not bluenosing itself, and I was wondering if there will be a cold day in the really hot bad place that will make it to where TV Tropes won't have to censor itself?

The honest answer to that is "Don't know."

But we aren't censoring anything; the material is still there and you can still read it. You simply have to step through one easy hoop, once for each computer you use to get to the site, and you can cheerfully ignore the division between SFG and NSFG from then on. The only folks who will have to deal with it more than once are those who used public computers or who refuse to allow cookies from us. And they've had to log in every time anyway.

How can we keep maintaining adult-oriented entries and pages? Even Shakespeare is full of adult humor.

Yes, but even he had to edit things to please his backers. Adult humor wasn't the issue, but several of his plays were definitely influenced along the lines of, "Well, I don't want to piss off the King."

Any time a work or project depends on money, those providing the money are going to end up sparking changes in the project.

Good point.

...It feels like something is dying.

There are other, less strict advertising services for the more adult pages, so they won't be removed or anything. At least, that's what the main article implies.

Alright, this is one of my biggest concerns. Right now, many pages contain adult topics, and they are not necessarily discussed in an inappropriate fashion, but rather in a mature faction by grown people who appreciate literature in all its diversity.

But if we split so many of the articles in two, it will not only have a traumatic impact on editing structure and editing culture, but it may also cause to further stigmatize the adult content even if it is wholly appropriate in literary analysis. The adult pages shouldn't primarily become magnets the extreme on one end of the spectrum, and the worksafe pages shouldn't primarily become overly tense and overpruned by the Moral Guardians. Imagining how to navigate such a leviathan feels like ripping an editor's very soul in two.

tvtropes is a place that feels relevant, and is also famous for its honest frankness in acknowledging tropes. I am concerned that too many drastic changes may alienate many useful editors—not because they are so attached to adult content specifically, but because the adult nature of content is not always a conscious relevant forefront issue in an editor's mind, and to make it so forces one's mind to always ponder toxic social issues of stigma and other people's fear. If the editing task becomes thus too complex or too stressful, an editor may just decide to call it a day and never bother editing again.

What exactly is considered adult? Is this the type of page that would have to be put behind a filter? - https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ClusterFBomb

Any registered users—so all of the editors now—will be able to opt out of seeing the barrier "Not Safe For Google" message. So for most of us, the segregation will be nearly invisible. I don't think this will effect the editing tone too much.

We are NOT going to be splitting articles into SFG and NSFG versions of the same article.

They'll either be on the "safe" side where anyone can read them and the ads will probably be from Google or on the NSFG side, where you'll have to click through a very basic "Yeah, I know, "may contain mature content, blah blah, just do it already" acknowledgment page. (If you're a registered user, you will be able to set your profile to automatically pass you through it.) The ads on that side will be from some other ad provider.

^^ Yes, Cluster F-Bomb will definitely be on the NSFG side.

I admit, the "keep most of it to a middle school level, teachers use us" thing bugs me. Gilgamesh's comment about how "the worksafe pages shouldn't primarily become overly tense and overpruned by the Moral Guardians" sums up my worries pretty much exactly.

And we can keep the self-demonstrating parts of Cluster F-Bomb, right? They're even funnier somehow now that it's only part of the description.

We aren't looking at Bowdlerizing it, honestly. It's not going to be "Don't you dare say "damn", it's going to be "Is there a reason you referred to this character as a motherfucker when it wasn't a quote from the movie?"

Cluster F-Bomb would stay exactly like it is now. It would just be on the other side of the fence, and the ads wouldn't be from Google.

God, I'm getting tired of repeating this: The only thing that is going to change is that some pages will be on the other side of a notice that "Yeah, ok, the pages I'm heading for might have some content that the prudes in the Google legal department don't like. I get it. Let me see 'em anyway." It won't be that blunt, but that's the gist of it.

Alright... I suppose my next question would be, What would be the automatic (software-based) criteria for putting pages in front of or behind the barrier? If a page suddenly gets bumped behind the barrier for even a small (but legitimate) reason, this won't create a per-page fuss about whether or not it should be behind the barrier, will it? Or would all pages be behind the barrier by default, and undergo some kind of per-page approval process? It practically sounds like all of this is going to be a logistical quagmire, especially when many ordinary trope pages have legitimate mature-oriented examples.

It's too bad tvtropes doesn't have lots of philanthropic sugardaddies like Wikipedia does, then we could avoid the question of Google Ads altogether.

And instead, get huge annoying monthly donation drives like Wikipedia does? :P

Don't panic, ladies and gentlemen. It sounds like the admins have it covered.

Gil, once the first push to get things cleaned up for the Google appeal is done, pages won't be being automatically moved. New pages will be flagged as NSFG until a staff member can vett them and make a decision on whether they need to stay on the 'adult content' side of the curtain or whether they should be moved back to the SFG side.

The first big move of pages is going to use a script and move entire indexes, but only so that the staff doesn't have to go through 25,000 subpages (like Just Bugs Me, WMG, Fridge, Moments, and YMMV), 20,000 trope pages, 17,000 works pages, 3500 creator pages, and 1200 Just for fun pages one by one.

Pages that are moved in this first big push can be moved back later, when we've got time to think again. There will be a button on every page so that tropers can report that they think it's on the wrong side of the curtain. That button will work both ways — Think of it as a "Hey, I think this page is on the wrong side of the curtain, would you take a look?" button. The staff will be able to move pages either way across the curtain.

The situation right now —well, let me make an analogy, here. If you were trying to sell your house and you got a call from the Realtor that she'd be over in fifteen minutes with a possible buyer, and the house was a mess with stuff scattered all over, would you carefully and meticulously put each thing away in the proper place? Or would you just scoop it all up and put it out of sight until the realtor and the possible buyer were gone? Replace "the buyer" with "Google" and "the house" with "the wiki" — we don't have the time to do a careful, meticulaous job of cleaning up. We have to get the sneakers out of the living room and the dirty dishes out of the sink. And we have to do it fast because the longer it takes us to appeal, the more of our operating buffer we use up, and we don't know how long it will take for Google make a decision after we do appeal.

No, it doesn't. I'll mention that. Thanks for the thought.

It does now. Thank you again.

Thanks. It helps to hear that. It's been tense.