This is a sandbox dedicated to the Let's Improve the TLP
thread. It exists in order to organize ideas proposed in the thread into one area.
The TLP Improvement Ideas:
User Level
- To take up sponsorship of a draft, you:
- Must make sure that the proper requirements for Up For Grabs have been met. (aka. either the previous sponsor put the tag up OR it has been abandoned for two months.)
- Must have participated in the draft within the last 48 hours. (This must be constructive participation. You cannot just say something along the lines of "We should change the title" and nothing else, and expect to fufill this requirement.)
- Must make your intentions clear within the draft's discussion. If anyone raises any objections there, you can talk about it then. (You must do this twice. The first to make your intent clear, and the second time after around 24 hours to make sure there aren't any outstanding issues with you adopting this draft.)
- Reasons for giving a bomb or a hat should be given in the discussion area. This will allow for a constructive flow of ideas on how the draft is doing.
- If you're not giving a hat but are in support of the draft since it's progressing well enough, consider saying a pleasant comment like "I support this draft and am shocked we didn't have a page on it yet" to support the sponsor's morale in addition to the example/suggestion/whatever.
- Give the sponsor time to improve. Hold off on insta-bombing and instead offer constructive criticism. If the draft fails to improve or there's an influx of support before the draft is ready to launch (such as unexplained hatting bursts), drop the bomb, but it should never be the first resort unless the draft is literally unsalvageable—and they very rarely are.
- If inexperienced sponsors are struggling to format their drafts properly, teach them the steps of how to do it. This can range from showing them proper tags to use to showing example drafts to demonstrate with. Do not be snarky about it either. Be sincere in your intent to teach.
- The initial examples on a draft should be from different franchises, mediums, and/or creators to demonstrate it's used in more than one place.
Admin Level
- Draft creation:
- Make a character requirement for a draft. 100 characters and 3 instances of "*" should be enough to allow both tropes and indices to exists while stopping low-effort one sentence drafts.
- Limit title length to 96 characters to prevent issues. Article names can be no longer than 64 characters (and that's not needed in most cases), but this should be long enough to allow for comments in the title like "Needs Better Description" or drafting works with a long title.
- Make Laconics necessary before creating a draft. There's already a glitch that makes it impossible to edit if there's no Laconic, so this'd just enforce this without causing confusion.
- Bump the time between draft creation and ability to launch to 7 days rather than 3 days to deter rogue launching, as impatient authors will be forced to wait longer and (hopefully) have more time to think about their draft and get feedback and additions from other users.
- Set a minimum account age and/or edit count before being able to create and launch drafts. note
- "The TLP edit bug!"
- Change the page type dropdown to include "Works" and "Index" pages, as it currently only has "Trope".
- Change the namespace dropdown to include all valid works namespaces, as it currently only has "Main".
- Change the "Launch a New Trope" button to remove "launch"— make it something else like "Draft a New Trope" or "Start a New Draft".
- Make the text entry box for the draft bigger by default, so it's clearer that you're supposed to type in more than a single paragraph. It should take up most of the screen, since you're meant to enter a whole page's worth of content.
- Feedback phase:
- Limit the comment section. 250 comments max. It'd prevent record-breaking attempts like on September 7, 2020 and again, no real draft reaches that amount.
- Add a "Report TLP" button for moderators if it's clear it's an utterly bad draft or in need of hold/other mod-exclusive actions.
- Launch/discard buttons should not available to people who haven't commented on the draft.
- Set a draft "grace period" in which all drafts receive a set amount of time in which hats and bombs are turned off, while being open for editing/commenting from the start. This is so the sponsor has time to collect ideas and expand the draft before people start voting.
- Hats/bombs:
- Make the software actually recognise bombs. Basically changing (in pseudo code) "if hats>=5 enable launch button;" to "if (hats-bombs)>=5 enable launch button;".
- Consider a ratio of bombs over hats to lead to an insta-nuke. Adding (again in pseudo code) "if (bombs-hats)>=50 insta-nuke;". It definitely would stop record-breaking attempts and no real draft reaches that amount.
- Hats and Bombs should no longer be anonymous, at least not to mods or the proposed TLP engineers. Being unable to see where hats and bombs came from allows situations like the experiment drafts to exist as they did, but it also allows users to sock-puppet hat their drafts or sock-puppet bomb other people's drafts. To ensure nothing fishy is going on and to force transparency, hats and bombs should at the very least come with names attached to them.
- Increase the ratio of hats:bombs needed to launch, not just a difference of 5.
- Changing the terms and images hat/bomb to avoid confusion from the colloquialisms "throwing one's hat in"/"tipping one's hat" and the extreme associations that come with "bombing" when someone just wants to indicate it needs more work before launch. Related: a more nuanced system than just these two options.
- Making it so clicking on the hat brings up a confirmation screen saying in big, bold letters, "By hatting this draft you are confirming that you think it is ready to launch in its current state." then below it, buttons marked accept and cancel (Hopefully this would cut down on mass hatting of new drafts and such)
- Making it so bombs provide a list of reasons for bombing the draft, visible to all, and to give a bomb, you must select a reason for it, like not tropable, draft not salvagable, etc. (to give bombs better feedback if nothing else)
- Other stuff:
- Fix these suspension banner errors.
- Fix the Inconsistent Dub that's still in the TLP's infrastructure, mainly changing the "YKTTW Archive" links in a trope's discussion page and the edit reason on the trope's launch.
- Make the draft history like page edit history so we could actually track what's been edited.
- Change the confusing thumbs-up icon to a follow-related icon, fix the way it doesn't give visual feedback, make it visible from the draft page.
- Add a timed edit lock to help avoid edit overlap, like on main wiki.
- Only allow users to launch one trope every 1 hour—mainly to prevent rogue launching twenty tropes in a row and similar nonsense.
- Make TLP drafts recognize small dashes (-) in titles to avoid similar cases of merged words like "Pullthe Trigger Provocation".
- Make redlinks work in TLP comments. The fact that every WikiWord currently turns blue means that it's impossible to tell what's a legitimate link and what isn't.
- Fix the TLP search function. Right now it mostly just brings up first-page drafts regardless of key-word, and only drafts that haven't been discarded or launched. Making it more accurate and expanding the scope would be helpful.
- Allow other users to see people's TLP history. This is useful in the case of TLP misbehavior or locating specific drafts.
- Fix these
