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Input Needed: Reducing the Trope Repair Shop Backlog

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Osmium from Germany Since: Dec, 2010
#301: Oct 11th 2011 at 8:28:34 AM

Maybe the number was down to this value, but it is up to 1001 again. Today were 10 new threads opend. Three of them within 7 minutes and two within 30 seconds!!

If a mod closes a batch of threads it possible to reach a number below 1000 but the question is how long we stay below the cap. And I think this window is relativly small and it is easy to miss for people waiting for a mod to close the threads they finished.

shimaspawn from Here and Now Since: May, 2010 Relationship Status: In your bunk
#302: Oct 11th 2011 at 10:00:43 AM

It's really making it feel like we're just treading water now that we hit the cap rather than trying to lower things. I really like that two threads closed, one opened. I'd really like to get things down to just two or three pages. I think that would be much more manageable than the current mess.

edited 11th Oct '11 10:01:05 AM by shimaspawn

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick
Madrugada Since: Jan, 2001
#303: Oct 11th 2011 at 10:24:20 AM

It would be more manageable, but would it be more effective at doing what TRS is for? The reason TRS exists is to repair pages that need work, not to make the forums look tidy. Crippling the ability to call for a needed repair to a page for the sake of only having X number of TRS threads open at a time is backwards.

What we need to be concentrating on is keeping the threads we do have moving, closing the ones that are done, closing the ones that are deemed unnecessary, and stomping out the idea that "I don't like it" is a good enough reason to open a TRS thread.

shimaspawn from Here and Now Since: May, 2010 Relationship Status: In your bunk
#304: Oct 11th 2011 at 11:00:55 AM

I think it would be more effective. Currently the TRS is crippled by ooh, shiney new thread syndome and the fact that things tend to get forgotten about rather than done. We need more incentive for things to be finished rather than just moving on to the next thread. Nothing gets fixed that way.

I don't care about tidy. I care about a reasonable amount of threads we can juggle at one time so that they actually get closed and not just forgotten about.

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick
Osmium from Germany Since: Dec, 2010
#305: Oct 11th 2011 at 3:05:52 PM

One thing we should pay attention to is the amount of crowners. We have a lot open (over 100 more than fit on one page). Instead of resolving the topic the crowners are often forgotten and end somewere five pages back.

I know the it is not really fair to compare RS with the IP forum, but due to the low amount of crowners there threads with crowners stick out and are drawing attention.

shimaspawn from Here and Now Since: May, 2010 Relationship Status: In your bunk
#306: Oct 11th 2011 at 3:15:49 PM

There are two reasons for that. One, IP only goes through one round of crowners and then done. Most TRS threads need at least two. Second, there are twice as many open TRS threads as IP.

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick
Osmium from Germany Since: Dec, 2010
#307: Oct 11th 2011 at 3:21:21 PM

Yeah but more than ten times of open crowners.

If we have more than 100 open crowners the older ones are not displayed in the show crowners only setting, so they are out of sight and pretty much forgotten. Unfortunally don't more crowners result in more resolved threads.

shimaspawn from Here and Now Since: May, 2010 Relationship Status: In your bunk
#308: Oct 11th 2011 at 3:22:36 PM

That bug really needs to be fixed. But cutting down on the number of crowners isn't going to happen unless we cut down on the number of threads. Threads without crowners don't tend to ever get closed.

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick
FastEddie Since: Apr, 2004
#309: Oct 11th 2011 at 3:28:45 PM

Setting the TRS limit at 200 would have the same effect it does at 1000. What might make some difference is a focus on closing the oldest threads rather than newest. Working that Stale Report.

The object being to discover what TRS throughput is, that is, what is a reasonable amount of time for a thread to be open. We clearly have some that have been open an unreasonable amount of time.

Knowing what is reasonable, we can remove the too-stale threads from the limit count and have a sane basis for the new limit number.

edited 11th Oct '11 3:31:53 PM by FastEddie

Goal: Clear, Concise and Witty
Osmium from Germany Since: Dec, 2010
#310: Oct 11th 2011 at 3:29:42 PM

Most of the crowners are old enough to call them. This means these threads are the best starting points for cutting down the amount of open threads. So cutting down the numbers of open crowners would result in a massive reduction of threads.

FastEddie Since: Apr, 2004
#311: Oct 11th 2011 at 3:33:14 PM

We could even have it so that threads cannot added until all threads older than N days have been closed.

Goal: Clear, Concise and Witty
Meophist from Toronto, Canada Since: May, 2010
#312: Oct 11th 2011 at 3:37:02 PM

That makes it sound like the default order of threads should be by reverse creation date.

Helpful Scripts and Stylesheets here.
FastEddie Since: Apr, 2004
#313: Oct 11th 2011 at 3:37:27 PM

We could try that, too.

Goal: Clear, Concise and Witty
troacctid (4 Score & 7 Years Ago)
#314: Oct 11th 2011 at 3:41:11 PM

That would make the forum very difficult to browse if it were the default, but it would be a good thing to be able to toggle.

Meophist from Toronto, Canada Since: May, 2010
#315: Oct 11th 2011 at 3:42:09 PM

We could have a similar effect by, let's say, putting the five oldest threads at the top, and the rest in regular order.

Helpful Scripts and Stylesheets here.
shimaspawn from Here and Now Since: May, 2010 Relationship Status: In your bunk
#316: Oct 11th 2011 at 3:42:34 PM

We've had a lot of threads that are still active after a long period of time and often times just shutting the thread down prematurely leaves the page a bigger mess than it was when it started. I like the idea of old threads being auto bumped back up to the top at a slow rate.

edited 11th Oct '11 3:43:11 PM by shimaspawn

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick
troacctid (4 Score & 7 Years Ago)
#317: Oct 11th 2011 at 3:46:51 PM

Well, we found out with the Extreme Trope Makeover project that punching a thread up to the top of the forum is not a guarantee that it will get resolved.

Osmium from Germany Since: Dec, 2010
#318: Oct 11th 2011 at 3:54:13 PM

I often simply ignore the pinned threads. And I would't be suprised if most other people react the same. Maybe marking the threads somehow (e.g big bold colorful font) can draw attention.

Spark9 Since: Nov, 2010
#319: Oct 11th 2011 at 5:16:10 PM

It would be interesting to see what the greatest "time sink" is - is it the discussion before the crowner, the crowners themselves, or the wrap-up of actually doing whatever has been concluded?

I believe that a lot of threads just fall off the radar and go unnoticed; this would likely be remedied by a (much) lower thread cap.

shimaspawn from Here and Now Since: May, 2010 Relationship Status: In your bunk
#320: Oct 11th 2011 at 6:07:27 PM

[up] I'm pretty sure that the falling off the radar is the biggest issue. Once a thread has fallen past the first page it just seems to get lost. That's why I think a lower thread cap will help a lot. It means that the tropes that we do have will get more attention and get done.

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick
Madrugada Since: Jan, 2001
#321: Oct 11th 2011 at 10:35:02 PM

The time sink is almost always the wrap-up: rewriting the definition, or actually doing the nit-picky work of changing the wicks and such. The second biggest one is apparently when threads fall too far back in the list and sit there with an open crowner for two or three months.

But far and away the largest number of backlogged threads were those that had reached a consensus about what to do, but it simply hadn't been done.

edited 11th Oct '11 10:35:11 PM by Madrugada

Spark9 Since: Nov, 2010
#322: Oct 12th 2011 at 12:16:18 AM

[up] Would it be possible to use automation for some of those tasks?

Obviously this is something to be careful about, but as I recall That Other Wiki uses bots for everything from renaming to categorizing to spellchecking.

FastEddie Since: Apr, 2004
#323: Oct 12th 2011 at 12:38:34 AM

We can have bots. It would be great to very completely specify the desired behavior before they are cut loose, though.

Goal: Clear, Concise and Witty
Osmium from Germany Since: Dec, 2010
#324: Oct 12th 2011 at 1:00:29 AM

I am not sure about the bots. Most tasks are not only simple steps like renames, a renamed trope often is misused, so the renaming of the wiks doubles as a cleanup. A bot is not able to do this.

A simple replacement of the names is possible without messing with the sentence structure when it is either potholed or used in a example list (but the alphabetical order will be messed up, unless we make an automatical alphabetization bot). If the title itself is used in a sentence there is often a rewrite needeed.

Even if we use bots, the results have to be checked by a real human being. And the work is not that much less than doing a rename by hand. And I am afraid that instead of being stuck at the point of having to do the rename, the threads will be stuck at the point when the bots results have to be checked.

shimaspawn from Here and Now Since: May, 2010 Relationship Status: In your bunk
#325: Oct 12th 2011 at 7:37:54 AM

All of the pinned threads in the TRS just vanished. Is Eddie doing something?

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

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