Appeal to the moderation

At least they won’t order censorship of basic human anatomy, right?

Where are you going with this? We aren't going to show nude images regardless of what our advertisers say.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

I assume Guma is talking about this ATT thread regarding the video example on Mass "Oh, Crap!" from Airplane!. Which is, uhh... calling it NSFW is putting it a bit mildly.

^^^^I don't think Google themselves are very keen on censoring anything; it's the advertisers who don't want their ads to be associated with porn or any kind of prurient imagery. So if we switch to another company, they will have basically the same rules...

...unless they deal in "adult" ads. Then they wouldn't care, but this site would be inundated with ads for porn and escort services, and I don't think we'd want that.

Edited by GnomeTitan on Oct 2nd 2020 at 4:52:51 PM

For context, there is a moment in the video where a topless woman runs in front of the screen and you can see her breasts and nipples for a second or two before she runs off.

That topless video violates our own standards, never mind Google's.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

The clip is a bit of a nothingburger if you ask me, but if violates policy, then it should go. It is hardly worth sparking controversy over, and there are plenty of other good moments to show.

For context, I have this movie on DVD, and it is rated 6 and up, at least in the Netherlands.

Edited by Redmess on Oct 2nd 2020 at 6:37:28 PM

Optimism is a duty.

I'm trying to phrase this politely... is it really so hard to accept that we don't want nude pics or videos on our site, regardless of what any advertiser says? That clip is all over the Internet. If y'all need masturbation material, go somewhere else.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

I was agreeing with you, Fighteer. If the policy is no nudity, then it has to go.

Edited by Redmess on Oct 2nd 2020 at 6:38:34 PM

Optimism is a duty.

Fighteer, the only people who can remove the video are the one who uploaded it (which we have no idea on who), and the mods. If the video needs to be removed, please do so.

Jawbreakers on sale for 99¢

Oh, right. Nuked that one.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Last I heard about the engineer position, y'all were still discussing presenting the idea to the programmers. Any news?

If not for this anchor I'd be dancing between the stars. At least I can try to write better vampire stories than Twilight.

That project is deadlocked until the admins are able to action the technical requests. We have made all the necessary recommendations on what we want. I can share no more details until they are able to implement something.

"If you aren't him, then you apparently got your brain from the same discount retailer, so..." - Fighteer

So in other words, the ball is in the admins' court now, right? Thanks for keeping us up to date.

If not for this anchor I'd be dancing between the stars. At least I can try to write better vampire stories than Twilight.

Hey mods, I just wanted to say I appreciate you guys because I don't think it gets said enough; this is a big wiki with at least one bit of drama every day, and you guys keep this site from drowning in the chaos. So thank you.

IDK why I felt the need to say it, but I did. Sometimes we just need to take a second to acknowledge these things.

Current Project: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

I agree.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Oct 6th 2020 at 5:27:59 AM

Patiently awaiting the release of Paper Luigi and the Marvelous Compass.

Thirding. It's a largely thankless job but we're glad you guys are around to do it

---

And uhh not to jump into a demand after that but... can we have some feedback regarding the effort to bring back Trope Report? There are a lot of people who are interested and I've put together a tentative list of categories based on discussion, but no one really knows how to move forward without staff input. Is it simply a matter of posting in the Newsletter namespace? Is there a way to broadcast the entries like via bulletin?

Edited by Synchronicity on Oct 7th 2020 at 6:17:10 AM

Yeah, I know we site users ask a lot of you, sometimes forgetting that you re people with your own lives and jobs and that you cant spend your entire day fixing our problems. I have nothing to specifically request, though I think that the video example system needs a little reworking.

...That said, it is getting a little concerning that Septimus keeps trying to make us use discussion pages. Nobody uses them because they're glitchy and out of the way. Only people paying attention to the pages actually even knows a discussion is occurring. The only way to ensure a lot of responses is to take the issue elsewhere. I feel like this keeps getting explained but we just keep going in circles, with half of the ATT threads being called out for "being better for discussion pages" when if they had been on discussion pages, nothing would've gotten resolved because only the people who already knew about the issue would've shown up.

Discussion pages have their purpose and a time and a place. But they can't be relied on because...well, they're unreliable and there's too many of them to keep up with. People aren't just going to go and skim the discussion pages for any interesting subjects like they do on the forums or ATT. For smaller disputes or things that get too long for ATT, I agree that discussion pages are the better option, but they shouldn't be the go-to because they're used so rarely and the wiki has changed a lot since they were the hot thing.

Wiki culture has changed and so has many of our rules and standards. Can we please allow people to use ATT the way they've been using it, instead of trying to make us use discussion pages? Maybe if the glitches get resolved people will flock to them. But for the time being, they're just not a viable option in most cases, and sometimes I feel like Septimus is a little behind-the-times in terms of wiki culture.

Don't take this the wrong way dude, you rock and we all love you. I just had to get this off my chest because it's been bugging me for a while and it's something that needed a little addressing. But seriously man, I ain't tryna call you out or start drama, I just wanted to start a discussion about the issue at hand and hopefully resolve it so we don't have to keep repeating ourselves- you or the rest of us.

Current Project: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

Agreed. Discussion pages are annoying ever since the bugs hit, and I know that's not the moderators' fault, but if these issues should be redirected anywhere, it should be to the forums (like "Is this an example?"), not the discussion pages. At least there we can ping relevant tropers and link things without having to copy/paste and edit the links manually. The only Discussion pages I ever see consistently active are the So Bad It's Horrible pages, which rely a lot on crowdsourcing and have a consistent userbase checking them. Commenting on a Discussion page that's never been used is basically shouting into a voice.

Edited by mightymewtron on Oct 13th 2020 at 4:03:28 AM

I do some cleanup and then I enjoy shows you probably think are cringe.

The problem is that Ask The Tropers has a limited bandwidth. It is the place where people are supposed to report things like edit warring and vandalism, and I've seen plenty of such queries get buried. It's one thing if you post a "please come" post like they sometimes do for TRS threads, but transferring entire example discussions there hogs the space. Things have changed, yes, in a way that is creating problems for other functions of that venue. And since the "example discussions" have alternative venues whereas the "problem report" aspects don't, that means I advocate that the latter be prioritized.

Edited by SeptimusHeap on Oct 13th 2020 at 10:13:23 AM

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

Is it impossible to permanently delete some of the old queries? I've read the backlog (I got really bored one week) and a majority of the threads could just be cut without any issue. If bandwidth is the issue, I think clearing out the backlog, much like we're doing with the TLP right now and might do with old threads, could really help. Pretty much anything that has zero chance or reason for being resurrected again can go, as the oldest ones aren't likely to be very relevant anymore anyway and many of them have been locked.

If it's impossible, shouldn't the forums be a better go-to option than discussion pages? Again, those things are too glitchy to use reliably in the way we need them, and are only really useful for small discussions until the issues get cleared up. Less will get resolved if we're forced to use them because I'd assume people would either just not bother showing up (as had happened before when things got moved to discussion) or would prefer to post on the forums, splitting the discussion into two conversations.

Current Project: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

Sorry, "bandwidth" in the sense of "how many queries you can have before people start missing them and less popular quries are buried", not in a technical sense.

I do sometimes suggest that people take a discussion to the forum, actually. See the posts with "Trope Talk" in them. Many of the queries concern individual examples, though, and these don't easily fit into the forum (other than the Is this an example thread but that too has overload issues).

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

And those I completely agree with you on, since there's already designated areas to discuss those in and they get decent amount of traffic.

It's just the "individual example" problem that I feel shouldn't be kicked out of ATT, unless the discussion gets too long, for the reasons I've already stated. People are simply more likely to notice the issue and pitch in on fixing it, and while it may seem like these discussions bury other posts, those also get buried because nobody wants to respond to things like behavioral reports- we don't want to popcorn post or mini-mod. The amount of upvotes those tend to get should be evidence enough that we all see them there and we bump as much as we can, but there's no actual discussions we can have on those threads if the troper in question isn't doing anything controversial or complicated. So we talk about the other issues that we're actually able to say something about without being accused of derailing things or mini-modding.

ATT is, after all, a discussion forum. While we do need better standards about what gets discussed, it shouldn't be so strict as to force us to use an objectively worse part of the site simply because it's not the intended purpose of ATT, unless the issue becomes so drawn out that keeping it at ATT is simply allowing the debate to drag on.

TL;DR: I agree we need to keep some issues out of ATT, but we simply have nowhere better to discuss individual examples at the moment, so going somewhere else would only make things worse.

...But seriously tho. That backlog. I'm sure it does eat up server space. It wouldn't hurt to clean it out.

Current Project: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

I feel like if discussions are getting too long for ATT, discussion pages are inferior in every way to Trope Talk as far as somewhere to move them goes.