Holler the threads that are stale and deadlocked or appear to have died from a lack of interest or lack of consensus, and ask for a lock due to inaction.
Holler the ones that simply need to have a crowner called so that work can be started on them.
If they've been called and are simply waiting for someone to do the work, do it.
The whole point of the thread cap is to encourage people to actually finish doing the repairs that are needed and agreed on, and to weed out the threads that haven't come to any conclusion.
edited 29th Jan '12 12:47:05 PM by Madrugada
Something that's been on my mind for a while - when is it safe to conclude a thread is "dead"? The Expiry Bot killed a thread at 90 days before it went away. I've been clocking threads in Image Pickin' at 60 days after the last post, but I've been thinking that moving the limit to 45 days would be a good idea, as we've hit a point in IP where threads are being created about as fast as they're being locked so we're stuck at 350ish threads.
edited 29th Jan '12 2:25:14 PM by Willbyr
I agree they should be bumped before locking them. As fast as new threads are created, it just ain't possible for all 500 of them to be on the front page where the action is. There's only room for 99 on the front page, and like it or not anything that isn't on that page tends to be ignored.
Not that truly stale threads that generate no interest or deadlock with no hope of a consensus shouldn't be locked.
edit: spelling
edited 3rd Feb '12 7:11:17 PM by ArcadesSabboth
Oppression anywhere is a threat to democracy everywhere.Why don't we just lower the thread cap again? Did we decide somewhere that we wouldn't lower it anymore? Even though having 500 threads is much better than what it was before, I think it still leaves too much room for threads to go stale. I think either 250 or 300 would be an optimal final thread count number, but for now we can lower it to 450 or 400.
Also, I'm not sure that putting more thread on the front page will solve the problem. For me, at least, it just makes the pages too long and the threads harder to find.
I think lowering the cap was pretty opposed in this thread.
edited 5th Feb '12 12:44:45 PM by ThatHuman
somethingWhat I really want is a page somewhere in Administrivia explaining exactly how crowners work. I have no idea how to create one, but proper use of them seems to make it a lot easier to fix a topic.
That's Feo . . . He's a disgusting, mysoginistic, paedophilic asshat who moonlights as a shitty writer—Something AwfulHow to fix a trope
covers it but an actual page would probably be good.
Closing threads isn't that hard. I sometimes just go to the last page in the TRS board, find a few threads that look done or like nothing else needs to be discussed. Then I post, saying, "this looks like we're done" or something along those lines. At that point I holler a mod to get it closed. If I missed my estimation, the thread stays open and hopefully some work gets done quickly. Otherwise, the thread is closed. Any time I want to open a new one, I try to close four or five old threads to make the space.
And yes, it would be nice to have easy-to-find instructions on how to make a crowner. I only just figured it out myself a few days ago.
edited 5th Feb '12 7:45:53 PM by Martello
"Did anybody invent this stuff on purpose?" - Phillip Marlowe on tequila, Finger Man by Raymond Chandler.Yeah, making crowners is only sort of obliquely explained, partly, on some other administrivia pages about renaming. Where to go to start one, how to start the different types, is not explained. A separate page for How To Make A Crowner would help.
As for raising the thread limit, then the TRS will go back to being the quagmire it was before, with over 1000 threads, and still it would sit at maximum and be closed. The fundamental problem is that people want to start new threads more than they want to help resolve old problems, and that mismatch will not be solved by a higher thread cap. Only removing the cap entirely would make the TRS permanently open, at the cost of getting almost nothing accomplished in there anymore.
edited 7th Feb '12 3:16:23 PM by ArcadesSabboth
Oppression anywhere is a threat to democracy everywhere.About crowners, it would be nice to have an explanation about how they work as well, since it is nowhere spelt out easily - how many votes you need, the yes/no ratio needed to call one etc.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard FeynmanThis may be a tangentially related question, but... How about making a "sandbox" page for tropers to list tropes/articles that are in need of TRS work (with one or two lines summarizing the essence of the problem, perhaps with the longer version being put on the trope's discussion page), while we deal with the effective "stalemate" between thread creation and thread closure in TRS?
I mean, Cryptic Mirror raised a good point here
:
I too am suffering from this problem, BTW.
edited 8th Feb '12 8:35:45 AM by MarqFJA
Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.For several days I was checking the forum to see if we'd gotten under 500 posts so I could submit a rename proposal. Got to submit it today after the thread count finally dropped below 500. Am not a moderator so I can't go closing threads, but it looks like right now there are twelve threads in the forum that have not had a post made in them in two months. Several dozen threads haven't had a post in over a month.
Agree with all others above who don't know how to make a crowner. That How To Fix a Trope Page says nothing about how to actually do the things it tells you to do.
edited 8th Feb '12 9:54:45 PM by Vidor
@Vidor, like I said early in this thread, if there's no room start pushing to get stale threads closed. If it looks like an old thread is already done, holler a mod on the last post and ask if it can be closed. If it's awaiting action - usually has a star icon next to it - then post a "bump for fixing this" or just start fixing it yourself. Then holler to get it closed.
"Did anybody invent this stuff on purpose?" - Phillip Marlowe on tequila, Finger Man by Raymond Chandler.Which things on How To Fix A Trope Page do you need help on?
edited 8th Feb '12 10:20:03 PM by Deboss
Fight smart, not fair.How to fix a trope is informative and useful, but should be in TRS, not FAQ. Or at least, put it in both subforums.
"If you aren't him, then you apparently got your brain from the same discount retailer, so..." - Fighteer

There's nothing wrong with the 500 post limit on TRS, but the fact that there's a full page and two posts without any posts in them for over a month...? Yeah.
It really needs more trimming when a thread doesn't get posted in for over a month, as there's about 100 slots that are currently being hogged by dead threads. (That's not even counting the ones that haven't been posted in since the start of this month.)
EDIT: Combine that with threads like this
(in case you can't be bothered, the thread is finished and the page has been remade but the thread isn't closed) and you see a trend towards lots and lots of slots being taken up by untrimmed threads.
edited 29th Jan '12 12:45:10 PM by Devour