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Probably not now that I think about it.
And IMO the Repair Shop and Image Picking themselves are more intimidating than anything else we have.... so many rules, regs, thread limits and other stuff that it isn't even remotely funny. A new user coming in and seeing all that they just say screw it.
edited 15th Feb '12 12:47:08 PM by Raso
Sparkling and glittering! Jan-Ken-Pon!To back up what Eddie said, we've found that participation in the right side (specifically the Yack Fest and Forum RP sections) of the forums is almost unrelated to participation in the main wiki. In other words, the "social" part of the forums is utterly irrelevant to the "sense of community" that you are talking about above, Zennistrad, because there is no evidence that it is any way correlated to activity on the wiki side.
The most active Yack Fest and Forum RP posters, for example, have no wiki edits, and vice versa. This means that the wiki is not bringing these people here or is not interesting to them.
edited 15th Feb '12 12:50:40 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"In an offtopic the forums trope page has a lack of a Video Games forum under media.
Apocalypse: Dirge Of Swans.I honestly couldn't care less about the Wiki Talk, Trope Talk, Image Pickin', TRS, OTC, or World-Building Forums, and I doubt I'm the only one who feels this way.
TV Tropes isn't about tropes for some people. It's about the Tropers, and the community they've established. Pushing these people aside could potentially lead to once-regular users leaving the site. You're only hurting yourself here.
Why exactly would you go through the trouble of creating an environment where people can chat freely about whatever and not anticipate a community to build? If you're going to just straight up go and tell off a significant portion of your userbase like this, then I suggest you put an announcement on the front page with a link to another surrogate forum that we can all go to instead. Otherwise, we'd just scatter to various other sites and never see each other again. If you're going to tear down our neighbourhood, at least give us a new one.
The most active Yack Fest and Forum RP posters, for example, have no wiki edits, and vice versa. This means that the wiki is not bringing these people here or is not interesting to them.
Then go and give us a new forum where we can all meet with the same people again. This is akin to tearing down someone's home and not giving them a new one.
edited 15th Feb '12 12:54:27 PM by Zennistrad
Fighteer is being too kind. To be perfectly frank, we've not only found that right-side forum participation is unrelated to wiki participation, we've found that there is in fact a negative correlation: the most prolific forum-posters tend to concentrate in the R Ps, and Forum Games and, to a lesser degree, in the other right-side forums and tend to have little to no wiki participation. There is a community, certainly, but it's a community that's largely unrelated to the wiki. The only connection it has to the wiki is that it's hosted on the same site.
edited 15th Feb '12 12:55:52 PM by Madrugada
Can you at least give us a place where we can all meet with each other again? If these forums disappear, I'll likely never see any of the people I normally chat with again.
Well, they still look at trope pages, generating revenue through banner ads.
If they left, you'd loose that revenue.
Just saying.
The 5 geek social fallacies. Know them well.^^ Why are you assuming that the forums are going to disappear? We do not plan to cut any of the forums.
^ The ads generate revenue on click-throughs, not page views. It matters not a whit how many people see the ads, except that the more people see them, the more likely it is that someone will click on one.
edited 15th Feb '12 12:58:25 PM by Madrugada
Zennistrad, it's not up to us to "give" you anything. We've split off troublesome parts of the wiki before and others have take it upon themselves to find sites for them. It Just Bugs Me was one such place. That is not our concern as wiki staff.
The fact is that we aren't taking anything away from you at all, except that newbies to the forums won't see those parts right away. This means that if you want to build your community, you'll have to reach out to the wiki proper rather than expecting people to click "Forums", see Yack Fest, and promptly forget about the wiki as they dive into the latest social hub.
I think you and a lot of other people missed the "Tropes" part of the site's name when you came here.
Also, the forum has negative revenue compared to the rest of the wiki. The percentage of click-throughs is far, far lower than the wiki proper. We would be in a better financial position if we cut off the most active subforums. Food for thought.
edited 15th Feb '12 1:01:19 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"The forums are not going anywhere. You just have to click an extra button if you don't already have the main page bookmarked.
I for one, did not come onto the forums initially by clicking the forum button. I got into it by searching for something or another and saw forum discussions for it. So its not like we are losing the only way people come to the forum in the first place.
ninja'd by Madruteer/Fightrugada.
edited 15th Feb '12 1:00:34 PM by Parable
...really?
If I'd known that I'd have clicked on the ads every once in a while. >.<
The 5 geek social fallacies. Know them well.By making them less accessible, fewer people could find themselves accessing the forums in the future, and at some point the admins could decide "oh, people don't use the forum anymore, why should we even have them?"
It's the beginning of a dangerous trend. The forums might not be under consideration for being cut, but this definitely increases the odds that it might some time in the future.
edited 15th Feb '12 1:02:40 PM by Zennistrad
I'd like to note that the Roleplays do add a bit to the Wiki with their respective pages.
Not enough to perhaps matter, but just putting it out there.
Also, yeah, I like that the Forums are more focused upon the Wiki itself. It helps participation where it ultimate matters. The rest is Just for Fun, which is a bonus to the Wiki, not the focus.
Quest 64 threadJust for Fun, Real-ish, and Forum RP are net negatives on the wiki in almost every objectively measurable way. Media is a mixed blessing; it would be very nice if more people in the Media threads helped edit their wiki articles and more wiki-siders participated in the threads.
edited 15th Feb '12 1:09:40 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"I can see where Zennistrad is coming from. Hell, that's the whole reason we cut Darth Wiki off from Main, we didn't want people to see it and the only reason it hasn't been nuked from orbit is the grandfather clause, and even THAT won't last if it gets too uppity.
With this "hiding of the forums" in a way that the average person would have no clue it exists, it seems like you are trying to cut off the "non-wiki" part of the forum from new people, until you can get away with nuking it all. Yes, I know that's not the reason and I know you aren't getting rid of the forums, but that's what some people see. I don't, but I can understand why they do.
"The fact that your food can be made into makeshift bombs alarms the Hell out of me, Scrye." - CharlatanWhile I don't particularly mind the change, it would have been nice to have some kind of warning beforehand. Doing it completely out of the blue (Yes, yes, "months of discussion," but how many people actually knew of this discussion?) is going to piss people off. You can't have not known this.
Just my $0.02
"It's so hard to be humble, knowing how great I am."People will see conspiracies behind every rock. Some actively foment them, such as by going onto Discussion pages and telling people to come here and bomb the forums with their complaints.
Our goal here is to increase participation in the business side of the forums. One way of doing this is by making them less intimidating with all the social parts.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"While I can understand the sentiment behind this. The complaints and the problems will stay the same. Only the people who care will bother to participate in the first place. This feels more like an attempt to force participation by greatly reducing the visibility of a part of the community. I can tell you what you will be doing. Alienating a portion of your user base.
Eddie: I can answer why you made a section that wasn't strictly for work on the forum. You wanted a section for a flourishing community. I recall you saying as much on multiple occasions as well as other mods and various other users who have been here for a while.
Who watches the watchmen?You're looking at it through the long lense. The key thing to do here is to ensure that the maximum number of people are visiting the site in some fashion. It doesn't actually matter why they are on the site. They could be editing articles, they could be just reading them, they could be editing the wiki, they could be participating on the forums, or just lurking. The fact is, it doesn't matter. What matters is that they are there.
It works like this. If a person is visiting this website, even if they are not actively participating, there is a good chance that they will link to here at some point. And people who are linked to here, well hey, they might decide to edit the wiki, and participate in the community. And that lurker who hasn't edited a day in his life, well, one day he might see a spelling error, or a trope that is missing, and decide to put it in. And after that, he might become a regular. Of course, this won't happen with everyone. But the fact of the matter is, the more people you have here, the more people ultimately are going to chip in. It's just a matter of statistics.
I know that I for one have visited this site for years before actually starting to edit it themselves, and I am sure that the same thing applies to others. So I feel that what is important here is to ensure that there is an easily accessible community, where people can talk even if they don't feel like editing. Because, hey, they might introduce someone to the site who decides that they want to.
I draws things. And I seem to be some sort of marine entity.My troping consists of going to pages I like, editing them, checking Ask The Troper if there's a vandal that needs repaired (not that we get to do that anymore... as much work as it was I kind of enjoyed racing to see who could fix the most pages
) and then going to the Video Game subforum and checking the cobbie thread.
Honestly, I think it'd increase participation in the left-side if it felt like anything discussed here mattered. This is just my Wiki Talk experience and some TRS, but it seems like a bunch of argument that results in either nothing happening or admin fiat, and any big important change is discussed behind closed doors purely by the staff, like this one.
Maybe that's just bad experience talking. Still, I don't think I'll be doing anything in the left side, except maybe stopping by Special Efforts once in a while to see if there's any large clean-ups that need help. Been meaning to do that anyhow.
These are just my thoughts... anyhow. My only request is a nice button at the top under the "About The Forums" "Tweets" etc row that says "More Forums".
That's true. I come here for the community and the people I like talking with, not just because I like the troping.
edited 15th Feb '12 1:28:42 PM by TheInferno
"The fact that your food can be made into makeshift bombs alarms the Hell out of me, Scrye." - Charlatan

I don't mind the change, but a more prominent link to the rest of the fora and an opt-in or opt-out option would be nice.
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