Content Policy Change

I agree.

Also, I think he should have at least released some kind of statement, or apologize for making this harder than it has to be.

edited 16th Apr '12 3:51:06 AM by condottiera

More pluck than an Alabama banjo festival

Also, there's another problem. Since cut pages didn't wind up on the Permanent Red Link Club page, nobody who just happened to click on it had any idea why it was blocked. If we are going to lock work pages temporarily, we ought to at least post why to stop the panic.

More pluck than an Alabama banjo festival

I have to say that this is going way too far. "It might be bad stuff, so we're going to shoot it now and leave it in limbo until the Council gets around to fixing it" is, to me, a sign that the place has gone back into crisis mode.

If this isn't about ad money, why are we treating it like an emergency situation?

I also want to know about the ad policy and how our posts effect adsense exactly. I asked some people about it before, and nobody answered.

edited 16th Apr '12 4:42:03 AM by condottiera

More pluck than an Alabama banjo festival

The Second Google Incident.

Essentially, someone posted the fact that we had a page on Naughty Tentacles to Google, and Google responded by pulling the plug because the site is not safe for Grandma Prudie.

That's the only connection ad money had to this, and has since become a dead issue.

edited 16th Apr '12 5:06:39 AM by Ramidel

It's not the end of the world because the Lolita page got removed

It is not the end of the world because any one page gets removed. It is the end of the credibiltiy and usefulness of this wiki if multiple works get removed based upon false assumptions about the content of the work, and are not restored shortly after the mistake has been pointed out by numerous people.

Basically we don't want this to become a place where any work not well known to the administration is at risk of being permently banned because of misrepresenation and misunderstanding.

Hopefully the page will return, however until an admin says it will return, nothing is certain.

That's it, too. It's not the missing page itself, it's what it represents. Today Lolita, tomorrow the world.

More pluck than an Alabama banjo festival

This

Too extreme...

Exactly.

What's good for the goose is good for the gander: Don't Panic, Mods

Right now, their actions (cutting pages without proof) are speaking louder than their words. Especially considering that most people don't hear their words because there's no announcement.

These porn pages have been here for months, if not years. A few extra days to get your policies sorted out and actually fact check aren't going to kill anyone. All of this cutting without looking (Lolita being only the biggest example) is what is Causing much of this panic and misunderstanding in the first place.

edited 16th Apr '12 5:55:03 AM by st753m

I don't know, Google pretty much did a complete 180 on what they previously told Eddie and haven't even given him the courtsey of saying why. It's kinda vital that they get the ad revenue pumping back in quickly, so better to go overboard and then just scale back once Google has decided what their own policy is.

Better to have some people panic in the short term then taking it slow and Google deciding not to run ads on the site anymore.

@Best Of: That's good to hear, but I have a few things to note...

By the same principle, and given his history of very controversial unilateral admin fiat-based decisions, it's all too possible that he can simply veto the council's decision to restore a cut page even if they are unanimous in their decision, if he is convinced that they're wrong in their judgment.

Glaring problem: Several of the changes are, as is clear from this thread's OP and previous statements by the parties in question, based on the admins' personal preferences/biases and/or what they percieve as a potential risks to the site's reputation rather than any actual threat to TV Tropes' survival or blatant conflict with the site's mission — and, at times, some of said changes actually clash with the site's stated mission. I would be surprised if people who oppose such things didn't act paranoid about the admins going too far with that approach.

Obviously a strict definition is out; what we do need and currently lack, however, is a general definition that the council and the greater troper community's more... reasonable section (hopefully represented by the people posting here).... can agree upon as a fair, flexible and non-biased standard that can adapt to the variability and subjectivity inherent in much of fiction.

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@Belian: "Perversion" flag? Do you mean the "flag a work for the Council to review" thing that he mentioned recently?

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@thatguythere 47: The only thing that apparently threatened the wiki's existence was Naughty Tentacles; the rest of the cuts and such stuff are all about Eddie taking a firm, personal moral/ethical stand on certain matters, whether we like it or not. Fortunately enough, he seems to be flexible enough to refrain from simply unilaterally deciding on the details of the new rules/standards and instead is leaving it to a council of generally competent/reliable tropers to do so.

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@st753m: The fanfic recs are not lost. They've been locked for an upcoming comprehensive review of violations once the Council starts its work.

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@Ramidel: And as have been noted several times, we have no idea why they took offense with that one or what they want us to do. And unfortunately, none of the mods or Eddie are being forthcoming on what has been done on that front.

edited 16th Apr '12 6:07:51 AM by MarqFJA

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

THIS IS NOT ABOUT GOOGLE. This is about FE finding out we had hundreds of hentai pages and wanting them gone. IT may have been precipitated by Google but this isn't about ad revenue any more.

edited 16th Apr '12 6:08:26 AM by TheOneWhoTropes

Keeper of The Celestial Flame

That is exactly what I meant. If you are asking about it in that way, seems I made it Exactly What It Says on the Tin-enough. As for the rest... here is something I've worked on for at least the last 30 min. See if this cleans up any of the misunderstanding/panic.

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"A few extra days to get your policies sorted out and actually fact check aren't going to kill anyone."

This is one point I can agree with.

However, it is simply not happening. And I can't blame Eddie for his reaction. Here is what happened to the best of my knowledge:

1. Eddie is running around doing his wiki work.
2. He gets a report/warning of some kind about a specific page that he A) did not know about and B)is mostly related henti
3. He does some looking around to see what other pages he did not know about and finds some of the... more unsavory pages that have been created.
4. A LOT of these pages are related to the weird stuff that comes out of Japan, though some of it is from other places.
5. He decides that he is not going tho have it. On top of that, he is personally offended that his site (and don't you believe for a second that there is a singe person on the site who has put more work into it then him) has been hosting this stuff for so long.
6. He comes to the conclusion that the best way to handle the situation, from a practical/personal standpoint, it to wipe it all and slowly let back in the content that is OK instead of letting it sit around and continue to accumulate.
7. In the process of his initial wipe of trope Indexes that had a higher proportions of "unsavory material" than most, he caught a number of tropes/works that should be kept in at least some form.

That basically brings us to today. Now we have:

• People adding stuff to the cutlist that may-or-may-not fall under the "will not have on this site" criteria
• Eddie and the cutmasters looking at the pages to see if they should be cut.
• If there is a reasonable possibility that they should be, they are (continuing Eddie's original policy)
• A council is being formed that will have the power to reverse those decisions

The part of this that people are having the most trouble with is #6 in the top list. And I see both sides of the issue: the general trope populous is not going to be happy about Eddie making unilateral decisions while Eddie feels he is doing what should have been done long ago (if he had really known about it). The problem is, Eddie has the power to do what he wants no matter how the rest of us complain. So, from a practical stand point...

tldr: What is the point of arguing about the current situation and not working on making the future decisions more informed/better?

Yu hav nat sein bod speeling unntil know. (cacke four undersandig tis)the cake is a lie!

You're forgetting the other major problem: Disputing the exact boundaries and degree of flexibility (or lack thereof) of the standards that he's using to make "No, we will not have an article on this" judgments.

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

Which is going to be the Council's prerogative/job. Though I expect we will see more "general guidelines" than exact rules. If we do end up with exact rules, it will be through their "case law" and not from the start.

Yu hav nat sein bod speeling unntil know. (cacke four undersandig tis)the cake is a lie!

"working on making the future decisions more informed/better"

Okay, Belian. How do we do that? I don't know what I can do from my end of the internet besides bitch and whine.

edited 16th Apr '12 6:31:06 AM by AlsoSprachOdin

Unfortunately, that is another question that people don't like the answer to. It boils down to "working out how the council will do its work" and "wait for the council to be formed" instead of "fixing/bringing back the pages that were taken away."

Though you could add your thoughts on specific works (without arguing about those works—that is the council's job) in the petition thread.

EDIT:Hopefully that is enough for now. I need to get some other work done and would like some time for my own hobbies.

edited 16th Apr '12 6:36:17 AM by Belian

Yu hav nat sein bod speeling unntil know. (cacke four undersandig tis)the cake is a lie!

That's what I hope for. That said, see my longer post above about fears that Eddie might pull admin fiat to veto council decision when he's not convinced of its correctness, which would undermine the Council's authority.

edited 16th Apr '12 6:35:24 AM by MarqFJA

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

Guess I have one more thing to say:

Eddie himself has said (somewhere on the previous pages) that he will abide by their decisions. What else can you ask for? As he is the owner and not elected, it is not like we can create a complete "checks-and-balances" system (like how the Executive, Judicial, and Congregational branches of the US government are supposed to work).

Yu hav nat sein bod speeling unntil know. (cacke four undersandig tis)the cake is a lie!

Find that, please. It's the exact opposite of the impression I'm getting.

ETA: I'm a little concerned about the distinction drawn between porn and "pedoshit." If the latter is just child pornography, it would be subsumed under porn. Now, I have a vague idea what constitutes "pornography," but apparently there's "pedoshit" that wouldn't fall afoul of the "no porn" rule if all the characters were adults? What are we talking about, here, roughly?

edited 16th Apr '12 6:49:51 AM by HersheleOstropoler

The child is father to the man —Oedipus

"without arguing about those works—that is the council's job"

Well Shit.

They're never getting through that mess. Even if they just list one work after another and either say "aye" or "nay" and go to the next, it'll take far more time than anyone has patience for without getting paid.

edited 16th Apr '12 6:45:42 AM by AlsoSprachOdin

@Belian - Your 1-7 are pretty comprehensive and from what I've seen in this situation, more or less accurate.

@Hershele - see here.

edited 16th Apr '12 6:48:07 AM by Martello

"Did anybody invent this stuff on purpose?" - Phillip Marlowe on tequila, Finger Man by Raymond Chandler.

I agree that all the cutting is creating a potential backlog of work for the council from the get-go, something that probably is not the best idea. Especially if it's only five or seven people or such on the thing.

Expergiscēre cras, medior quam hodie. (Awaken tomorrow, better than today.)

<looks at link> Well, that's relieving.

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

*5 and ninjaed: Back on page 43. That "search for posts by troper" feature is quite useful at times...

*4: Think about the mods and Eddie himself. People are quite willing to spend that sort of time on things they care about.

And we will be hoping that people only refer the works that will get put back and not everything.

Speaking of... one thing we can debate is how they come up with the order that they look at the works/pages.

edited 16th Apr '12 6:51:41 AM by Belian

Yu hav nat sein bod speeling unntil know. (cacke four undersandig tis)the cake is a lie!