Greetings Tropers,
TV Tropes has encountered a storage/memory issue and we need to start cutting some old threads in Yack Fest.
We anticipate cutting those threads in Yack Fest that have not had any activity since December 31, 2011.
If there is a thread in Yack Fest prior to that date that you would like to preserve please let us know via a post in this thread.
Please note that bumping a thread in Yack Fest to preserve it won't work and is irritating.
If you want to save something for yourself, archive it for yourself.
If you believe the thread is significant please let us know in this thread. Please understand that we can't save everything, so choose carefully.
edited 28th Apr '13 10:03:49 PM by Madrugada
Let's see aside from YF, this is what I think would be a good list of clearing priorities, going from biggest to smallest (doesn't have to be all these listed of course):
IJAM (>20 pages of it fit past the threshold) would be first, Forum Games, OTC (easily the most egregious case, perhaps even more so than any Just For Fun subforums), A couple Media subforums (especially Video Games), other "Real-ish" subforums, Role-Playing signups (RPs not so egregious compared to other subforums), everything else (especially since some don't have that many pages) that's not workshops or morgues (both of which not going anywhere).
edited 29th Apr '13 11:45:27 AM by EarlOfSandvich
I now go by Graf von Tirol.So, is anybody going to make an archive of the stuff before it's deleted?
If you want any of my avatars, just Pm me I'd truly appreciate any avatar of a reptile sleeping in a Nice Hat Read Elmer Kelton booksWell yeah, some people already went to make their personalised archives of stuff they treasure, plus there's submitting them to wayback machine idea upthread.
Oh also, I think it'd be better to make a bigger announcement about this thread. Perhaps make a thread in YF itself? (thread locked with just the announcement and link here, pinned for the time being?)
Just because the RP Forums are different doesn't mean it is more useful to delete from there than anywhere else. What TV Tropes has is a memory issue, which means that we've got to free up memory. Save for your initial point, I could list the same points for other forums. OTC and IJAM don't really add to TV Tropes mission statement any more than the RP forums do since they are neither talking about media specifically (which would be the domain of the various media subsections) nor involved with the actual running of the site itself. Few topics in general are really going to be revived after a year and a half and even if there was a retread of material, it would likely be better to have a new topic anyway in most cases. However, I can actually mention a good reason why topics in the RP subforums would be revived and why pruning it may be a little more complicated than other forum sections.
As you've mentioned, there are three RP subforums... the RP subforum, the RP Discussion, and the RP signups... Because each RP has one topic in each section, the mods need to be sure that they aren't deleting only parts of an active RP. By its very nature as a signup forum, the topics in the RP Signups are going to be dead most of the time since it's for just posting signups and getting approval to enter. A very active RP could have a very dead RP signup because no new people are entering it.
Now, I'm not asking that you avoid cleaning out the RP Forums, since even I'll admit that it needs some cleaning, but if it must be done, I feel it should be done with caution and respect to the various RPs within. They might be the most prolific posters on the board and make little edits to the tropes themselves, but an RP is really just a collaborative writing session with a few rules and regulations to keep it somewhat controlled. The rest of the forums might be more active in creating and editing tropes, but the RPers are the ones actually writing stories and putting those tropes into practice. Sometimes, I feel people who don't visit the RP subforums miss that.
Either way, I've said my speech, and would be glad to help you in finding which inactive RPs to purge should the purging of Yack Fest prove ineffective. We over at the RP subforums do care about the rest of the site, we just enjoy writing stories and using tropes rather than editing the site and creating them.
edited 29th Apr '13 1:34:47 PM by GameGuruGG
Wizard Needs Food BadlyRP writes pages, yes, but in the grand sceme of things that doesn't matter much. Only enough to make it a lesser priority than Yack Fest, I'd imagine.
edited 29th Apr '13 1:35:06 PM by SeptimusHeap
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard FeynmanOur data has repeatedly shown correspondence between frequent wiki editors and OTC posters, meaning that OTC is more useful in keeping the crowd that edits the wiki around.
But aside from that, we are not planning to purge anything but Yack Fest at the moment.
edited 29th Apr '13 1:49:53 PM by lu127
"If you aren't him, then you apparently got your brain from the same discount retailer, so..." - Fighteer

We might kill some article histories; apparently those things eat up a whole lot more space than you'd expect.
Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.