TV Tropes 2.0: Database level redesign (Not in active development yet)

I mean, I wasn't around back then. Fighteer and the others had always presented it as something they were discussing in-depth, but because nobody was even working on it yet it became just an "if".

I remember there being some unofficial prototype work a few months ago. I think Amonimus was doing it?

Fighteer and the other mods from that time have the concept and plan for everything but they were always that everything was "pie in the sky" as Fighteer put it earlier in the thread.

I believe the devs described 2.0 as though it was a thing that was going to, or at least potentially could, happen as a result of the Kickstarter because it was thought that if they raised enough and could get enough work in, they could actually make the transition, and they might have if the established code base didn't turn out to be such a mess that they spent most of the Kickstarter money and most of their dev energy just getting it to the point where it is now. Many of the ideas behind 2.0 were already being discussed during the Fast Eddie era, and the impression I get reading Fighteer's comments on the first page of this thread was that the mods basically went to the new owners and said "hey, here's what we'd like the wiki to be going forward" and the Kickstarter was launched in hopes of getting to that point but with no promises beyond taking incremental steps in that direction, even if it may not have come across that way to the user base.

Edited by MorganWick on Feb 10th 2023 at 1:19:21 AM

I think that a good way to help the progress in 2.0 might be to (if possible) put the code on a code sharing site so that people could suggest fixes to improve it.

Sure, but I don't know if the current owners are up for that.

Well they should be. Also, there are lots of free things available for open source projects to help make the code better.

Sure, but the staff has always denied such access. That's just the way it is.

The owners seem to be content just owning the site and getting some revenue stream from it, without too much interest in actually developing the site too much.

It's a corporate thing. "If it ain't broken, don't fix it. And changing that much will cost heavy development money and not like 2.0 will attract more readership".

From my short experience as a pro web dev, every difference requires testing an exam how does it benefit the service.

Also, we only have like one developer who's busy with another project.

I can only recommend learning to web-code (XAMPP phpmyadmin or analogues are great for creating sites on local computer) and then pitch the design to the company, they will likely agree if they don't have to research how the wikipages would be structured.

I mean, I understand why, it's just a shame it is the way it is.

Maybe they should do another Kickstarter, lol.

Moving to an open source repository could just be helpful to improve the code and not just moving forward on 2.0.

I have created a demo app that implements some of these features. You can check it out here: github.

Let me know what you think and if I should implement any additional features.

~Kory, Say, would you be able to share some website's technical details like frameworks, plugins and database service, or is it a secret?

It's at least apparent the site is primarily on PHP and Bundle.JS (personally, a lot of JS functions being visible in browser's inspection tool instead of being pushed to backend is odd and may be a vulnerability)

For educational purposes. There have been "probably never" suggestions because they rely on technical redesign and it could be helpful to learn a bit about the site's tech and structure.

I understand if anything not visible is private.

Tv tropes is built with PHP, JS and SQL.

The database is a mess of 9 different ones, some have just a dozen tables while others like the trope database has around 100. Many tables have unknown uses, if any. So out of paranoia nothing gets deleted.

What this company wants to do is eventually re-write all of T Vtropes and just transfer over whatever tables are actually needed while keeping all the current functionality. Which will most likely fall to me as my job once we finally cross that bridge. but they won’t even start without a complete site map of all the functionality explained for each page.

The most important part would be mapping all of the current functionality of T Vtropes in words. Which you made a good effort towards already Amonimus. But we don’t need the get parameters, we just need a link to the page the user is seeing and then what the page functionality does and what it should do. If we can fully map-out tropes functionality like this then this idea of 2.0 can actually become a reality. You could be the person who made 2.0 happen. I don’t have any free time to spend on this otherwise I would, but if you and some other veteran tropers were to fully map-out tropes then I could pitch the idea of actually doing it sometime soon after that.

Edited by kory on Jul 24th 2023 at 2:56:48 AM