Lately, we've been having some trouble with pages in the Roleplay/ namespace, and much debate over how to handle said pages. Problems include:
- Auto-Erotic Troping
- Major problems with example context
- The difficulty cleaning up or verifying the content on said pages, often due to these roleplays being private or otherwise inaccessible
In this thread, we will discuss and clean-up these works so they conform to the rules of the wiki, and can be understood by any reader regardless of whether or not they take part in the roleplay.
Here are some useful sandboxes for our cleanup effort:
- How to Clean a Roleplay - a sandbox guide to determining availability of, locating, and cleaning up pages to roleplays.
- Roleplay Cleanup Thread is used for sorting pages after we examine them, whether they've been cleaned, cut, or shelved, and anything in-between.
- Roleplay Cleanup Thread Indexing is used after a cleaned and verified page has been added to the first sandbox. We try to add these pages to our indexes, with the plan to create actual indexes later on.
Edited by Tabs on Mar 15th 2022 at 11:27:21 AM
Yeah, all true, but I think these indexes are good for now.
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Great work!
Looking at this list, though, I believe that there are probably not enough crossover roleplays to justify splitting them into a separate index from the rest of the fandom ones. I think that making "crossover" into a subsection of the fandom roleplay index (either above or below the list of normal roleplays alphabetically sorted by fandom) would be the best approach.
And an ongoing roleplay becoming either finished or abandoned is definitely a risk, but I think we can live with it. The index is meant to help people looking for forum roleplays they can still take part in, and it'll do just that the majority of the time. If we make it clear in the description that any work that seems to be either completed or abandoned should be moved off this index and into the two corresponding ones, it should settle the issue for any visitor to the index who stumbled upon an outdated entry.
Now, another thought: Play-by-Post Games index is separated into a sub-section for roleplays hosted on these very forums, and the offsite ones, which is quite reasonable. In fact, I now think it would be equally reasonable to make the "status" indexes (abandoned, ongoing, completed) divided in a similar manner.
The Fandom Roleplay index would be a nightmare to divide like this, however (first you alphabetically list all the relevant fandoms, and then you do the same thing once again), and so it would be a lot easier to just write "(hosted on TVTropes)" to the side of each such entry. The Original and Quest roleplay indexes would not have this problem, but there may not be enough TVT-hosted works of either kind to justify a divided index.
Edited by NTC3 on Aug 3rd 2019 at 5:20:44 AM
The main reason I brought up the Crossover index as a possibility is that, over on our RP subfora, the prevalence of Crossover RP's is something of a meme. Obviously this doesn't correlate exactly to how much of these RP's get a page made, nor whether this reputation extends to off-site, but I still thought it was notable.
I think that this, and the below issue:
require a larger sample size before we can take definitive action on whether to include the split. Our current sample is about 36/1459 - less than 3% of the total amount of Roleplay/ pages.
I can get behind this.
This, however, might end up looking clunky in practise- again, we're working with a small sample size right now and we don't know how large these index pages will end up being.
For now, I've added a divide between TVT RP's and off-site RP's to the folders and put them over in the sandbox (also included East Academy in them, thanks lalalei!).
they/them || "Forgive me, regent of queer amphibians" - Lt.BGobI commented out several ZCE's on Annals Of Beacon. Its character page should probably be deleted because it was blanked out years ago.
While doing some "hit the 'Random Media' button, hit Shift+5 a lot" style ZCE cleanup, I stumbled on Roleplay.Ides Of Iron. Pretty typical roleplay page: lots of ZC Es, lots of shoehorning / misuse, lots of general examples, etc. The only edits since 2013 appear to be folks engaged in cleanup efforts and the link to the roleplay site is broken.
I've commented-out the ZCEs and deleted some of the more egregious shoehorning, which leaves it pretty barren. I'd be fine cutlisting it personally.
I agree with getting rid of Annals Of Beacon's character page, so I've sent it to the Cut List.
I cleaned up Yu-Gi-Oh! East Academy and its character page. I also cleaned up the rest of the Chronicles of the Gods related pages and their character pages. Academy of Merlin didn't need a lot of work but I fixed a couple of ZCE's and indentation issues; unless something else comes up, then I'll probably go over its character page tomorrow.
they/them || "Forgive me, regent of queer amphibians" - Lt.BGobRan into an odd problem- we have Characters.Play By Post Games, which is the index for PBP Roleplays (though at a glance, it seems it's being used more as a catch-all for any type of roleplay). However, there's also CharacterSheets.Roleplay, which is in the wrong namespace.
CharacterSheets.Roleplay needs to go, but there's a couple of options here- we could migrate all its contents over to Characters.Play By Post Games, but that doesn't fix the problem of PBP being used as a catch-all. We could instead cut both and move all content to Characters.Roleplay. Alternatively, we could sift through PBP and sort the character page indexes along the same axis as the main roleplay page indexes that we're proposing- Fandom Roleplays, Quest Roleplays, etc.
Thoughts?
they/them || "Forgive me, regent of queer amphibians" - Lt.BGob
I'd personally prefer cutting and moving to Characters.Roleplay, if only because the other option is more time consuming.
Really though, either way works.
Working on: Author Appeal | Sandbox | Troper WallAnyway, as per ATT
, we have a new issue: Roleplay.Rise, which is in DarthWiki for no reason.
The page was fully created by lakingsif.
Besides the wrong space, it's got a lot of example indentation issues.
My guess is that it was moved from a regular page to Darth Wiki, for no known reason. It should be noted the tropes were put on in a giant edit overall. So that's likely the reason. Why is the question.
Shadow?I think I can see the reason why; the two links on the page that purportedly go to the roleplay and its sequel give a 'you don't have permission to view this page', i.e. the RP is locked behind subscription. I can get onto the forum itself, and there's a couple of threads related to Rise, but I can't seem to find the roleplay itself anywhere that's available to a non-member.
they/them || "Forgive me, regent of queer amphibians" - Lt.BGobI would like to respond to the posts above, but I just spotted something more urgent: Roleplay.Cardians Research And Development just got cutlisted for "having less than three tropes". The thing is, it also has a pretty decent Characters.Cardians Research And Development page, which even has some images, and definitely possesses more than three tropes.
I would normally be in favour of moving the character tropes to the main page (and in fact, I just moved two to prevent premature cutting until we discuss this in depth), but there are two further complications. The first is that the page does not appear to have a link that would back anything written there up. The second is that it is apparently a minor part of a whole Cardian universe of roleplays, with around a dozen of pages on here, which generally don't seem to be big on links as well.
I think that ultimately the best approach would be to merge all the spin-off pages into that main Cardians, since none of them have more than a dozen tropes or so anyway, and they take up disproportionate space compared to the actual outside interest. We may still have to contact the original creators to get substantiating links, though. (Unless we are to consider the "hub" DeviantArt link on the current "hub" page to be good enough.)
Edited by NTC3 on Aug 4th 2019 at 2:01:04 AM
In other news, I'm going to start on some cleanup, but I'mma start in the B's, Because, why not?
I could also agree with merging most of the pages back onto the main page. Cardians Tokyo, Cardians Rural, and Cardians SEA Pacific are the only pages that I would say are large enough to justify a split.
However, looking through the deviantart link, the roleplays all appear to be pen-and-paper tabletop RPG's that are being hosted on Discord, i.e. not publicly available. We could contact the page editors, if any of them are still around, but for the moment it seems like the whole RP might have to be moved to Unpublished.
they/them || "Forgive me, regent of queer amphibians" - Lt.BGob
Well, many of the edits are from this year, so there's little risk of the organizers not replying to our PMs.
Given that many of them are invested enough to draw a whole lot of character pictures (even on pages that have no real tropes, like Characters.Cardians Frostbite here), they should be able to produce a written recap of at least a few of their sprawling epics on their DV or some blog/wiki to authenticate the work in a reasonable amount of time if we tell them what the alternatives are. If they fail to do so in a couple of weeks, I would be fine with moving the merged page and largest spin-offs to Unpublished.
In the meantime, I made a request to hold off on cutting things related to this universe too early. Roleplay.Cardians Chernobyl and Characters.Cardians Chernobyl are the only cutlisted pages I would be glad to see gone immediately.
Maybe "challenge" the cut on the discussion page, then. The Mods'll see it and understand we have a plan in mind.
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Bs section of the Play-by-Post Games index, I presume? Are you planning to start with TVT-hosted section, off-site one or go for both?
As for me, I suppose I now have to take part in steering through the Cardians thing, and I also need to move the misplaced "fanfics" I asked about earlier to their correct namespace. Once that's done, I'll focus on the off-site sci-fi roleplays.
Well, I sent a PM, but I guess posting a similar message on these discussion pages won't take too long.
Edited by NTC3 on Aug 4th 2019 at 2:10:30 AM
Actually, I'm just doing the "B" section of the Roleplay namespace index
and taking what I get. I'm in the middle of it now, big post-cleanup report being typed in another tab XD
Oh, speaking of wrong namespaces: I cleaned up VideoGame.Action Chatroom and then did some researching on it. First, it was moved from Main/ to VideoGame/ back in 2014 by Septimus, one of the mods. I'm guessing he just got the wrong impression of what type of media it was, or was given wrong information.
Secondly, all of the RP's listed are not publicly available; the RP's are set up in a forum thread and then moved to a live chatroom for the actual content. I tried to access one and it was blank; if there was any sort of archiving feature, then I didn't see it. Moreover, the page's main (only?) editor hasn't been around since '16, so it's probably getting moved over to Unpublished.
they/them || "Forgive me, regent of queer amphibians" - Lt.BGob- Back And Behind The Woods: Decent main page and worse-but-manageable character page. Character page is unindexed, but since we've not fully nailed down how to deal with these indexes, I'll hold off for now. Main issue is that the links take me to a page with an error message, so I'm not sure the work is accessible.
- Bad Magic: No existing link to the work, and Google turned up nothing. It was last edited in April, so I'll invite the editor, ~jennalia, to chat. Otherwise, basic cleanup on the main page, it does have two large character pages that need cleaning that I'll muster up the energy to do later if nobody snakes it from me.
- Batter Up!: Basic clean-up and nothing more required. It does need an index though, the only one it has is Troper Works.
- Battle Action Harem Highschool Side Character Quest: Basic clean-up completed, has a YMMV page of only ZCEs, so cutlisted that page.
- Battle Despair: Unindexed page with no link to the roleplay; Google helps not at all; page untouched since 2014. Character page is more ZCEs than not, so I moved the contextual examples to the main page and cutlisted the character page.
Out of time to do cleanup, but yeah. I also updated the sandbox.
Working on: Author Appeal | Sandbox | Troper Wall
Nice work! I'll see if the Wayback Machine works on that first roleplay tomorrow.
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Yeah, sounds like Action Chatroom really does belong on DarthWiki.
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My PM worked, and all the cut requests on these pages have been declined. I also invited the troper who had originally cutlisted them to this thread, so that we can coordinate efforts better in the future.
Edited by NTC3 on Aug 4th 2019 at 2:31:48 AM

I've gotten word back from one of the editors on Advance Wars Eternal War; they confirmed that the RP was deleted as part of a site wipe and is now unavailable, so the page either has to be sent to Unpublished or cut.
Secondly, I just mopped up the last of the Doubt Academy character pages
Also, I've went through the list of roleplays that we've cleaned up thus far and categorised them under the indexes that we've suggested. If these look alright to you guys, then I can put them on the sandbox too.
To expand on my earlier thought, it can be difficult to discern whether a roleplay has been abandoned vs. when it's been finished, especially since many roleplays aren't really created with a particular ending point in mind. On top of that, the Roleplay/ namespace isn't updated frequently, so pages that are currently ongoing could easily slip into abandoned without anyone noticing, especially once the list starts expanding.
Edited by whizzerd on Aug 3rd 2019 at 12:46:03 PM
they/them || "Forgive me, regent of queer amphibians" - Lt.BGob