Let's Improve the TLP

Troll drafts benefit no one except the one trolling. That is NEVER OK, for reasons that should be obvious.

As for troll drafts, a TLP option to holler the mods would help. If you check the recent discards list, you'll note that they do have the ability to discard drafts before the three-day wait.

I think there should be a 15 minute waiting period between clicking the "Launch" button and the trope becoming visible to everyone so a mod or TLP engineer can review and abort the launch if necessary.

What if there was a character minimum on TLP? I think 500 characters is a fair amount to expect someone to put into their draft. I don't think we should ever have a page shorter than that. If your draft is shorter than that, it would be automatically blocked.

(reading the edit banned thread) Now y'all have got me thinking of these lyrics from Pit of Vipers:

Kinda funny how so many are suddenly up in arms over a so-called "troll draft" and are demanding changes to the TLP, when the actual problem was that a bunch of people, many of whom are regulars who know better, decided to act like total trollin' yahoos in that thread.

I'm not saying the TLP doesn't need to be fixed in many ways, but this sudden influx looks a lot like people farted and are trying to blame it on the occasionally mischievous dog. :P

Improvement starts with oneself, is all I'm sayin'.

Edited by HeavyMetalHermitCrab on Sep 8th 2020 at 9:13:52 AM

I like the character minimum idea. As for the waiting period for a mod or engineer to review it, I'm a little less sure on. A lot of these tropes do get proposed, and while I don't know the exact number of mods/engineers who deal with TL Ps, 15 minutes probably isn't a sufficent amount of time for one of them to notice a draft.

Ugh... What an absolute mess. As much that I don't like how it ended up getting all major players of this debacle suspended, I think Warjay is right when they said that "that draft" was the straw that broke the camel's back in regards to how poorly maintained TLP is, and is in dire need of an overhaul.

Sigh... It's all my fault.

Edited by DivineFlame100 on Sep 8th 2020 at 9:21:48 AM

500 might be a tad too high; I used this thing to see how many characters a typical "one sentence three with-context examples" super-rough early draft might have and it came out to 424.

Edited by wingedcatgirl on Sep 8th 2020 at 9:15:52 AM

Nah man, it's all of our fault. I think we all just assumed that since everybody else was doing it, including reputable TLP members, it wouldn't get us in trouble. That's clearly not how it works around here. I guess all the issues just drove us mad and we just desperately wanted to have some fun, even if it was a pretty stupid idea and we could have just used a forum game to muck around.

What about 300 or 400 as a character minimum? That sounds like it covers a short-but-decent description and three examples with context.

Edited by mightymewtron on Sep 8th 2020 at 12:24:50 PM

I'd make the requirement 300 chars. Seems like a reasonable barrier.

What I believe we absolutely need is some info on TLP Guidelines on how to deal with troll drafts. That's what I'll post in the Outdated Pages thread.

And if a draft is deemed Up for Grabs by a previous host, there should be some sort of permission/signup system to adopt the draft so a new host can get holding privileges.

how would this signup system work? would it be a "first come first serve" thing? would the person need to meet certain requirements such as "worked on the draft within the past 48 hours" or something?

Posted on Outdated Pages.

I think the 48-hour rule would be sufficient.

Edited by ccorb on Sep 8th 2020 at 12:30:55 PM

What I'm confused on is why this happened here and not on Mario Pissing.

My guess was that once was enough, and the second was really got out of hand.

Probably because Mario Pissing was so new that it just happened naturally while this was a calculated attempt to overtake its record just for the sake of it. It's like a TV Tropes Franchise Original Sin thing, I guess.

If that's the case than the reaction still seems a bit drastic to me.

Also, while this may seem a bit harsh coming from me, but I believe new accounts should be barred from TLP until they have spent at least 1 year in the site as a whole to get used to editing. And then once they're qualified and if they're interested, they can sign up for permission to enter TLP by doing a little test of creating drafts that'll get evaluated by the mods. This should decrease the amount of inexperienced users creating stub drafts as well as problematic troll drafts like "Gay".

Wait, was "Gay" a troll all along and not just a bad draft? I just got back on the site and I'm still piecing together what happened.

Edited by VidExGuy on Sep 8th 2020 at 9:38:52 AM

I'm going with 'Troll' in the dungeon

A year seems a bit extreme. Would six months also suffice?

Anything that would require the mods to personally evaluate every X (for any value of X) is a no-go, I think.

As for whether Gay was a troll or a legit bad draft, having spoken with the troper who created it over the issue that led to its creation, I... have to admit I'm not entirely sure; they seemed to be sincere about the issue itself, but at the same time going out of their way to miss some basic wiki etiquette like "communicate with people instead of edit warring".

Edited by wingedcatgirl on Sep 8th 2020 at 9:42:53 AM

Believe me HMHC, we know that the blame is on us. However, it can't be ignored the broken sysyem allowed this to happen. It allowed us to abandon our good judgement and act like dicks.

While we need to improve as a group and start taking things more seriously, system improvements would prevent this from happening for a 3rd time.

Never assume any draft is a troll unless it’s incredibly, 200% obvious. This one wasn’t.