TLP Community Issues

This thread's purpose is to discuss issues within the TLP community and site culture as well as propose solutions to said issues.

Please do not use this thread to report or call out specific users or TLP drafts on this thread. You can make a Ask The Tropers query on the issue, holler, or PM a mod (the first of the three being preferable).

I've been discussing with Warjay on DMs over the problematic issues of the TLP community as a whole, and I've started noticing this pattern from this draft. Based on the earlier Mario Pissing and Gay incidents, as well as observing the behavior of regulars in general, here are some issues I need to address.

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• The community is too bomb-happy. By that, I mean, when a stub draft is proposed, users are way to quick to drop the bombs the moment it's available, and this creates a feedback loop where other users are encouraged to drop bombs as well. It gets to the point where the purpose of dropping bombs to offset hats is lost, and people care more about raising the bomb count than anything else.
• The community is unwilling to teach inexperienced sponsors. All too often, I've seen regulars not even trying to teach sponsors the steps needed to improve, and instead, will just give blunt statements that do nothing to help at all. (Ex: "No description! No examples! Bombing for lack of effort!")
• The overall rudeness of regulars. From my observations, most of the regulars are very prone to delving into snarky and sarcastic comments that condemn sponsors, and this is only creating an unwelcoming, toxic environment.

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This needs to be fixed because, from the looks of it, those who were not banned from the 5T incident or didn't participate at all didn't get the memo that this type of mentality is very toxic and is what leads to incidents like that in the first place.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Nov 30th 2023 at 9:20:46 AM

Lol, I guess you made this after all.

What bugs me the most tonight is the fact that people don't seem to understand that the excessive bombing was also a problem. It wasn't just the meme-spam, it was the sheer amount of bombs for no other reason than just to bomb things. And that happened again tonight, albeit on a lesser scale...so far. Time will tell if we get a relapse. I pray we don't (and I also, selfishly, hope that I wouldn't get caught up in another mass-banning if one does occur, considering my entire purpose on that draft is to try and get people to be reasonable, instead of bomb-happy).

A draft only needs that many bombs if there's an equal amount of unwarranted hats. The amount of bombs never needs to exceed five more than the amount of hats, and excessively bombing something doomed to be nuked anyway makes no sense at all.

Just tell people to use bombs sparingly. Maybe the OP is new and doesn't know how to use TLP, so you should help them write a description, tell them to copy and paste suggestions through the comments, etc.

I've been asking it all night. Nobody will listen to me.

...TBH though? There's more drive-by voters than there are actual contributers. I never see 19 people posting on the TLP at the same time, but yet 19 bombs mysteriously appeared? I think there's the normal community of people who, you know, actually care and work hard and try to follow the rules even if we slip sometimes, and then the people who just lurk and toss bombs and stuff without ever reading the comment section.

I mean, it's either that or we have a major sockpuppet infestation.

Edited by WarJay77 on Oct 5th 2020 at 10:17:59 AM

The good thing is the TLP community has been kinder since that incident. Low-effort drafts have come and gone, and I'm seeing much fewer snarky comments. Point-and-laugh behavior can be fun, I know, but if we want to act as an authority to new tropers on how to act productively on the wiki, it's extremely counterproductive to just snark at them and discourage them from reworking an idea - and if the idea is unworkable, then what's the point in bumping it with snarky comments and taking attention from drafts that actually could use some real help?

I know why people leave snarky comments, because I did it for months too when I first learned how TLP worked and wanted to act high-and-mighty, linking to Administrivia pages that I never read and such. It is frustrating, though, especially considering how I have several stagnant drafts that I've had to embarrassingly bump for any attention because I have a decent amount of examples, but am struggling with the scope, definition, or something else that requires more thought when crafting a trope.

Edited by mightymewtron on Oct 5th 2020 at 10:23:42 AM

Because people on the TLP are allergic to actually giving serious help when it's needed. I'm not joking and I've talked about this before. Drafts that are in need of a lot of feedback from people get ignored in favor of stub-drafts or ones that are easy to give comments on.

Real, genuine feedback is a rare beast. People don't like to give it very often and will instead direct their attention at the more fun activity of snarking and example-writing. I can't tell you how many drafts of mine have died because it was too complex for me to do alone, but nobody in the community would offer any help on it.

Edited by WarJay77 on Oct 5th 2020 at 10:21:32 AM

Well, TLP as a whole is in dire need of a lot of changes. There are so many newbies dropping zero-effort drafts then running away that it's understandable that some people would get irritated and lose their patience. Ideally, we'd have systems in place for preventing this, such as requiring a certain account age and number of edits, having a minimum character count for proposing new drafts, and just plain changing the whole bomb/hat system which doesn't really work as intended.

Draft count is slowly going down, so participants will either have to participate on harder drafts or not at all.

Huh? Why? The count is going down because we're clearing out the backlog that nobody worked on. It has nothing to do with easy or hard drafts.

Or do you mean that the draft count will eventually just be the salvageable ones that need effort?

Edited by WarJay77 on Oct 5th 2020 at 11:49:57 AM

I've tried to help out some folks a bit at TLP (usually by adding examples if I can think of any), and in fact have done drastic edit rewrites of trope descriptions on a few occasions the last few weeks. But it gets frustrating to see so many people proposing tropes whose English is terrible (never mind tropers who put up all kinds of awful entries on existing trope pages, which I'll do massive clean up on if I'm in the mood). It's almost as if several folks there are just throwing some half-baked TLP hooey up and expecting others to do the boring heavy lifting. Honestly, it gets frustrating after a while.

There really should be a minimum standard of writing capability required from TLP creators. I used to be active on travel sites, and this problem is analogous to posters at those sites who pop in and say "I'm going to Paris next week for the month. What are the must sees? What are some great restaurants? Any itinerary suggestions?" And when someone makes a suggestion, they invariably say "Great suggestion! Keep 'em coming!" Urgh — how about at least doing some of your own research instead of expecting everyone else to do your work for you?

Believe me Bolt, I understand your frustration. It's very annoying to deal with half-baked drafts.

The issue is, a lot of people's "contributions" are also half-baked, and it leads to nothing productive.

I'm not saying your work is half-baked btw, you do really well and we need more people willing to do so much to help people. And we do need better ways of keeping the TLP garbage free.

But we all know that there are better ways to deal with these things than to excessively bomb them to hell. The 5T incident was a wakeup call for me and now I'm trying to be an Internal Reformist, but it's hard when a lot of people don't seem to care. The drive-by voters, specifically, who can get away with their antics thanks to anonymity.

- Yeah. Unless easy drafts replace hard drafts more often than the other way around.

If there's one lesson that can be learned from these posts here, it's that you shouldn't post links to bad TLP drafts on ATT or in forums; doing so just invites more unnecessary ridicule.^note There's a reason why I didn't link the draft I mentioned here. If a draft is so blatantly bad that it needs to be discarded immediately, we should just PM a moderator.

See, I've had to use ATT in the past to discuss TLP issues because of on-draft shenanigans. Attracting more attention is a bad side-effect and I certainly don't want to contribute to any problems, but sometimes ATT is necessary to get help with the TLP- not just from mods.

Everyone only has a certain amount of time they can spend, so it's inevitable that people will look through TLP to see what they can do easily with the little time they have. Sometimes it'll be contributing an example or a comment; sometimes it'll be dropping a hat or bomb on drafts where it's clear-cut one way or the other. I know I haven't been around long so maybe it's not my place to say this, but I think 20 bombs is much too few to be panicking about people "bombing just to raise the number".

Not when you've been around as long as I have and were directly involved in the 5T incident.

20 bombs is way too excessive for a draft like that. By bomb...idk, 10, I already knew something was going wrong. The poor state of the draft combined with the comments and the amount of bombs gave me war flashbacks, man. And then as much as I asked people to stop bombing, they kept going, almost never explaining why. The draft only needed 5 bombs, maybe 6. No more. Bombs aren't to be tossed for fun, they're supposed to be taken seriously, not just added willy-nilly to a draft that could already be discarded anyway. At that point, when it stops being for the sake of getting the draft off the TLP and more about saying "this draft sucks", it stops being in good faith.

Drive-By bombs (and hats) are an issue we're trying to squash, and this is one of the reasons it's important. People need to be held accountable. We need to be able to see who bombed or hatted something and why. They'd think twice about doing it for the memes if they were forced to say so on the draft.

And, frankly, if you're looking for something quick and easy, the TLP isn't the place to look.

Edited by WarJay77 on Oct 5th 2020 at 12:30:56 PM

I'm not saying that mods should be contacted for all TLP issues, nor am I saying that you shouldn't take TLP issues to ATT at all. I only said that they should be contacted when a draft needs to be discarded before 3 days like Blank, and that's because moderators are the only tropers with the power to do so.

Honestly, I have no idea what we, or even the moderators, could do about this issue. I'm not convinced the admins will ever resume active development on the site, and we need tech changes before community changes can happen.

No, I get what you're saying, I was just pointing out that posting a link on ATT can be necessary sometimes and the extra attention is a risk we sometimes need to take.

^^^^^^ I don't know about PM-ing moderators. I did that once about some fanfic-style recommendations for what looked like smut Web Original stories and got an unfriendly response and best I can tell, no fixing of the issue. I don't do that anymore, and they may not like to be contacted directly.

In addition, I've asked a couple times about having an easy-to-find list of moderators that includes who is and isn't active at a given point in time. That hasn't happened either. It also takes a while lately to get moderator response on ATT problems, with several issues not addressed even when bumped. I appreciate that the moderators are busy, for sure, but there are quite a few of them right now.

My guess is that the site is understaffed on moderators, or they have some other big site issues they're working on, or the like. Who knows?

Edited by BoltDMC on Oct 5th 2020 at 12:40:30 PM

Bingo.

This is why we keep discussing the idea of promoting people as engineers, to do some grunt work for the mods. I'm sure some of us here would be more than happy to be a TLP-based engineer and have the power to discard drafts early. I know I sure would, of course only using that ability in cases where the draft is attracting trolls and drama.

Edited by WarJay77 on Oct 5th 2020 at 12:43:03 PM

Just as a reminder, ATT queries can be privated before publishing so only the mods see them.

Anyway, yeah, we really need that engineer position. The mods have been in shambles for a while now, especially since one of the more active ones retired a few months back.

Until then though, we need to try and reign in the community ourselves...but people won't listen.

*glances at the Video Quality Examples Control thread* what else is new?