TLP Community Issues

Yeah, I don't think you did anything wrong there personally, and you calling for a discard fixed the issue anyway.

Sigh...requesting a mod discard here, because even though it already has 15 bombs people are still bumping it and posting about bombing it. It's sort of getting excessive and I'd like to just see it get discarded before this keeps going.

What's annoying is that I asked a legitimate question (whether it would be valid as a Missing Supertrope) and nobody followed up and just threw in more bombs. :/

I dunno about this one.

It's a pretty straightforward concept, to the point that using TLP to farm for examples seems like a reasonable approach even if it means starting out with none. The question about a Missing Supertrope is also legitimate. I'd be inclined to tell people to knock it off with the overbombing, myself.

I've tried; they never listen to me. :/ I've gotten accused of "defending" bad drafts in the past, so I'd really rather not have that happen again.

I'd appreciate if you said something yourself, because I know if I do it it'll do nothing.

Edited by WarJay77 on Apr 28th 2021 at 3:40:14 PM

I guess we could always start from scratch, or at least kick the concept to Salvage Yard (if people still use that).

Salvage Yard is still used, but I think it's mainly a "out of sight out of mind" dumping ground.

I'd like to establish in policy that TLP are not meant to be perfect from the get-go and that in particular using them to gather examples is a legitimate use of the venue.

Admittedly, most stub drafts are abandoned immediately and aren't used for example-fishing. But that's why people need to at least give these kinds of drafts a fair shake before jumping to throwing 16 bombs at it. Even if the idea's fine, that draft is now rendered unsalvagable, and I think that's what pisses me off the most.

These same people will then go and hat anything that somewhat looks decent even if it has a ton of problems.

They don't like to give drafts much more than a superficial glance before judging it, and it's driving me crazy.

Hmm... Changing an entrenched cultural issue like that could be difficult. More assertive moderation would be very resource intensive, and would require trying to create a set of objective criteria for what is, at heart, a subjective process.

Just a thought: Would a technical mitigation be worth pursuing? I don't know how the back-end works, but maybe this is already possible:

• Limit all users to 10 (or even 5) active hats/bombs each.
  • Launched/Nuked trope proposals don't count, of course.
  • Trying to cast more when already at your limit causes the confirmation dialog to note that the system is discarding the oldest of your existing hats/bombs. (People should only be hatting once a draft has been iterated upon until it really is ready, so most hats should self-resolve soon due to successful launch)

Theoretical intent:

• Turning these into a limited resource reduces how much noise drive-by/carpet-droppers can generate, and hopefully prompts them to become more involved in the process. Carpet-bombing in particular becomes sort of self-cleaning, so that it's harder to lock proposals into an irrecoverable state
• Should also prompt more well-intentioned tropers with low filter levels (remember this discussion?) to prioritize which tropes they think are most ready.

Could cause some difficulty with the discard project.

Limiting the amount of bombs you can throw at any draft per day would make the process way too slow, I think. Per draft, yes, but then you'll get annoyed if you "waste" your bomb/hat and then see another draft that deserves it far more.

There might be a bit of a tradeoff. I think that at least some of the downside would be mitigated by the limits on frontloading too many hats —There would be less demand for bombs to hold down so many over-eager drafts.

Maybe I didn't explain clearly. Not talking about a per-day limit. If you cast 5 bombs in support of the Discard project, and those drafts get nuked, your bombs are immediately available for further use.

I offered what I think is a more practical solution earlier; people simply can't vote on drafts when they're first proposed.

And mods should still have early-discard powers, if there's a draft that obviously needs to be discarded, such as a redirect attempt or deliberate spam.

If we are spitballing fixes (not taking into account programming downtime), the thought that came to mind is maybe limit the number of hats/bombs on a proposal to 20 each, and maybe after some clean-up you can archive the original rating and start fresh. The purpose of that feature is to gauge community response with a built in rating system for a quick glance. Having a troubled draft go through a massive overhaul based on community feedback but still with 12 hats / 22 bombs doesn't look good on the trope and harms first impressions.

It may not be perfect, I can see people abusing the rating reset, but limiting the number of ratings would outright eliminate the whole "bomb a draft just to see how many bombs it can get" issue. Once any trope gets over 15 hats it should be obvious the trope has potential. Conversely 20, rather than 10, is enough to both see the extremes as well as better measure the ratio between bombs and hats. This, of course, would come with a new set of ground rules for troper behavior (such as minimum of a week to gather new ratings before theoretical launch).

And just regarding terminology, but if the purpose of bombs is to imply the proposal is not ready for launch and not opposition to the trope itself then it shouldn't be called bombs. While a hat says it is good to go, bombs are being used to imply multiple things. This sort of fix may be more controversial, maybe a mid-ground button like an exclamation point warning sign to indicate that concern rather than opposition. In it's current state that kind of thing would be more complicated than it would be useful, but in conjunction with a rating reset feature that could be helpful.

Isn't there another thread for technical TLP suggestions?

Right, it's here.

Since any fixes to the system need admin work, we need to figure out a way to prevent the issue while working with our current limitations.

Manga The Mother Of The Great Demon Kings 10 Children

We got a problem page, whoever launched it clearly missed a rule or two

Edited by VengefulBale on May 5th 2021 at 6:10:28 AM

I think you need to go to Crash Rescue to talk about that.

Edited by mightymewtron on May 5th 2021 at 7:13:17 AM

I was looking at the Trope Launch Pad, and sorted the tropes by number of bombs (and hats). What do we do with the tropes at the top of each list (at least the ones published before 2020)

...Nothing? We don't need to do anything with them. If you want to get some discussion going on those, go for it, but the community doesn't really need to do anything as a whole.

We have a forum for cleaning out old abandoned drafts that can't be salvaged, though that's most helpful for getting bombs on an old draft that needs discarding but doesn't have 5 bombs yet.

Edited by mightymewtron on May 19th 2021 at 11:02:04 AM

A spin off from this discussion.

I want to talk about the tendency for tropers to post poorly formatted examples, and how we can fix these issues.

A lot of tropers will do things like use bad indentation, and will keep doing it even if people point out they're doing it wrong. It's near impossible to report TLP issues unless you know exactly where each incident took place due to the nature of the TLP's backlog and formatting, so these issues often end up going unchecked, and it's something I really think we need to try and deal with.

Since the TLP is a rough draft part of the wiki, I don't think it's that big of an issue, as long as the tropers aren't editing the wiki like that.

It is pretty annoying when people make contributions like "Is work X an example?" I dunno, you tell me by actually writing out an entry.

Part of the problem though is that the sponsors shouldn't have to deal with re-formatting things properly. If you're going to be suggesting examples, you should also be following wiki rules when you do so.