TLP Community Issues

Do you think people get an "I did something!" thrill out of hatting/bombing? Like they do it cuz they feel powerful and included, even when the draft already has 23 bombs to 0 hats and it doesn't matter anymore?

Edited by mightymewtron on Dec 8th 2021 at 4:59:30 AM

I'm not so cynical. On a draft with 25 hats and 0 bombs, all those unnecessary hats might be an implicit "This is great, super launchable, launch it already" (even if there are still things the sponsor wants to work out). So the opposite, 25 bombs, could be "I hate this, it's unsalvageable, make it go away already". It's not 1:1, but you can kind of think of it that way.

I could easily see it as being both for different people.

My concern is less how many bombs eventually gathered, and how quickly bombs tend to gather. Hats never get collected that quickly, but I've seen drafts reach 10+ bombs in the space of an hour simply for lacking examples. They pile on faster than it could possibly take for the sponsor to actually fix it if they wanted to.

I think it's more that people take longer to see if they like a trope/think a trope is ready to publish b/c doing so usually requires reading through an entire description and thinking it through.

Whereas it's very easy to see how a stub is deserving of a bomb and therefore they're easier to toss and accumulate. Low hanging fruit mindset

Edited by amathieu13 on Dec 8th 2021 at 8:16:20 AM

This is the one thing that makes me think maybe there was some logic to the YouTube dislike erasure... Not that I'm saying we should hide bomb counts, that'd just be stupid, but like...

The thing is, there are some drafts that are good in concept and just need some work. If they get mass bombed before the sponsor has a chance to make changes, then there's no use trying to save that draft. On the other side of the coin, there are plenty of drafts that people just give hats because they like the concept, but aren't nearly launch-ready. Getting a bunch of undeserved hats early on might cause the sponsor to think it's ready to launch.

I think the biggest death toll for a draft is a bad name, such as a stock phrase or a bad trope namer. Even if the draft is good, people will bomb it just on the name alone instead of providing helpful feedback or alternate names. This is obviously because it's the first thing you'll see on the draft, so it requires the least amount of analysis or even reading before you bomb it and declare "bad name."

Edited by mightymewtron on Dec 8th 2021 at 10:15:24 AM

I think there should be a period after the draft is first made where hats and bombs can't be added. That way the sponsor has time to fix the draft's issues without getting hit by bombs.

yup, 24 (maybe 36?) hr rule. people can give feed back and comment. if sponsor makes improvements and appears to be actually working on the draft, then more likely to avoid mass bombing after the grace period. and if not, then it's a stronger indicator the sponsor was either intentionally trolling, ill-prepared and should take the draft back to the drawing board, or the idea is unsalvageable

This was a draft created earlier today. The person who launched it appeared to be confused and put the body in the title by accident. It was nuked pretty quickly. Right now it has eight bombs and there's a lot of pop-corning in the comments.

I don't know how long the title was, but that seems like an oversight that could easily be fixed by limiting the length of the title.

Agreed. If page titles/namespaces can reach up to 64 characters, TLP titles should never need more than 128 (for extra comments and stuff), and that's being generous. 96 would be a decent limit IMO.

Edited by Piterpicher on Dec 15th 2021 at 11:12:13 AM

What mostly just makes me sad is seeing people going back to popcorning on a weird draft like that; it feels like at the end of the day people just aren't learning.

Edited by WarJay77 on Dec 15th 2021 at 2:33:48 PM

It did happen to something for much different reasons and it took more than a year, but yeah... Sadly, that's human nature (to react emotionally and make similar mistakes).

And it might well be the case that this troper was just confused about how to create a draft and made a mistake. Instead of popcorning, people could've been offering them advice. Side note, most of the bombs were added after the draft got nuked. What's the point of letting people bomb a draft that's already been nuked?

That's probably just another technical oversight. And yeah, the text was either just a glitched copy and paste or some confusion about what went where; there was no reason for people to start memeing again.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=16037500180A26540800&page=122#comment-3043

Basically the troper who made that was just banned, since it was a sockpuppet account made by Shadow 8411 after deleting their account. Something seems to have happened to them. Hope they're OK.

The draft says it was made my Shadow under their old account.

The LGBT Representation Index has already gotten two bombs. I think you guys can guess why this likely is.

I listed a number of issues with the draft, the scope of it, the intention with it, in my first comment, none of which have been remotely addressed, so, no, that's not the only reason.

I see, I didn't notice you were one of the people who bombed it.

Even if I wasn't, the point remains there are legitimate reasons a lot of the bombed LGBT drafts get bombed, from what I've seen.

A long post, so I apologize up front. I mentioned something related to this before and I guess if no one else sees this as an issue, then I'll leave it be. That said...

Bumping several very old drafts on the TLP without explicitly claiming them. Over the last week RockRaider and MovieNut14 bumped something around 15 old drafts on the TLP. They typically make minor edits to the description and fix formatting issues. But they never outright claim the old drafts or say they're adopting them.

Personally, I find the amount to be congesting of the TLP, but I hear WarJay's point. I've just taken to ignoring those drafts since it's not clear to me whether they are being actively worked on (and thus new examples or comments will be actively incorporated into the draft) or if they're being bumped because the bumpers believe the ideas are salvageable if someone were to take the time to work on them.

But the draft for Men Are Bad At Sex raised some flags for me. It was bumped by Chabal2 on 12/31. That same day RockRaider added two examples and today they put a launch date for 48hrs, citing the lack of comments as their reason. Which seems odd to me. They didn't indicate they were formally adopting it (it's not listed on the TLP Adoption Drive either) and there was no indication that the draft even had a sponsor. I know if they did I'd have given it a more serious look (which I did today and pointed out the issues the draft still has). The turnaround on this draft that hadn't been touched for 6 years is also concerning, especially since another older draft that RockRaider adopted around the same time (12/28?, again no adoption note on the draft, but that's when the first recent comment was made) was launched (1/1) and then unlaunched due to not addressing several concerns in the comments.

Idk, this all just feels...off to me? I think more of this would be noticed if people were more explicit about which drafts they're adopting and if we limited how many drafts a single user can bump without adopting at any time to like...5.

Edited by amathieu13 on Jan 5th 2022 at 2:25:13 PM

Yeah, that's not cool. I've been ignoring the old drafts too, but that's a misunderstanding of the Up for Grabs rule.