TLP Community Issues

Yeah, I was keeping my eye on that one too.

I would say yes because not doing so would just be unnecessarily delaying the inevitable.

Going to bring up this draft.

While there is plenty reason to be suspicious, I really want people to stop assuming bad faith all the time. We do not all start knowing how to write context or descriptions. TLP is already a learning curve, and comments like "The sponsor has no edits or forum posts. Pretty sure they're not coming back." do not make for a more welcoming environment for sponsors who genuinely want to learn (especially since they did come back).

Like I want bad drafts out of the way too! But there should be ways to phrase these things better.

I don't get the "no edits or forum posts = never coming back" idea. Yeah, TLP isn't the best place for newbies, but it's common for people to lurk on the wiki for years and learn the trade while barely making edits of their own. Plus, just because they're new doesn't mean they always think they can just pitch a trope and leave?

Edited by mightymewtron on Oct 28th 2020 at 3:41:40 PM

Agreed. When I made my first draft, I did check back on it and tried to incorporate suggestions to the best of my ability and learned a fair chunk of formatting guidelines from it. I have made some edits beforehand and can't quite remember any specific examples from others right now, though.

Edited by Piterpicher on Oct 28th 2020 at 8:59:28 PM

The issue is that a lot of people who post drafts like that never do come back. Some of them do, and we should never assume they won't, but it's just a fact that a lot of them don't.

Practical question... how would I know that I have addressed other (experienced) TLP users’ concerns in my draft if I don't see follow-up comments to larger edits? I have put up a launch notice but not received further feedback since, either positive or negative. If this stays true, can I launch under the implicit understanding that silence means no further issues have been found? I wouldn't like to get accused of rogue launching.

It's often understood that a long silence means no further issues, but the last time I assumed that I launched a duplicate trope because nobody commented about it in the week I notified about launch. Sometimes the silence is just the draft getting buried. So now I say don't launch until somebody else explicitly says it looks good in its current state.

Case In Point: Silence about the title of Doomed Autographed Item led me to launch it as The Autographed Ball, which...didn't go very well, hence why it has a new name.

Silence isn't always a good sign, but sometimes you need to launch to discover that. It's unfortunate, but it's not your fault.

...And okay. I can see the points against the newbie-restrictions more clearly now. While I still think it'd help, I'm willing to wait for other fixes first to see if it remains an issue afterward.

Was checking my list of all tropes that exist until sometime in the last two years...

Gideon Ploy was sent back to TLP, still exists... Numerical Advantage Illusion TLP to replace it stalled a year ago...

More info or something...

Just bringing it up...

I need five more hats, nobody has given any more examples... I've got nothing to do until either one changes.

Try bumping?

I've got something like an example... Not sure if false troops in general count, without trying to get a numerical advantage...

Edited by Malady on Oct 30th 2020 at 10:42:23 AM

"We pretend to have more troops than we really do so they are too scared to attack." — That's exactly what the trope is.

- Oh. I just got tripped up over the word "numerical advantage"... Oops. Well. Commented that into the trope!

And the first sentence being:

Edited by Malady on Oct 30th 2020 at 11:13:40 AM

At the risk of having another dogpiling situation, I'm calling the mods to discard this draft early. (They've since edited it thankfully, but Traveler 123 in particular got very pointlessly angry on the first comment, and I know this isn't the only instance where they ranted unproductively about bad TLP drafts. Seriously y'all...I know barely-laconic drafts are a problem but what is yelling about how bad these drafts are and how they "abuse the TLP" going to do, especially if the troper is simply new and the concept isn't even unsalavagable?)

Edited by mightymewtron on Nov 15th 2020 at 2:15:29 PM

We need another early discard for this draft. It's attracting a lot of bombs and popcorn-y examples.

You know, I saw that draft earlier, and I think it only had maybe 8 bombs, and all the comments are productive. Now I look at it, the amount of bombs have doubled in a few hours (maybe only an hour), with annoying pointless "WHAT IS THIS LOL" comments and somebody even encouraging a mass-bombing.

The worst part? The idea isn't even that bad! A bit hard to define, and the title is obviously bad because it's a lame stock phrase, but the basic definition ("the work in a franchise that often gets forgotten") does not sound like a bad idea. It brings Adaptation Displacement to mind, but it's a distinct idea and I don't think we have it. Seriously, ANT Muddle, "What the shit have I just read?" to a dialogue-based title and a description written like a decent laconic? If that's a uniquely bad TLP draft in your eyes, you're not looking hard enough.

At least the Scottish draft was clearly a low-quality trope idea made out of spite for a TRS decision, so the backlash made sense. This is just a bunch of tropers piling on a draft because it has a poor title and no examples, without even examining the idea at all. Maybe this troper could make a better pitch if we worked with them instead of using them as an outlet for popcorning bitterness about the TLP.

Edited by mightymewtron on Nov 17th 2020 at 6:29:46 AM

Like, I get it. There's been a lot of low-quality proposals lately. But you'd think people would've learned, would've matured, enough to not drive-by-bomb drafts and cover it in spam comments. I'm at a loss for how to make people stop, besides just repeatedly calling a mod to discard things.

Unfortunately, I'm afraid it's that kind of attitudes (of the drive-by bombers and nay-sayers) that risks costing us potentially valuable contributors. If I had gotten such a reaction on my first in 5+ years attempt at a new trope proposal, my reaction would have been "F*€% it, if I wanted to be called incompetent, I'd read a few new user tickets at work." and given up on contributing anywhere on the site other than the occasional new entry.

I know it can be exasperating to once again see an apparently doomed to an early discard TLP, but in such cases, the old saying of "If you've got nothing nice to say, don't say anything." is probably quite helpful. After all, the first 10 pages of TLP move fast. If nobody complained in those stub proposals, they'd move to the background really fast. Or somebody sees the value in the idea, adopts the TLP and it can receive some of that much-talked of wiki magic to turn the proposal in a valid TLP without the need to overcome 10+ bombs.

Anyway, just saying...

Drive-by hats ruin our credibility as a quality wiki. Drive-by bombs ruin our credibility as a helpful wiki.

So we can't win. What else is new?

We can when hats and bombs stop being anonymous. It's the only way to really catch the drive-by tropers. Comments themselves seem to come as a result of the bombs as people get curious.

I feel like the "see who hatted/bombed a draft" and "leave a comment with a hat/bomb" mechanisms are like our wiki's equivalent of a COVID vaccine. It'll reasonably take a while for us to get it, but when we do it'll lift so much stress.

Bombs shouldn’t be used if there are no hats on the draft to begin with. Bombs were supposed to be anti-hats and no one thought that the draft shouldnlaunch in its current state But bombs have always been misconstrued as “I don’t like this draft” same with hats being used as “I like this idea”