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 an Ask The Tropers query on the issue, holler, or PM a mod (the first of the three being preferable).
- 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.
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 Mar 8th 2025 at 5:31:13 AM
They might not not be explicitly forbidden but both count as bad etiquette. If people think they should be included in TLP guidelines, we can move the discussion to the outdated Administrivia pages thread.
Macron's notesYeah, I decided to bring it up here first to see if there was even support for the idea of stamping down on this.
Working on: Author Appeal | Sandbox | Troper WallMaybe include a phrase to the effect of "If you think there's something salvageable in it, you can bring it to [one or more relevant threads] and see about making a draft of your own."
Suddenly I'm... still rotating Fallen London in my mind even though I've stopped actively playing it.Just putting this here to get the word out. I found out I overlooked Virtual Sidekick when I put Internal Computer Partner on the Launch Pad. I just did some serious tweaking of it in an attempt to salvage. Many people who hatted it may not have known about Virtual Sidekick, so those folks might want to give it another look and bomb if they don't think it's different enough from Virtual Sidekick to justify splitting the trope.
Edited by Traveler123 on Oct 6th 2022 at 5:44:19 AM
This draft
has 17 bombs and one hat that was likely added by the OP.
People are also kinda being rude. Not that the OP is helping with their attitude.
Working on: Author Appeal | Sandbox | Troper Wall
If I'm included in that, whoops, not my intention. I just try to guide folks to Administrivia to read up on matters. I can rephrase.
No, not you, you're fine. It's the people who are like "bombs away" and being overly harsh in their critiques.
Working on: Author Appeal | Sandbox | Troper WallLooks like the draft was put on hold (not by me and I don't think I did it by accident).
Edited by MacronNotes on Oct 7th 2022 at 8:58:33 AM
Macron's notesWar Jay has a point. Any rudeness in the responses was caused by the immaturity/flippant attitude of the OP, so there's some blame there. I was pretty straightforward in my bomb.
There's a lot going on with the wiki right now so I'm sure the mods aren't super focused on it... but I'm also curious to know who put it on hold and why.
Working on: Author Appeal | Sandbox | Troper WallI only applied the hold to make a quick change, but as the bomb count has gone up to 21 (completely unnecessary, there), I nuke and applied a lock to prevent restoring.
Link to TRS threads in project mode here.When tropes are unlaunched, do new examples or changes carry over to the draft?
TroperWall / WikiMagic CleanupNo, unless people actively update the drafts themselves, the unlaunched draft won't have any of the post-launch changes.
Working on: Author Appeal | Sandbox | Troper Wall"Spirit of Halloween
". The sponsor has only one edit since October 2021 (July 6, 2022), and prevented the draft from being Up For Grabs by a simple "Bump" and refused to put it up to grabs
. I have a sincere belief that they are hogging the draft. Are we allowed to opened a new draft with essentially the same content to override him in this particular case, as I suggested in the draft
? It reads like it's malign to me.
Yeah, a sponsor doesn't have to give up their draft if they really are interested in working on it, but they're also expected to do work and not doing so is in and of itself is problematic.
Working on: Author Appeal | Sandbox | Troper WallIf you aren't a mod, you shouldn't be implying that unilateral action might be taken upon other tropers.
For now, I'll message Roy G Biv and tell them that they can't keep bumping the drafts while not putting in the effort to edit them.
Macron's notes

Should we add a rule about bashing / bombing a draft after it's already been discarded? People keep doing that and it's awkward getting them to stop if you don't want to also reply on the discarded draft.
Working on: Author Appeal | Sandbox | Troper Wall