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Edited by GastonRabbit on Oct 11th 2024 at 3:20:25 AM
The reason we do things for RP in here and in discord is for varied reasons:
1. Not everyone has access to Discord for various reasons.
2. Folks can more easily enter RPs via a website where anyone can walk in instead of needing an invitation to enter. Not to mention it can more easily keep itself alive in the website and he formats in TVT are far better for long term roleplays
3. Timezones make moderating things in one website really, really hard because of the time it takes to send a post and the fact that in order to call people's attention you have to both mention them and then PM them to make sure they see what they were called for.
4. The Discord/offsite server also allows for faster communication overall and prevents general talk or planning posts from clogging threads
And banning every single RP isn't going to solve the problems of drama that happen. I'd argue it just will make things worse. Some people do properly use the off-site discussions to vent about stuff
And on the evidence accusation, such things rarely overlap with the actual game.
Prettiest Meta Knight Gijinka, ngl@Zanreo and VengefulBale: The thing is that it's not our problem. TV Tropes is not supposed to host original content. There are literally thousands of RP communities across the Internet and they manage somehow.
It seems like they sort of grow out of the woodwork on any site that has an extensive forum presence. Someone says, "Hey, we're all into this stuff, let's play an RPG!" and the next thing you know we have a forum with a thousand active threads and millions of posts.
We could have laid down the law a long time ago and did not. That doesn't mean we can't do so now.
Edited by Fighteer on Jan 18th 2021 at 9:34:12 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"What I would suggest is having a pinned thread at the top of RPG subfora where people who are hosting off site games can advertise them and post links. Discussion itself would be forbidden unless it was about technicalities. We can do similar things for Yack Fest and Forum Games though I personally don’t see much purpose in it for those two. Just a suggestion.
Edited by SatoshiBakura on Jan 18th 2021 at 9:37:41 AM
I've not participated in this discussion so far at all (having watched it all from the outside,) but I strongly do not think we should have (as has been said) an unlicensed mental health treatment thread. Not only is it off-mission, but as Redmess explained, it's possibly dangerous. I won't go into detail because Redmess already did but to those who are here from the Insecurities thread, (and anyone else with issues,) I will also say to see a professional therapist. I can attest from personal experience that that is the best possible solution if you are going through mental problems (and trust me I have.)
As for the whole Forum Games/Yack Fest drama, I don't participate in any part of the forum outside Projects but I agree we need to keep offsite drama off TV Tropes. I agree with Fighteer's proposed rule about it-I think it could and should be implemented.
Edited by themayorofsimpleton on Jan 18th 2021 at 9:37:40 AM
Works That Require Cleanup of Complaining | Troper WallI have my own personal anecdote re: offsite harassment and drama. Disclaimer: this post may be offtopic.
I moderate a couple of forums (although you wouldn't think it by my posts on here
), and one of the forums had a member who was incredibly prolific and seemed like an all-around amazing contributor. One day, a user registers and immediately PMs me screenshots of that user being a member of a Discord server that harasses people (and by harassment, I'm talking full on harassment: doxing, cyberstalking, spamming, sending malware and gore), raids other servers, and even targets/raids websites as well. (Hell, they were actually planning on raiding us.)
I realized that doing anything major might spark a flame war, so I called in the admin on a private chat and showed him the screenshots. Now, the problem here is that our rules explicitly said we would not ban members for offsite conduct regardless of the type of conduct. This meant that we had a very annoying predicament on our hands. If we banned the contributor immediately and said nothing about it, accusations of censorship would soon pop up and I didn't want to deal with that. On the other hand, if we banned the contributor because of their Discord server, that would immediately lead to us being accused of violating our own rules re: offsite harassment.
Ultimately, we agreed that we wouldn't take any action, as it would have been far too volatile of a situation. It was annoying, and both me and the admin wanted to deal with the contributor, but the shakiness of the situation (and the fact that our own rules had completely screwed us over) led us to take no action.
Whew! And that's the end of my offtopic post. Apologies for the rambling.
Honestly, I feel like most depressed people who would use a thread for insecurities would do so because they see no point in their lives, so they use the thread to do something and find a point there. I used to feel pointless and saddened in the past, but found a job (currently part-time, soon full-time) and I'm totally happy. Maybe we should tell them to find an employment office in addition to a therapist.
Edited by Piterpicher on Jan 18th 2021 at 3:47:54 PM
Currently mostly inactive. An incremental game I tested: https://galaxy.click/play/176 (Gods of Incremental)
Not sure if teenagers and young people who visit these forums would magically heal all their problems by working... It might just make them more depressed and load them with responsibilities they're not fully ready to handle
Sure, and there are ways to set up your own free web forums if you need that functionality (Zetaboard seem to be kinda dead, but it live on in Tapatalk).
Having split communities puts TV Tropes is a very risky position, if everything is happening here than the mods can properly control things, if everything is off-site it’s not TV Tropes problem, but when it’s half-and-half TV Tropes risks being liable for things outside its control.
If it was just small RPG groups it might be manageable, but the recent situation has revealed that there’s at least one entire community out there (as apparently the recent drama was connected to three different RP Gs?), that’s far more than people simply happening to hang out off-forum.
As someone who has done forum moderation in the past, I’d have pushed to scrap that rule and ban the relevant person. “We don’t care what you do elsewhere, you’re welcome here whatever your past” sounds great in theory and puts people’s well-being at risk in reality.
Edited by Silasw on Jan 18th 2021 at 2:52:17 PM
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran
you do realize that plenty of depressed people have jobs, right? It's pretty fucking condescending to go "well, get a job and that'll fix it", and I'd argue that's just as much "condescending useless advice" as everything that happens in the anxiety thread
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Yeah, just finding a job isn't magically gonna cure someone's depression, and there are other ways to find meaning in your life than just getting a job - also many depressed people already have jobs in the first place. Great to hear your job made you feel better, but that's not gonna work for everyone
Edited by Zanreo on Jan 18th 2021 at 3:55:24 PM
My favorite failed console tbhI don't think not banning people for offsite reasons regardless of what they are is a good idea. At some point, when faced with credible evidence, you need to be able to determine that someone is a toxic influence on your forum, and you need to ban them. You can't simply insulate yourself from the outside world as a forum.
That sort of rule is exactly what leads to alt-right people and neonazis (and whatnot) infiltrating communities, especially when they are careful about not breaking that particular rule.
Also, it is important to remember as a moderator that rules are not set in stone, they are not laws, and you can and should break them in exceptional circumstances. You can't possibly cover every situation in forum rules, and sometimes you need to make exceptions.
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I think you are taking that comment a lot harder than it was intended. Getting a job can certainly help break someone out of a spiral of depression, but it is by no means a cure all either. I think getting a job can be a good start to treating issues of loneliness and isolation, but again, professional help should be sought in any case.
Edited by Redmess on Jan 18th 2021 at 4:05:16 PM
Hope shines brightest in the darkest timesAlso, honest question: since it's been made pretty clear certain moderators would prefer to not have anything to do with certain sections of the forums, why not assign other mods to deal with most of the stuff going down there?
My favorite failed console tbh![]()
Right.
Then again, after we had the discussion and agreed not to take any action, the admin decided that enough was enough and banned the contributor for drama importation, so...
Make of that what you will. Either I'm an indecisive idiot who can't decide on anything to save his life, or... nah, that's the only reason.
Edited by SilverCrown on Jan 18th 2021 at 8:38:03 PM
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The problem is that the mod team is so small that after factoring out the "certain moderators" there's not really anyone left.
You do know that depression is more than just "seeing no point in your life"? There's a difference between nihilistic, existential sadness, and being clinically depressed. Depression is a chemical imbalance that causes a variety of feelings and problems. It doesn't just vanish once someone has a career. Hell, for a lot of people that career may be contributing to their depression, or at least is taking time away from things like therapy.
Working on: Author Appeal | Sandbox | Troper WallLook, I spend enough of my personal time on this site already and that has to include both moderating and participating as a user. The social parts of the forums are just too large. They've grown at a much faster pace than we can reasonably keep up with, and it's always been my vote to drop them if they became that much of a problem. They are fundamentally off-mission for TV Tropes.
I'm willing to allow certain considerations for them to remain, but those need to include rules for how people will conduct themselves vis-a-vis offsite interactions. It cannot be a no-man's land where we are called in like kindergarten teachers when little Suzie and little Billy have a fight at home and start tattling on each other in the classroom.
I stipulate that young people need spaces where they can learn how to effectively interact with others, but I'm not equipped with the necessary patience to deal with that. A certain degree of social and emotional maturity is expected of all our members. If we can't get it, we'll drop people and subforums like scalding potatoes.
As an aside, I remember when Fast Eddie wanted to age-gate the forums because of this exact problem. We managed to talk him out of it, but I understand where he is coming from.
Can we stop this back-and-forth please? You are only proving our point that we aren't equipped to deal with depression and other clinical medical problems and shouldn't try to.
Edited by Fighteer on Jan 18th 2021 at 10:22:19 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
FWIW, I was not trying to give anyone specific advice, if I was one of the people you were referring to. I was actually saying that people who do need help should seek professional help instead of going to TV Tropes.
There are two separate issues. One is offsite drama showing up in TVT threads because they're being conducted in two different places. The other is people seeking out commiseration and advice for their mental health problems.
TLDR on the former is that people should not have an expectation that we can make informed moderation decisions about things happening on Discord or anywhere other than TV Tropes, nor are we willing to do so even if we had a hundred moderators.
Edited by Fighteer on Jan 18th 2021 at 10:25:20 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"There is also the problem that the amount of people who are both willing to become mods and have the qualifications to become mods is very, very low.
I personally would not like to get rid of the right side of the forums. I don't use them much, but I feel that it creates a sense of community on this site that isn't strictly bounded by shows or tropes. But we also need to take steps to ensure that the drama does not happen again.
I understand your position Fighteer.
Again, the wiki I was at didn't have a massive community but the one we had used to be very active and people would congregate in our IM chat to just hang out, but this became rather clique-y and full of drama. People called me in constantly to deal with their fights; once I got summoned because my friend was going off on a rant, and when she saw me show up she complained that nobody would give me a break. I worked extremely hard to try and keep the drama away and rebuild the community but nothing worked, and people seemed more interested in messing around, bickering, and discussing their personal issues than talking about the thing our wiki was designed around.
At the time it seemed okay. My constant effort made them like me, but I was often a bit too lenient and easily stressed. I cared about everyone on a personal level and dreaded the day where I had to ban one of my friends, which did happen, and it happened because everyone independently expected me to fix their issues for them and then flipped the fuck out when I had to enforce the rules.
These off-mission chat-groups, as well as anxiety threads and off-wiki stuff, can be all well and good when things are going well. But when things aren't going well, it's utter chaos and the perspective of people in the bubble can be radically different from the people trying to fix the problem from the outside.
As for:
I agree that we shouldn't deal with these things. I was trying to explain why it's impossible for us to deal with it; why depression isn't something with any easy solutions and why having amateur therapy on the site is at best pointless. But I did go off-topic a bit and I apologize.
But in fact the point of both my anecdotes is that things like this can get very toxic very fast. From cliques forming, to offsite and onsite drama, to people threatening suicide- things like this aren't something any wiki of any size is equipped to handle.
Edited by WarJay77 on Jan 18th 2021 at 10:32:02 AM
Working on: Author Appeal | Sandbox | Troper WallOkay, I'm going to modify something I said and offer a bone to the people who want these things to remain. Are there any moderators on the Discord server(s) who are generally trusted to be impartial, and if so do they also have TV Tropes accounts? If we can establish a positive link between accounts on the various platforms (Discord and our forums) and have a reliable source for bans and other actions taken there, it might be possible to effectively coordinate activity.
That would require a lot of trust on our part, so I'm reluctant to take it on, but it's the only way I'd consider it.
If the Discord communities are exclusively self-moderated, then no way.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Because there aren’t “other mods”, the team probably isn’t big enough for what the wiki side of things needs, even if the team was big enough to moderate the wiki we’ve also got the forums that contribute to the wiki and after that the forum sections that operate as basically their own things (I’d include Real-ish (mainly OTC) alongside the Just for Fun and Forum RPG areas in this category).
To emphasise this, Wikipedia doesn’t have a forum, the fact that we do is an oddity in of itself. As an OTC regular I’m very aware that our entire section probably shouldn’t exist and that we need to tread carefully if we want to keep existing despite not being part of the site’s actual mission.
It’s honestly not the worst idea, that or some kind of situational judgment test to filter out people who are going to cause issues the moment a difficult situation emerges.
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranI know we have a general Digimon Discord which I'm a Moderator for, but considering my past history, I don't think I can be called trustworthy anyway. I do my best to be impartial regardless, but still. It has a blocked off NSFW section, which already sounds problematic in itself due to what was being talked about earlier. It was only designed for a few roleplays, and only linked partially to one.
I'm not counting the Discord I'm working on, since it's not officially up.
I'm not saying I'm a logical choice, but it's only fair I speak my case.
Shadow?Alright, for everyone involved in the Yack Fest squabble, please see my response on what the actual issue is: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=5cma6iojg5o27puhulc24sje&page=906#comment-22642
I'm getting a bit tired of what is a back-and-forth in entirely missing the point. The moderation team dealt with this incident as we would in any other similar case: lock, investigate, impose sanctions. It doesn't matter if this is in TRS, Yack Fest, OTC or Visual Novels. We've done it everywhere, it works best. The reaction to this was disproportionate. We heard everyone out and did what we were going to do anyway.
I don't believe "find someone who wants to moderate that part of the site" is the solution here. Even when we had Maddie, Blackcat, Morven, Bobby G, who were all experienced and even participated in the right-hand side, the question of removing the right-hand side as too much hassle kept coming up. The drama it attracts comes down to the age bracket that seems to hang about there and the social aspect of the forum. In short, the place is immature. That doesn't mean the site doesn't merit more moderators in general. But not for this reason.
Realistically, there is nothing we can do to prevent or moderate improper behaviour on other clients. We can ban people for importing drama or doing something outright illegal or harmful to the wiki but that's about it. Someone being a tool on another forum is beyond me.
My proposition is that any community that decides to have accompanying threads or contact alongside TV Tropes needs to be made aware that what happens on Discord stays on Discord and cannot be used as evidence unless it fulfills one of the above criteria. Failure to do so will see all parties held accountable in some way. As all parties were in this case.
"If you aren't him, then you apparently got your brain from the same discount retailer, so..." - Fighteer

Forum Games in general seems like a weird section. Like, I get the idea on paper is to have silly forum games that tend to be ubiquitous in other post-by-post forums but a lot of the games there are Would You Smooch The Above Avatar On The Cheek™️ or something like that and it feels kinda... grimy, I guess?
I get it, TvTropes as a site does attract a lot of teenagers and teenagers are... y'know. I used to post there a lot back when I was one! But looking back at that subforum now there's a lot of odd stuff and most of that is probably a product of both how teens are and how the kinds of nerds around here have their social oddities.
Also, since it came up as a recurrent source of situations, does the Anti-Necromancy thread even count as a game? I know the definition is broad but it's always seemed like more of a shitpost/general chat than an actual game.
🏳️⚧️she/her | Vio Rhyse Alberia