Not Tropeworthy: Fora

... as well as IBTL, Implonkus, Internet Detective, Lurker, Mistakenly Banned, Post Count, and YouTube War Expert. (EDIT FOR THE FUTURE: THE LIST IS VERY BIG NOW)

All of these were listed on Tropes Needing TRS with reasons to the effect of "One of several 'web tropes' from the wiki's past when standards were lower. Currently on Definition Only, reflecting its low wick count, this is also troping real life behaviour..."

So let's go over them, shall we?

• Hit-and-Run Poster: A type of internet troll who drops their single nonsense post and immediately leaves forever. It has one (1) work page wick on Characters.Durarara Main Characters and even that one wick is a misuse because the troll in question returns to the chatroom repeatedly.
• IBTL: A Stock Phrase to spam in threads that you know will be locked. No wicks but its indices.
• Implonkus: "that feeling you get" when your well-thought-out post gets only childish typo-ridden dreck as a response — or the impetus to add someone to your ignore list. Only non-index wick is a perfunctory "see also" on a JFF page.
• Internet Detective: That guy who will dig up your sordid backstory to discredit you in an internet argument. Its only work page wick is a misuse, describing what amounts to legitimate detective work using the internet.
• Lurker: Someone who reads a website without posting. Works page wicks consist of an inline wick to contextualize a different trope, people who STOPPED lurking in an ARG, and people who aren't paying to post on Something Awful.
• Mistakenly Banned: When you get banned. By mistake. Rather more total wicks than the rest, but still only three on works pages: an old fixed bug with Peach, a page that is definitely troping real people and not a work, a works page written in first person for some reason. (What the hell?)
• Post Count: The number of posts you have. Modern forums stopped tracking this anyway because it's just an invitation to spam it. Only "works" page wicks are in the already-questionable Website/ namespace — 'some members have really high ones' which is not an example, and apparently one web site can get into post count drama.
• YouTube War Expert: Someone who thinks they know about wars because they watched a lot of youtube. Works page wicks include complaining about a comment section in a Trivia subpage (??) and an inline wick complaining about Youtube comment sections in a YMMV page.

(And, yeah, strictly speaking all of those wicks should be removed regardless of what happens in this thread since these are all Definition-Only Pages anyway — except that the only reason they're definition-only is that they got added when making that index on account of their few wicks... gah.)

I'm pretty sure all of these pages can just be cut. They aren't tropes and have basically zero to do with storytelling beyond "this exists, therefore a story might incidentally contain it".

Edited by wingedcatgirl on Mar 16th 2021 at 11:37:58 AM

Opened this.

All these pages are from way back in site times, when websites and web concepts were troped like works. We have tightened up the rules substantially since then, in particular because a) these tropes often end up troping real people/users and b) many websites aren't stories.

I think however that merging them together to an Internet Speak glossary would be more useful/interesting than a mere deletion. The concepts don't work well as trope pages in and of themselves - see the lack of examples as an example - but as a single glossary they would.

I'm inclined to support this position:

The items referenced here seem interesting, and potentially useful to users on the site and forum—but don't really fit the overall purpose of the wiki's troping.

Thus it doesn't make much sense to me to keep them as "tropes", but does make sense to me to keep them in a useful-notes glossary.

Perhaps the old trope-names could be kept as redirects, to allow wiki-word linking?

I'm down with merging them all into a glossary page.

++ on merging them into a single Internet Speak page.

Yeah

Yeah I'm good with merging them. I very much enjoy these pages and think they are a valuable archive of internet culture, and oppose an outright cut. But they are clearly not exactly tropes in the traditional sense.

Merge these into an Internet Speak page.

Just repeating and agreeing on what they said; merge these entries into one big Internet Speak page.

Another pro-merge vote.

There's also some others, like Garbage Post Kid.

Why Am I Banned might be a good redirect to What to Do If You Are Suspended.

Edited by ccorb on Feb 15th 2021 at 9:00:39 AM

Down for merging.

Also, didn't we have a glossary page for TV Tropes talk? I know that kind of got derailed when SA invaded the place, though.

Agreed.

Edited by FishiousRend on Feb 14th 2021 at 3:40:09 AM

You mean TV Tropes Glossary? That's TV Tropes-specific lingo and vocabulary editors find useful. I oppose moving these to there.

I'm fine with merging these into a glossary of Internet terminology, and I'm fine with turning Why Am I Banned into a redirect to What to Do If You Are Suspended.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Feb 14th 2021 at 7:12:35 AM

...Would merging these pages into one really be worthwhile? Maybe if we also added a bunch of other, more common internet speak terms to the page, but then that would probably be off-mission for our site.

I'd rather just cut them all and be done with it.

Now that you mention it, I'd be fine with cutting, though I still think Why Am I Banned should be turned into a redirect to What to Do If You Are Suspended instead of cut.

Edit: I saw that Why Am I Banned is a redirect to Mistakenly Banned, and I think the latter should be moved to Administrivia or merged with What to Do If You Are Suspended (there have been cases of the mods accidentally suspending the wrong user due to a misclick, as well as cases of people accidentally resurrecting an account that was deleted after being banned).

Another edit: I'm also against moving these to the TV Tropes Glossary, since they're rarely relevant to TV Tropes.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Feb 14th 2021 at 10:23:38 AM

I mean, that's a good point, these things aren't tropes, so where would the merged page be? JFF?

Useful Notes, maybe.

And there's definitely more; I picked this set because they all had nearly the same reason on Tropes Needing TRS. I think there's some more even on that page that are just not blatantly obvious about it.

Some of Fora are legitimate Internet Speak terms, but some appear to be invented by our site without a broader popularity taking hold. I'm not against a Useful Notes on unique internet terms, but Implonkus, for example, is trying to invent a new term. We don't need that.

Maybe, or maybe Useful Notes if we're getting it out of Main/ (which I don't have a strong opinion on either way if we don't just cut these).

Edit: I was ninja'd, but I'm fine with getting rid of terms that TV Tropes just made up (we've had tropes cut due cases of citogenesis and/or apophenia that weren't describing a real trope) even if we keep the preexisting terms.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Feb 14th 2021 at 12:10:05 PM

According to the article, the term "Implonkus" first appeared on the HBO forums, not TV Tropes.

Rule of thumb: if it doesn't have a wikipedia page, then it's a made-up term that somebody is trying to promote memetically, and we don't need that.

Anyway, to making a list of jargon.