Trope Launch Pad Improvements & Changes

Hello everyone!

While the tasks I've completed so far go through the review process, my next project I'll be working on is improving the Trope Launch Pad as much as possible.

Below is a list of the current ideas for changes and improvements and wanted to ask the community if I'm missing anything important or if you have suggestions or questions about things currently on the list please let me know!

CURRENT PROGRESS:(needs design work)

Edited by kory on Dec 21st 2023 at 11:52:29 AM

Now monitoring Wishlist and Bugs

One idea I pitched was to make the laconic section a requirement to fill out, though that's mostly to prevent the "can't edit" glitch.

Anyway, I think the "local" part of your links are messing the links up for me.

Edited by WarJay77 on Jun 22nd 2023 at 1:16:37 PM

Current Project: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

warjay77,

Oh I thought all fields were mandatory, I'll add that to the list. Easy fix.

Links fixed too.

Edited by kory on Jun 22nd 2023 at 10:28:28 AM

Now monitoring Wishlist and Bugs

Yeah, people have been able to submit entirely blank drafts before. None of the fields are mandatory, at least not when first submitting a draft.

Current Project: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

I've suggested a couple of these in the wishlist before, but I'll repeat them here for visibility's sake.

• Require an explanation for hats as well as bombs. Undue hatting does not get punished nearly as much as undue bombing. If possible, make it possible to holler/send notifiers for individual hats and bombs.
• The ability to holler comments.
• Disable the ability to add hats whenever there's at least 5 more hats than bombs, and vice versa. No more dogpile bombing.
• Instead of showing both total hats and bombs, only show the net count of hat or bombs, whichever is greater. This way, the tally is a better indicator of progress towards launch instead of a popularity contest.

Edited by badtothebaritone on Jun 22nd 2023 at 12:43:49 PM

The ability to holler comments would probably be better if there was some way for mods to thump posts.

Macron's notes

I agree with expanding "require a reason" to hatting and not just bombing. Pre-emptive hatting is a problem, and I suspect the people that do it aren't checking up on the draft to see if it actually is in a launchable state. That leads to people bombing just to counter the hats and sometimes there aren't enough counters to close the +5 hat gap.

Actually maybe an idea would be to disallow voting for the first three days, like how launching/discarding can't happen for three days. That might be a way to prevent some of the dogpiling in both directions.

CSP Cleanup Thread | All that I ask for ... is diamonds and dance floors

Oh yeah, excessive hats are just as much a problem as excessive bombs, and both need to be limited and monitored.

Current Project: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

When adding a text box for the bomb reasons how big should the character limit be? Do people need to be able to type out multiple paragraphs for a bomb reason?

Now monitoring Wishlist and Bugs

Sometimes, yeah. It depends on the severity of the problem.

Current Project: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

I doubt we'll need multiple paragraphs, and if someone did they could just comment on the draft itself. Maybe enough for a couple of sentences/one paragraph? Maybe like 500 characters, if I were to put a number on it.

CSP Cleanup Thread | All that I ask for ... is diamonds and dance floors

I mean, it depends on the severity. I wouldn't want to see people be limited by a strict character limit when trying to explain a complex issue, and making people use the normal draft comments instead, well... at that point you may as well just make the hat / bomb comment mechanic add a regular comment to the draft, sort of like how notifiers are just a special type of PM.

Sure, the need for several paragraphs is very unlikely. But it can happen.

Edited by WarJay77 on Jun 22nd 2023 at 5:02:16 AM

Current Project: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

Could just be "bombing for unclear scope, see [link to comment] for more details".

Would it be useful/feasible to make hats/bombs a function of adding a comment, but tied to your most recent comment on that draft? I.e. you can choose to add a hat or bomb and it displays next to your comment, and if you change your mind in a later comment it will affect all your previous comments accordingly and update the counter.

The Revolution Will Not Be Tropeable

I don't think so, because then people will just attach hats to, like, them adding an example. It'll just encourage laziness, if the comments aren't specifically tied to the hats and bombs.

Current Project: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

I'm not sure how useful requiring descriptions for hats will be. Like, the message that appears when you go to add a hat reads:

Basically, saying that there aren't any problems that would prevent it from launching. If someone's bombed the draft you could argue that the issue it was bombed for was fixed or never a problem, but if not what exactly are you going to say? In particular, what are you going to say that'll make clear you understand what it takes for a draft to be launchworthy and aren't just hatting because you like the concept, without being utterly banal and repetitive?

It's more for weeding through the invalid reasons ("I like this concept", "Draft looks ready" when there's only like 3 examples on it, "It's my draft", etc) or force people to only use their hats when they can actually say "it's ready to launch".

Like, there's a massive issue right now of people throwing a hat at just literally anything that isn't an obvious stub. That's why we need hat reasons, to be able to separate the real hats from the ones that people threw on before it was ready.

Edited by WarJay77 on Jun 23rd 2023 at 12:13:33 PM

Current Project: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

What if the hat button showed a pop-up form with a list of checkboxes ("I believe the draft meets the X Y Z requirements for Launch") and also the ratio showed a list of everyone who has hatted.

Edited by Amonimus on Jun 23rd 2023 at 7:23:26 PM

TroperWall / WikiMagic Cleanup

You'd still have a lot to filter through, since people are more likely to just click through the list without reading it once they've done it a single time.

Current Project: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

I just... don't think having to add a reason to a hat is necessarily going to do much. Like, "'Draft looks ready' when there's only like 3 examples on it" seems like it's the most likely thing to happen, which amounts to the people who do know what makes a draft launch-ready passing judgment on the ones who don't. I'm not sure that's much different from such people throwing a bomb on it and saying "stop hatting this, it's not ready to launch because XYZ". (And if "it's my draft" is a reason, maybe sponsors just shouldn't be allowed to add hats to their own drafts? Considering your ideas to make sponsorship more formal in another thread, that seems like a logical enough extension.)

It sounds like what you really want is to associate hats with a particular date and time, so you can compare the hat to the state of the draft at the time and invalidate the hat if it wasn't ready, and maybe also the troper that added it so you can tell who isn't good at adding hats. That seems to me like it would achieve the goals you want without adding hat reasons that wouldn't do a whole lot on their own, though the way I've described it, with people saying that only certain hats "count", it could spark accusations of TLP being run by a "cabal".

Heck, maybe it could be possible for a mod to purge a draft's current hat and/or bomb counts, so if a draft that's clearly not launch-ready has lots of hats, it has to start over with regards to gaining hats.

No strong opinion on hat reasons, but I really like the ability fir a mod to purge all hats and bombs. Helps with overzealous hats, overzealous bombs, or a fixer-upper that got all the needed improvements.

No, I definitely just want to weed out bad hat reasons. Trust me Morgan. The TLP has a serious problem right now. Understanding the psychology behind these hats would work wonders.

Edit: To be clear, comparing times will be helpful too. But it is far from my main goal as invalid reasons can happen any time.

Edited by WarJay77 on Jun 24th 2023 at 11:53:36 AM

Current Project: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

Im looking for anything to reduce the possibility of bad launches that will just be cut as well as anything that can help speed up good launches, either new or old drafts.

Such as the search is broken so people can't look up old abandoned drafts, you can't change the troper of who's on the draft or people bomb and hat drafts without giving a reason so the OP has no idea what to fix or if it's actually ready.

What other ideas related to these things do you think will help reduce the bad and/or increase the good?

Now monitoring Wishlist and Bugs

So in other words, you're not proposing hat reasons as a solution to the problem, only as a way to understand the problem. That feels more like a temporary data collection measure to gather data for a more substantial change, but I do understand better why you'd support this particular change now.

Of course, there's no guarantee you actually will end up "understanding the psychology behind these hats". Even something as simple as "good idea" or (for a clearly not-launch-ready draft) "ready to launch" would provide valuable insight, but you could just as easily get infuriatingly non-specific hat reasons like "looks good", or even worse "obligatory text". Meanwhile you're forcing people who do know how hats are supposed to work to find something to fill the box - which in turn could be copied by the people handing out bad hats (which is how "obligatory text" could appear).

I mean, it's not perfect. But it's way better than the current system. We could also cross-reference the reasons with the hat and bomb data we have in user's TLP histories (which are public if you know how to find them) and go from there. People who are repeatedly copy-pasting hatting reasons on undeserved drafts will be found out real fast, and people who aren't paying attention to the comments or process will be very easy to weed out as well. Yeah, some issues will slip through the cracks, but it'll be pretty obvious as to who is trying to "game the system" and who legit doesn't understand how the TLP works.

So it's both. I want to understand why people throw hats at everything, and I want to weed out the bad hats so that drafts may be able to be prevented from launching if there's a good enough justification to say that the hats the draft have should not be accepted.

Edited by WarJay77 on Jun 25th 2023 at 12:37:22 PM

Current Project: Incorruptible Pure Pureness