Trope Launch Pad Improvements & Changes

My one concern now is concerns that hats and bombs will probably be frustrated by redundant reasoning. Don't think that's strong enough to offset the upsides, though.

As long as the reasoning is legitimate, I don't see a problem with redundancy.

I lean on making hat reasons mandatory, it won't cause a problem. If proved to not show anything interesting it can be disabled later.

Ya we can do both hat and bomb reasons. That’s fine. But beyond the hats and bombs, any other ideas that could help streamline the process of launches?

I know there are still times where people launch with the wrong title (launch date in title, incorrect capitalization, etc.) so maybe there's something we can do to lower those mistakes?

Edited by Hello83433 on Jun 25th 2023 at 7:17:19 AM

I don't know that there's much we can do along those lines aside from putting launches in an approval queue for the mods, and I'm very hesitant to take on that kind of workload, to put it mildly.

That sounds like something that be should saved for if/when the Engineers actually exist.

Edited by badtothebaritone on Jun 26th 2023 at 2:52:20 PM

I don't like the idea of a queue at all, no matter who runs it. It's more trouble than just... making sure everyone is following the rules and acting appropriately. There's also the risk of bias or percieved bias, if engineers or mods are involved in the TLP discussion, and don't believe the trope should be launched. Most tropes launch without issues in their title, so we don't need an entire queue system just to solve a pretty minor issue.

I've always liked the "3 day wait limit before bombs and hats" idea, but IDK if it can be coded. It's just a way to force people to actually give feedback and try to HELP a draft in the early stages, instead of immediately resorting to hats and bombs.

Edited by WarJay77 on Jun 26th 2023 at 3:58:56 PM

If that can be coded, I'd be down for the 3-day pre-hat/bomb grace period.

For reducing the number of accidentally mistitled pages, maybe the launch box could say some extra stuff before Launch Trope, like, "That will be the title of the page. Ensure it's correctly formatted before pressing the button!"

Or, if possible: This will be the title of the page. Make sure you want the page to be called: Trope Namelaunching 627 <- where that is an automatically generated "preview" of the wiki word once launched

Hey, maybe there could be a special field for a sponsor to add comments (launch dates, help requests, etc) without it having to be attached to the title or laconic.

Thing is, the title preview your suggesting already exists. It pops up when you're launching and you have the chance to change it. So people not doing that isn't a system error, it's people rushing.

Edited by WarJay77 on Jun 26th 2023 at 5:00:01 AM

Well if you guys think limiting bombs and hats for multiple days will actually lead to more help and better quality drafts then I can try to implement that. We can always remove it if it has undesired effects.

warjay77,

A special field for status is already in my list.

Edited by kory on Jun 26th 2023 at 3:21:31 AM

Then that removes the title issue almost entirely

That just leaves miscapitalized titles and disallowed characters in wiki words, then.

There's some formatting limitations in the TLP that can mess up drafts or make them harder to work with.

Special characters get turned into gibberish upon editing. I see there's a bug report for this which is marked as 'working'.

Hang on, I'll just copy over what I wrote in the mods' tech wishlist a while back:

(I know a change for the bookmark feature is coming up, and the "retract hat/bomb" thing is listed in the OP)

The "red links showing as blue in comments" thing means that if people cite a policy page that is later cut, they won't know it.

Double backslashes are used for multi-line quotes, so not being able to use them in TLP means that you have to indent each line separately instead, which is less convenient.

Edited by Twiddler on Jun 26th 2023 at 5:25:42 AM

the three day hat/bomb wait is a great idea. there's so many drafts that gather a bunch of bombs or hats when they're not actually broken, just rough, but also not ready to launch. could even be in the form of a button— "Is this trope Ready to Launch? Click here to open your draft for final voting". But either way it's a good idea and will help reduce both unready drafts being hatted and good unpolished ideas being bombed.

at the moment a lot of people use hats and bombs as "upvote/ downvote" for the idea as a whole, and the format encourages that— there's no other option to vote for except launch or discard, and voting is open immediately upon draft creation. so people bomb to offset hats (its not ready!) and hat to offset bombs (don't discard this, it's a good idea!)

Edited by Tremmor19 on Jun 26th 2023 at 8:43:48 AM

As I've been mentioning, new drafts should be tagged with Early Development Phase and have voting disabled. If they're not up to standards in three days time then getting bombs is only fair.

Edited by Amonimus on Jun 26th 2023 at 4:07:21 PM

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.

Related to this—a recent ban evader's TLP activity led to the question of whether hats and bombs from ban evaders should be struck from drafts. I think this potentially has merit.

Seconding this.

Thirding.

Okay added mods removal of hats/bombs and 3-day wait period for either being added to the list.

Any other ideas on ways to improve the process?

I know things like allowing mods to thump TLP comments has been brought up, that seems worth pursuing.

Also, the general bugfixes like making links work properly in the comments, getting rid of the weird "slash deletion glitch" that makes adding quotes so hard, and fixing the timestamp glitches too (comment edits don't have timestamps and change the posting date, while the timestamp associated with the "last edited by" thing goes based on the last comment and not the last actual edit).

Oh, and that reminds me of one thing I proposed once a while back — make a draft's age more obvious. People have really bad habits of accidentally commenting on ancient drafts under the assumption they're brand new because the creation date isn't very obvious.

If I had one more, maybe have a field for Trope/YMMV/Trivia/Other so it can automatically add the banner (if applicable) and make it easier to find stuff. But that's more of a "nice to have" than a significant bolster.

Agreeing to striking hats and bombs from ban evaders.

warjay77,

I put the timestamp glitch in the OP list, but what are these two glitches? “ making links work properly in the comments, getting rid of the weird "slash deletion glitch" that makes adding quotes so hard”

Edited by kory on Jul 2nd 2023 at 8:18:29 AM

The first glitch is just what it sounds like: in TLP comments, links don't work as they should, in that everything looks like a blue-link. This can be confusing if someone mistyped a work title or trope page, or if something got cut, or what have you.

The slash glitch is a little harder to explain, but basically you need to use backslashes to create new paragraphs for certain quotes. Saving a TLP draft deletes these backslashes, breaking the formatting.

I pointed out those two glitches in my earlier post, too.

Backslash markup is explained on Text-Formatting Rules, in the "Paragraphs" and "Quotes Formatting" folders.

In TLP drafts, every time you save a draft with backslashes, the number of backslashes gets cut in half, rounded down. So if you have

->line 1\\

the next time it's edited, that line will be

->line 1\

instead. And on the next edit, it'll be

->line 1