Hey tropers, we are about to undergo a large update to the tvtropes' database to convert the encoding. During this time the login system will be offline. You'll still be able to read TVTropes but you won't be able to post or edit anything during the conversion.
How long will the login system be down?
My most recent test run took 9 hours (my first test took 20+ hours so this is after a lot of optimizations to get down to 9 hours). ***it will now take 11 hours. see update below
Can you give me more details?
TVTropes was originally hosted on Windows' servers back in the day and all content on the site is encoded with Windows 1252 (a superset of ISO-8859-1, aka latin1).
According to the W3Tech, only 1.3% of internet traffic is ISO-8859-1. I'm guessing a large amount of that is TVTropes considering we have millions of pages defined with that charset.
The majority of the internet is encoded in UTF8. By doing this conversion it will bring us up to modern standards with the rest of the web and allow us to more easily support other languages and icons. It will also allow us to use more modern tools to help with editing such adding a WYSIWYG editor option. It will also help with code development as we often have to add special workarounds to continue to support this long deprecated charset.
Are we changing anything else?
While we have the login system offline, we are going to upgrade the edits history database table to include a sequence number. We've always wanted to do this but it could not be done while the site was online. That table has 40M+ rows of data. With this change we'll be able to make it so we can easily jump to any page when filtering to edits from a specific page or from a specific user. We have this for the forum and that's why you can jump to page 500 for example of a long running thread and not have a long delay.
When will this happen?
UPDATE: (take two) This is now scheduled for Mon Dec 5th at 8:30PM PST until Tue Dec 6th at 7:30AM
At 8:30PM PST you will be logged-off of TVTropes so make sure to save anything before that time. Once the conversion is done the next morning, I'll point the code to the new server and everyone should be auto logged in. If not, when you see the all clear announcement at the top of the page, go ahead and try logging in again.
The process will take approximately 11 hours. I had it down to 9 hours until I found examples of utf8 encoded values inside latin1 columns so I had to add some extra testing to ensure that data doesn't get double encoded in the process.
If you have any issues during the migration please send an email to thestaff@tvtropes.org
UPDATE: (complete) The migration is officially complete. It ended up taking nearly 12 hours but we got there. All data on TVTropes (hundreds of millions of rows of data) has now been converted from Latin1 to UTF8. We now have the same encoding as 99% of other websites and can support special characters and other languages. It will also allow us to build other tools such as a WYSIWYG editor.
Edited by itcdr on Dec 6th 2023 at 8:48:40 AM
Minor nitpick about monospace font: can it use the browser-defined font for monospace instead of forcing Courier New? I prefer Consolas and I'm not fan of my option being overridden by the site. (Strangely, the post editor shows my preferred font just fine; this mostly affects the article editor and histories).
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
, This discussion thread seems to have dwindled, best course of action now would be to make wishlist and bug reports.
One-Track Mind (he/him)
Yeah, I concur. I therefore propose this thread is unstickied and locked due to having served its purpose.
Tyrannoraptoran Reptiliomorph
Are the new history and edit fonts here to stay?
Join the Five-Man Band cleanup project!
I like that; that it gives people options. It also seems like it could be the first step towards that fancy visual editor you've been talking about.
Admin
The visual editor
is actually complete except for a few issues with the mark-up conversion we are trying to fix at the moment before we launch it for the engineers and moderators to test. After a short testing period then it’ll go live for everyone 
Friends forevermore
The "edit page" URL has included the term WYSIWYG since the beginning. Almost twenty years later, it's time to turn this into reality!
I had a dog-themed avatar before it was cool.
Tyrannoraptoran Reptiliomorph
How do I toggle the history/edit fonts again?
![[down]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_down.png "[down]"){kind=icon}
Thanks, I just didn’t think to look there for some reason.
Edited by Lymantria on Dec 9th 2023 at 6:42:55 PM
Join the Five-Man Band cleanup project!
Tyrannoraptoran Reptiliomorph
There’s no toggle on the history pages, though. Is this intentional?
Join the Five-Man Band cleanup project!
One-Track Mind (he/him)
Personally, I don't mind. I think the edit history pages are easier to read now.
Absolute Rainbow & the tales between worlds
What does WYSIWYG mean?
Absolute Rainbow
the Retromancer
What You See Is What You Get, aka Visual Editor.
As asked before, is there anything left on the conversion topic?
TroperWall / WikiMagic Cleanup
Absolute Rainbow & the tales between worlds
What's the specific benefits of, well... WYSIWYG?
Absolute Rainbow
the Retromancer
You see the page as it would appear on-page while typing, without pressing Preview every time. Microsoft Word works the same way as fonts are actually also invisible-to-users blocks.
🍊orange fursona🧡
Wikipedia links with accented marks still has this jumbled mess
ᜇᜎᜈ᜔ᜇᜈ᜔|I DO COMMISSIONS|ᜇᜎᜈ᜔ᜇᜈ᜔
the Retromancer
Examples? Links usually have own URL Encode method because unicode in web address actually uses own format.
TroperWall / WikiMagic Cleanup
🍊orange fursona🧡
I was editing the page for Charles Perrault, about his membership in the Academie Francaise, and the Wikipedia link almost ended up like this -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AcadA9mie_FranA7aise
I just ended up with the accented versions of the links.
ᜇᜎᜈ᜔ᜇᜈ᜔|I DO COMMISSIONS|ᜇᜎᜈ᜔ᜇᜈ᜔
He/Him
On Blackmail there's this entry for Hamilton linking to the Reynolds affair Wikipedia page
- The Reynolds Affair drives much of the second act of Hamilton. Maria Reynolds seduces him, then she and her husband blackmail him by threatening to publish the proof. Which is a problem, given that Hamilton is 1) active in politics and 2) mostly-happily married. Unlike most examples of this trope, Hamilton does go public, though only because the proof of his affair exonerates him from an accusation of embezzlement.note It works, but he almost loses his wife and his career as a result.
Yet it ends up saying "Bad Title"
Art Museum Curator and frequent helper of the Web Original deprecation project
, I replaced the links. They work now.
Edited by Twiddler on Dec 21st 2023 at 6:34:07 AM
He/Him
We should probably go through We Are Not Alone Index and fix as many links as possible
Art Museum Curator and frequent helper of the Web Original deprecation project
Absolute Rainbow & the tales between worlds
When will WYSIWYG be added?
Absolute Rainbow
About the monospace font, on the history page when it's on, I've noticed there's a difference in line spacing. Here's a comparison
◊ when it is off. And (if needed) here's how the spacing looked
◊ before the update (via WayBack). It is possible for the spacing to be fixed?
Your receipt. You can keep the freakin' change.