This is the thread we use to talk things over with people who have received a suspension notice. A lot of the time the notice goes out just so we can explain how seriously we take certain things, not because we want the person to feel bad and go away.
If you're suspended, give What to Do If You Are Suspended a read, then post here to begin your appeal. We try to respond to appeals in order via batch posts every few days. If a moderator has responded to your appeal, you will receive a notification in your private messages, even if you're suspended from PMs.
The Forum Rules
apply here.
Don'ts
- Don't be rude. Rule 1 applies here, too.
- Don't try to negotiate your suspension outside of this thread, such as by sending Private Messages to moderators or posting elsewhere. Such activity may be thumped or otherwise removed, and may warrant an additional suspension block if it keeps happening. All communications have to take place within this thread.
- Don't respond to other suspended users. This is a place for you to discuss your suspension, not others'.
- Don't spam the thread about your appeal, since it makes it more difficult to compose responses. If you've posted, we're likely looking at it, and kindly request you to be more patient.
- Don't make another account to try and get around your suspension. This is called ban evasion and will get you bounced. (Again, read What to Do If You Are Suspended if you don't know what these words mean.)
Edited by GastonRabbit on Apr 30th 2025 at 11:56:51 AM
~tetrahedronX790: For making no effort whatsoever to understand and comply with our requirements, you are now bounced.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"I just got a notification that my ability to edit the wiki has been suspended, and for the life of me I can't see why.
The linked Administrivia page provides several examples of things I have not been doing; perhaps the closest is where it mentions Zero-Context Example, which someone almost a month ago flagged one of my edits as, but that edit has since been deleted and it has not happened again, so the "persistent problems with" it does not appear to apply here. (Ironically enough, my suspension seems to have come with zero context!)
Could someone explain to me what went wrong and how I can fix it? If I've done something wrong I definitely want to do better, but according to the rules as-stated, I honestly don't see anything.
~A Random Page: "Don't be rude to people" is not something you can prove you've learned other than by not being rude to people, but we are going to mute you in this thread if you don't stop asking these inane questions. It's not our job to teach you how to interact with other human beings.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"~Mason Wheeler: There are several problems, in fact. One is zero-context examples, although as I look at your history I see that it's not so much zero context as insufficient context. For example, on Literature.I Do Not Want To Do This, you added examples for Extreme Doormat and The Berserker that run into our Word Cruft policy in that they spend a lot of time talking about the tropes without illustrating them. When stripped of all the extra language they read as, "This character is an example of the trope, except when they aren't."
- It is not necessary to say that an example is an example. We get that from the fact that it's in the list.
- Don't talk about how other characters react; just say what the character says or does. By way of illustration:
- Extreme Doormat: "When Bob asks Alice for her car keys, she gives them immediately without even asking why, even though he crashed her car the last time."
In your The Berserker example, you write, "Daheþ, who Joanna worships, is known for this." That's exactly what I'm talking about. At no point in the entire text of the example does it mention Daheþ actually going berserk.
Other problems include:
- Using wiki discussions and review comments to complain — in one case digging up a review from six years ago to tell everyone why Firaxis sucks, and in another adding a They Changed It, Now It Sucks! example to an article that's just a personal rant. See Complaining About Shows You Don't Like for why we discourage this.
- Making stub Trope Launch Pad drafts. If you're going to put something in TLP, you need to be willing to go to the effort of following through.
- Using the [invoked] tag to stick an example of The Woobie in a main page. That's not how it's supposed to be used.
- In that same article, using slashes to separate two tropes in one example, which is also explicitly mentioned in How to Write an Example.
In short, you need to clean up your act, and sending you individual notifiers isn't useful when there are so many issues to go over.
Edited by Fighteer on Apr 7th 2022 at 1:45:07 PM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"I've gone too far with my questions... I can't prove that I won't be rude unless I have a chance to not be rude, and we know that's not happening for a month. Seeing how unequipped I am for this, I won't return to this thread, even if I want to ask things, until April 20. If I feel like posting here is unneeded, I'll try to extend this to May 1.
Troper Wall, sandbox, and I'm trying to kill typos.~A Random Page: Dude, seriously. We are not going to keep a scheduled suspension for you, nor do we care about your self-imposed deadlines. As Fighteer has said, we can't really ask you to 'prove' that you aren't an ass in this thread, but we are not looking for self-flagellation either.
Just answer these questions: Do you think you are capable of being polite to other users if we release you? Can you tell if your wording might offend the person you are talking to? If someone tells you to stop doing something because it hurts them, will you actually stop?
These are the behaviors that got you suspended. If the answer to those questions is yes, then we can move forward. If the answer is no, then don't bother appealing next week or next month.
Ok I'm sorry, I just don't understand what you're asking me to do, and for the record I did read the sinkhole page I just didn't understand it. Do you want me to stop using so many links in my entries? I would very appreciate it if you guys would just tell me instead of sending me to a useful notes page.
~M3S: If you can't tell us why we have a rule, then you don't understand it, and that means you are going to keep breaking it. The purpose of a suspension is to get you to stop breaking the rules.
You were asked here
to count the number of potholes and explain, in your own words, why you shouldn't do that. You appear to be in a university, so you ought to understand the concept of homework and doing your own research.
Edited by Fighteer on Apr 7th 2022 at 3:03:39 PM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Oh, ok I see I was banned because I made some chained sinkholes, I didn't know that wasn't allowed I'm sorry, I just saw them on quite a bit of pages on here, it won't happen again.
I see that I've been suspended, and I think I know exactly why. On Electric Dragon 505/Animat's page, I labelled him as a jerkass for some really horrible things he said about Sony and politics. I now know that labeling a real person as a jerkass breaks ROCEJ (I initially thought my lack of proof was the ROCEJ part, but I now know just putting that trope on a real person's page is not allowed, and also I was edit warring, which was not okay), and would like to have my suspension lifted, and will not touch that page again.
Edit: I accidentally hollered this because I thought that would be the only way to reach the moderators faster, since this thread gets cluttered. I didn't know that it was a report button. My bad.
Edited by Chewbacca on Apr 7th 2022 at 5:01:51 AM
~crazysamaritan About my edit on The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie, I think I can name all the rules and why I would have broke them
First, the obvious: it's a Zero-Context Example. I am aware that one should avoid writing these, but in my case, I couldn't really think of a proper way to describe my edit. The meme "I FUCKING LOVE WAR" could be described as a way to talk about things that you like, but there just wasn't really a hook that I could use to describe it in that way.
Secondly, it wasn't exactly listed in a very elegant way, just sort of tacked on to the already existing and much more well known meme of screaming Patrick. Though I may have thought it looked alright, this probably doesn't fit the example indentation rules.
Finally, the meme doesn't really exist outside of Reddit, in which case it wouldn't really make this a case of a Memetic Mutation, since it's localized in place. I probably should have realized that sooner.
After considering all of this I realize I should probably not touch Memetic Mutation examples again, since I can't really write well for them and it usually ends up badly anyway.
Edited by Tux1 on Apr 7th 2022 at 8:33:09 AM
"I definitely know what science is."Why have my messages been banned? All I did was ask Fighteer why I couldn't ask him a question.
Edited by Spidey on Apr 7th 2022 at 11:11:41 AM
"Unite GUN/BAZOOKA/LAUNCHER/TANK!"Alright, fine...
Thanks for clearing this up, Synchronicity. The answers are "yes?", as I think I can stop being rude/snarky/whatever due to this suspension and being able to prevent that behavior on two other sites.
I'm gonna reveal the reasoning for my timeouts (both of which were broken). Both were responses to scary posts from Fighteer, who, from lurking experience, is usually the one to ban/bounce people. I felt like talking further would get me banned. I don't want to get banned, and I was also looking to prove that I won't be rude. So, I timed myself out so I could develop myself further, and I looked to demonstrate that by moving to an other other wiki and becoming a prolific contributor with little to no incidents of rudeness, which has partially succeeded so far.
Edited by ARandomPage on Apr 7th 2022 at 10:25:42 PM
Troper Wall, sandbox, and I'm trying to kill typos.~Spidey: Because it's not just me you're harassing via PMs. There's something wrong with you. I don't know what it is, but most people can learn from mistakes and accept correction. You can't. There is no point in continuing to fuss with taking away your privileges a little at a time in the hopes that something changes. You're permanently banned from all site activities.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"~Fighteer, crazysamaritan, and Synchronicity: Do you and the other mods trust that I've learned my lesson on Rule of Cautious Editing Judgment and edit warring considering the previous post I put on this board (currently it looks like it's getting lost in some failed appeals) as well as this one? I believe breaking those two rules on AniMat by calling him a jerkass are why I got suspended, and I fully own up to my mistakes and would like to have my wiki privileges back please. If I was suspended for a different reason, let me know please. Thank you.
Edited by Chewbacca on Apr 8th 2022 at 12:51:14 PM
Access to my PMs and the TLP (Wow. I wasn't suspended there for quite some time. How surprising!) are no more. I can only fear the worst. I'll ask another question.
How close am I to getting permanently banned?
Troper Wall, sandbox, and I'm trying to kill typos.~Fighteer Thank you for the examples. I suppose my only reason for all this is, things have changed a lot around here.
I've been an active Troper for about 15 years now. I've never done anything actually bad. (Vandalizing pages, doxxing people, breaking ROCEJ, etc.) I learned the style of the wiki by reading it, and all of these things that are apparently considered suspendable offenses today were quite normal for a long time. It's difficult to follow the rules when they get changed out from under you with no warning!
But if these things are no longer considered acceptable around here, I'll definitely keep that in mind going forward.
A few points of clarification:
- The Trope Launch Pad draft. I created the proposal, then quickly got a reply that it was similar to an existing proposal that had a lot more engagement already. So I abandoned it; I didn't "go to the effort of following through" because I felt it would be pointless to do so with a duplicate proposal. What would have been a better way to handle that?
- Using [invoked] on The Woobie. The notes say that [invoked] is for trope examples that are normally YMMV but are used in-universe, and in the story in question this is a key component of Brad's relationship with Joanna. He sees her as someone tormented by factors that are not her fault, and wants to (and does) try to comfort her. Isn't that exactly the type of thing [invoked] is for? If not, what's the correct way to express it?
Edited by MasonWheeler on Apr 8th 2022 at 2:48:23 AM
~M 3 S — You were given a pre-written private message and an edit history reason informing you of that fact. You persisted in breaking the same rules afterwards. We'd like to be certain that you aren't trying to simply going to go back to the same behaviour after we release you. That goes for other rules that editors may message you about in the future as well (not just sinkholes).
You can either answer my earlier three questions, or you could demonstrate your understanding by explaining how to properly write a Pot Hole and why chaining multiple potholes together is a bad idea.
~Chewbacca — A pretty good understanding there. However, there's a detail that I'd like to clarify. An article about the "real life person" would be in the UsefulNotes/ namespace. You were adding a morality trope about a real person to an article about their work. Their work is about reviewing other people's work. So what we trope is their reviews, not whatever political/economic opinions they have. Both Nice Guy and Jerkass are indexed under NoRealLife.Morality Tropes so even if this wasn't violating ROCEJ, both of those tropes were trying to apply moral judgement to the creator, not the character doing the reviews.
The full policy on that is at No Real Life Examples, Please!. Please read the article before responding.
~Tux1 —
- Correct
- The policy is Example Indentation in Trope Lists, and the part that you broke is "Don't list one example, and then indent the others under it."
- No, and this reveals how little research you did before trying to add the example. The lack of research is why you ended up writing a ZCE because the meme did spread outside of reddit
, and even if it didn't, that would still qualify for Memetic Mutation.
~A Random Page — Again, this depends on you. You seem to be building up disasters in your own mind with What If? scenarios. This post
is what we want/expect from editors posting in this thread. This post
is regressing to the same sort of flame-out that causes editors to get bounced.
"Stay calm and carry on" and all that. You lost the other permissions because your inability to stay calm had us concerned that you'd try to do something foolish on the permissions that you had left. If you need time, take it. We don't need the announcements; we will wait here as long as necessary for you to be ready.
Your fourth post
shows how you started twisting yourself around based on a perceived failure to live up to perfection. Calm down. We aren't therapists and therefore cannot help with that internal conflict. We cannot see the future, so we will not refuse a promise to avoid rudeness. We are not secret government agents who will send squads of enforcers to collect your computer if you make a mistake; we are overwhelmed kindergarten teachers running around making sure Aaron and Bobbie aren't getting into a fight over the crayons while a hundred other groups demand our attention. Once we can see that you're ready to begin contributing again, we will move on to the next problem/project. How do we see it? You make a straightforward post explaining that you understand the issue (in this case, being nasty to other editors) and that you promise not to do it again.
I just noticed I was suspended from editing; I only edit very rarely, and I can't even remember the last time I did. What did I do to get suspended?
Crazy Samaritan I have my answers for your three questions 1. you put six links in that one sentence, 2. the links you set up lead to One to Million to One, Two Word Emphisis, two links to A Million Is a Statistic under the same word Million, Two-Timer Date, and finally Not a Date, and 3. the sentence should only link to One to Million to One, as the sentence says, the other links are unnecessary and have nothing to do with the first one, also A Million Is A Statitic shouldn't need two links let alone in the same word.
~crazysamaritan: Yep, I read the No real life examples page and understand how real life morality tropes work now. Even if most everybody can agree that a real life subject of an article is a scumbag, the jerkass point is too subjective. I initially thought it would be fine since Animat shoves his political and economic views into his reviews all the time, but copying that example isn't good, and the list you gave me was very objective. The nice guy trope I removed wasn't allowed under Morality Tropes, but so was the jerkass tag I added, along with others like evil twin, heroic bastard, and neutral evil. Now that both the nice guy and jerkass tags are gone, I have no reason to touch that page again. Do you trust that I won't repeat this mistake, and feel safe lifting my suspension?
Edited by Chewbacca on Apr 8th 2022 at 9:35:32 AM
Hello, I am just asking if I can get my editing privileges reinstated since most of it was simple grammatical errors that I didn’t even know I did.
~Reviewer2016: Proper English is mandatory on our wiki. That you did not know you were making grammatical errors is exactly the problem. Well, if you were doing it deliberately I'd be worried too, but for a different reason.
So, how do you plan to address this? If you keep making mistakes, you will be permanently banned. Promising to "do better" is not good enough. We have a forum topic
where you can ask for proofreading help. Post in there for a while, demonstrate enough improvement, and we'll give you another chance.
If I were to rewrite the edit I did, I would probably do something like this:
- Memetic Mutation:
- Surprised Patrick
◊Explanation
- I FUCKING LOVE WAR
◊Explanation
- Surprised Patrick
I do realize that I may have had other edits which don't quite follow the guidelines, and I am willing to correct those as well.
"I definitely know what science is."

hi guys how can you appeal my suspension? because of my poor English of course but I am also new here because according tv trope version of the Freudian trio super ego is logical? ego in-between? and id emotional? while is the Freudian trio is the superego is moral and ego logic id is still emotional and impulsive.
Edited by tetrahedronX790 on Apr 6th 2022 at 12:15:43 PM