Ask The Tropers

For what it’s worth, Ex sent me something similar. The “vouching” ended up being for a candidate whose work Ex admits he hasn’t seen, so I just ignored it, but it did rub me the wrong way too.

Mr-ex777's forum suspension is for discourtesy and off-topic posting more so than participation in Complete Monster, and I can't tell if the PMs intend to skirt the forum ban or are just an attempt to be conversational. Noteworthy but not grounds for further action, I think.

He's showing serial tweaking habits on the sandbox that I think would be concerning anywhere, and today he added a character to the sandbox before the cut had been finalized

Okay yeah, I'm getting very concerned about their edits to Former Complete Monsters. They're adding cuts and moving things from the "By Troper" section before discussion is anywhere near concluded yet, and it's meaning that they're having to go in and edit it like six times when all is said and done. Just to top it off, he keeps putting things in the wrong place, so then he has to go back in and move it again. It's cluttering the edit history and making things very difficult to find.

Yeah the sandbox tampering is my biggest issue atm, he's doing a lot of pointless, impulsive edits before full discussions are even completed and is including, IMO, what seems to be a lot of natter.

Ok, over two dozen tweaks to the Former... sandboxes in an hour is excessive. PMing...

Bumping because it's worth mentioning that the serial tweaking is still happening, this time on SoYouWantTo.Complete Monster. 23 times in a bit over 24 hours, and just about all of them is just adding "examples" to paragraphs, which is turning the entire page into a wall of natter. It's also worth pointing out how he felt the need to randomly add rape to an entry, which is notable because he kept adding rape into hypotheticals in a recent discussion, to the point that multiple people were begging him to stop.

Edit: Okay, I'm really concerned about the rape stuff now. He added an entire paragraph about it (where he noticeably continues to use the "brutally raped" phrasing for some reason), worked it into a completely unrelated paragraph, and I noticed he kept tweaking a paragraph that included the phrase "horribly raped" and lo and behold, he added it all the way back in September. In isolation none of these are concerning, but the consistent shoehorning it is getting a little disturbing, honestly

Yeah, I was pretty disturbed by his obsessive focus on bringing up "brutal rapes" at every hypothetical turn in that linked thread, just wanted to throw in my two cents

Like, full disclosure, I don't mind stuff being added to the Sandbox for former because it saves me some work, but is Yazan officially a consensus cut yet?

He added Kor Phaeron before he was a consensus cut too, and he keeps rewriting his writeup to be incredibly crufty. The first version was this

• Warhammer 40,000: Kor Phaeron (Extremely vile and passes WH40K's astronomically high heinous standard, but is indicated to have genuinely cared about Lorgar)

Which I would argue is incredibly crufty in its description of the heinous standard and also that the heinousness of a former CM not being cut for heinousness is a moot point. This entry also received something like 5 tweaks in the space of a few hours to fix grammar and formatting issues, which is never a good sign. Today he altered the cut down version of the entry to

• Warhammer 40,000: Kor Phaeron (is indicated to genuinely care about Lorgar and did not kill prophet Jepeth to save his own skin as the whiteup stated)

Which, typo aside doesn't feel super relevant to why he was actually cut

Ex also made a Tabletop Games folder for Jor Phaeron without moving the other Tabletop former CMs out of the Other Media folder. In general, it feels like he's rushing to put his mark on the sandbox without taking time to think about his edits

Serial tweaking and writing about how evil certain characters are seems like a general habit for them.

In this deep dive of their edits I discovered that the person who actually thought Cambodia should be OBC wasn't Sieg, but Ex.

In general even beyond CM stuff they have questionable editing habits.

Gonna also voice my concern about his questionable edits and posts in that above discussion.

^^ Ah, so they were probably saying that OBC labelled was bad in the worst way possible. Guess we can take that concern off the table

Like for instance, he wrote this entry for NightmareFuel.Criminal Minds:

• The UnSub, only known as "Lucy" is the leader of a human trafficking ring who abducts troubled students from carefree backgrounds and hold events where her ring offers the victims to rich customers to exert their depraved sexual fetishes, of which included throat slitting and fatal strangling. It's implied that they're not only local, but international. At least we don't get to see what their "shows" are.

...then just a little bit later edited it seemingly solely to include the word "rape" multiple times

• The UnSub, only known as "Lucy" is the leader of a human trafficking ring who abducts troubled students from carefree backgrounds and hold events where her ring offers the victims to rich customers to be raped and used as outlets for whatever depraved sexual fetishes they have such as throat slitting and strangling. There are at least 63 dead and even more raped and tortured over this. It's implied that they're not only local, but international. At least we don't get to see what their "shows" are.

Once or twice of this kinda stuff isn't much concern to me, but the user seems...intent on reiterating "rape and torture rape and torture" in both edits and forums, to a concerning degree.

Bumping because it fell to the second page

And bumping again because Ex is still jumping the gun on adding stuff to Former Complete Monsters before discussion wraps up. He's basically adding things the absolute first second he can instead of actually waiting for the cuts to go through, and as Agent notes below, he's going so fast that he's not observing any proper formatting etiquette.

Edit: And he's even continuing to make changes to SoYouWantTo.Write A Complete Monster to make several adjustments for Cinder Fall being cut by the thread (specifically, adding her as an "example" for reasons why a character doesn't count), even though this discussion began like an hour ago and is still happening

Edit 2: And just for the hell of it, here's another two times Ex gratuitously added more rape to examples that didn't need it, with the second going back to July

Also he didn't italicize the work name, or add a colon to the example, and the description of why she got cut is pretty vague.

But yeah he added that example about 22 minutes after the cut post was posted, the cleanup thread is still on the same page it was posted on

Yeah, that's way too fast. We don't have discussion periods for cuts like proposals, but that's way too fast and I would not call that a finished discussion

I'm also still concerned about the rate at which they're filling the "so you want to" page. There's explaining something fun, and then there's making the page massive and rambly. It seems to be a recurring issue with their edits, gun jumping and rape aside.

Yeah, checking the edit history for the SYWT page has 64 pages worth of history. Checking how many Ex has, he has 40 pages worth of edits, that's almost 2/3's of the entire pages history

Yeah this bit about the amount of edits he's done is not ok at all IMO. The page is downright ghastly to look at because of all the natter he's injected it with.

Yeah, I feel weird about the So You Want To page in general, I feel like it kind of encourages the "badge of honour" mentality, but that's definitely weird even by those standards

Likewise agreeing that all those edits to the So You Want To page are very strange and not okay in the least.

Would a mod revert be too extreme a request, to clean up all the nattery stuff?

My worry is that if he's made 2/3s of the edits some useful things might get swept up in a revert.

Mmmm, I'd add that I thought it was kind of unnerving how often those specific examples came up in the CM discussion—but if it's coming up on any semi-related page, that's concerning.

I don't follow CM stuff at all but I would like to observe that the SYWT page has way too many citations of specific examples. Readers can't be expected to be familiar with all of these works, and some of what's said may be spoilers (I haven't looked closely).

Yeah, idk how many of those were done by Ex but they're definitely unnecessary. If the reader is unfamiliar with the work, they don't mean anything, and honestly most of the ones I'm familiar with are just distracting

This thread may have gotten too long for the mods. May be smart to make a new one with every issue presented.

I'm unwilling to perform reversions on pages with a fair amount of good edits between, even if the bad edits are frequent. Cleanup afterward is still work for other tropers, and the history hides the changes rolled back.

Would it be better to create a sandbox to show a proposed version and then swap?

Wait has he been suspended?