Ask The Tropers

Delete it. Inactive characters do have tropes.

Roleplays still fall under The Fic May Be Yours, but the Trope Page Is Ours. It's a rule for all the pages & media here. So, yeah, I vote for nailing that line. It does sound like someone's trying to claim ownership of the page.

Will cut.

Roleplays follow the same rules as every other work, and there's no rule anywhere that supports unpersoning characters who haven't appeared in a work recently.

I agree with cutting it, for reasons already stated.

Wonderful. I'm glad we all agree. And thanks for taking the notice off.

Aye, that kind of note is inappropriate. Any character can be troped, even if they currently do not appear.

Who placed the note?

Someone named SHAEN The Brain like, 4 years ago.

^ The user hasn't been active for years, too, so there's no point in sending a notifier.

I don't understand why you people keep messing with our page without even expending a modicum of effort on doing us the simple common courtesy of contacting us about it. There are multiple recent edits pointing to active players who could be a point of contact.

That notice was added because we have a couple dozen players active at any one time, with a fairly large turnover, and if we left every single character anyone ever created for the site on the page then it would balloon up to literally thousands of characters, most of whom aren't relevant to any of the current storylines and haven't been for years. It was as much for the benefit of you people as it was for us, since TVT admins have been complaining at us for the size of the page since we created the damned thing.

Despite barely being updated in years, that page continues to serve as our primary recruiting tool, so we'd greatly appreciate it if you people would at least tell us when you plan on messing around with it, and why.

"You people" is being leveled at tropers, of which you are a part, whether or not you consider yourself one. All work pages are subject to the TVT rules.

The pages may serve as a good way to recruit new players, but that should not be their primary purpose.

May I chime in as a regular troper who does lots of cleanup work? I assume your outrage is aimed at commented-out zero-context examples.

I don't understand why you roleplay enthusiasts create tons and tons of pages with minimal effort without actually checking this wiki's guidelines and rules; those pages linked above are literally filled with zero-context examples, poor formatting, misuse and empty folders. The cheek of you!

My sincere apologies to tropers who like troping roleplays and write good articles. There are some decent ones.

If you have thousands and thousands characters, that's fine. You can split the character sheets in several. Even one page per one character is okay if there is enough content.

We could always make trope pages specifically for inactive characters.

Man, if the page got that big, it should've been split even more, not chopped down. Alternatively, the "inactive character page" idea would also work.

Let's keep the alphabetical order, no separation of active and inactive.

I think ~Grumblefloof just vandalized the character sheets we talked about. A whole folder was deleted here: Characters.Freedom City Play By Post PQR and here: Freedom City Play By Post MNO. (Possibly more, these two just showed up on the pages I followed because of the ZCE cleanup).

It was done without an edit reason, so I don't think it was moved to another subpage. I assume it has something to do with the roleplayers' rule about deleting entries for non-active characters (which we just decided is against the wiki rules), or perhaps with their anger at the cleanup efforts. Link to the roleplay cleanup thread discussion.

Can we get a revert?

^ Done; let's see what happens from here.

EDIT: disregard, the content I am referring to appears to have been snagged in a mod revert

Fighteer went ahead and suspended them.

The question that's coming to me right now: Is Grumblefloof a one time thing, a Vocal Minority that's taking this too personally, or will we possibly have issues with other members of this Roleplay?

^ Not sure about this particular roleplay, but there was at least one ...incident when roleplayers took cleanup way too personally.

I just want to say that once the cleanup of the pages is finished, they're not gonna be bad character sheets. Some characters have decent list of tropes with context. The editors include pictures which almost always looks nice. I honestly don't understand what's so triggering about the whole thing.

The ZCE and empty folders have been commented out, but of course anyone from the roleplay can explain the examples and make the tropes visible again.

We agreed that inactive characters shall not be deleted, but again — they can add a note to the character description. "This character retired from the game in June 2019." Done. It's still a part if their story, and it should be good that it's documented. Might be interesting to them as readers/participants of the game and potentially to any wiki reader who is looking for examples of certain tropes in unique works. (That's how I stumbled on the pages in the first place, btw. I'm interested in all examples of Spoiled Sweet (that are not misuse) and how they're used in various works.)

I mean, that's one of the most interesting things about this wiki; we don't just define tropes, but we show people how they're used in all sorts of different works and contexts. It's pretty cool that the same trope can be used a variety of unique ways in different works, and it's unfortunate when proper examples get deleted- especially if it's just because the creator doesn't think the information deserves to stay.