Have a question about how the TVTropes wiki works? No one knows this community better than the people in it, so ask away! Ask the Tropers is the page you come to when you have a question burning in your brain and the support pages didn't help.
It's not for everything, though. For a list of all the resources for your questions, click here. You can also go to this Directory thread
for ongoing cleanup projects.
Ask the Tropers is for:
- General questions about the wiki, how it works, and how to do things.
- Reports of problems with wiki articles, or requests for help with wiki articles.
- Reports of misbehavior or abuse by other tropers.
Ask the Tropers is not for:
- Help identifying a trope. See TropeFinder.
- Help identifying a work. See MediaFinder.
- Asking if a trope example is valid. See the Trope Talk forum.
- Proposing new tropes. See TropeLaunchPad.
- Making bug reports. See QueryBugs.
- Asking for new wiki features. See QueryWishlist.
- Chatting with other tropers. See our forums.
- Reporting problems with advertisements. See this forum topic.
- Reporting issues on the forums. Send a Holler instead.
Ask the Tropers:
openDoes This Violate No Real Life Examples? Web Original
I added an entry into Police Are Useless for The Last Podcast on the Left, but only afterward did I realize that the trope is in the No Real Life Examples, Please! index. I now have two questions: does the following violate NRLEP? If so, do I take it off the works page, too?
- The Last Podcast on the Left:
- The hosts often note times when police ineffectiveness is a major factor in how long a serial killer goes without getting caught. For example, in the Dean Coril series, they note the Huston police were underfunded and understaffed so much that, as a result, they actively avoided investigating things like homicides and shut down a victim's family when they provided a letter written by their missing son that they suspect was faked, but which Missing Persons took as evidence he was no longer missing.
- They also note occasions when a killer was caught by dumb luck or mistakes rather than anything police did. Leonard Lake and Charles Ng, for instance, were only found out when Lake was held for questioning for an act of compulsive shoplifting by Ng, and police never suspected anything serious until Lake killed himself while in custody.
The trope is discussed on the show, but on the context of real life events (which I included so they wouldn't be purely general examples).
If this does violate NRLEP, could I rewrite the example to state that the hosts hold this view and then describe a character they created, Detective Popcorn, as a way to mock them?
Edited by sgamer82openSelf-Pimping: "Radio For Gamers" Web Original
User DJ_MixDoctor has created a page and four wicks to it for his own podcast, "Radio For Gamers." He isn't even trying to be sneaky about it (the page and one of the wicks leading to it are written in first-person), which tells me he probably just doesn't know how we do things here. I'd provide a link to the podcast itself as well, but in spite of all this he hasn't actually linked to it at any point or even said where it's hosted.
Edited by Dirtyblue929openHow could I shorten the Red vs. Blue WMG page? Web Original
It's too ridiculously long. I'd like to shorten & reorganize it myself, but I've never had to do something like this before. I don't know where to start. Can someone help?
resolved Fanfic self-recommendation on FanficRecs/RWBY Web Original
(Why do the RWBY pages get so much attention here?)
Skybrigadier, the author of The Reactsverse, recommended Weiss Reacts (the verse's first entry) on RWBY's Fanfic Recs page.
I've removed it from the page, under the assumption that any following recommendations are in reaction (heh) to the illicit self-rec. Allowing Weiss Reacts to stay on the page despite initially being self-recced would set a very bad precedent for fanfic recs pages.
Edited by bwburke94openIndexing Question Web Original
Where should one index the character page of a Journal Roleplay? I've seen some people put them on Characters.Play By Post Games, but since according the descriptions Play-by-Post Games and Journal Roleplays are different enough to warrant different tropes and indexes is that a good solution? I'd consider making a separate index page myself, but I don't know how to do so/if it would have to go through the Trope Launch Pad.
openA Review Series that Doesn't Exist and some Possible Self-Promotion Web Original
There is a review series called Movie Dorkness on Agony Booth. The page for it, however, was littered with some references to a so-called ascended fanboy called the "Professor Detective". According to the edits, this person has their own review show and is a fan of the host of Movie Dorkness, and indeed, there's a page for said show. Only the show doesn't exist. The page for Professor Detective mentions a You Tube account, but I found no videos by any user under that name. It mentions a Tumblr, but I found no such Tumblr bearing that name. And to top it all off, the edits done to both pages were done by a user named Professor Detective. I edited out some mentions of the person in the Trivia page for Movie Dorkness, but I'm wondering if this is possible some kind of self-promotion for some anonymous troper?
Edited by AdricDePsychoopen"bloat" definition. Web Original
So I stumbled across the useful notes / Asperger syndrome page. Since I myself am an aspie, I naturally thought I could provide *very* helpful input there. But when I clicked the edit button, I was taken to the "locked page" article (I'm somewhat new to this site, so it was only then that I even learned about the lock mechanism). So I did as the description instructed, but saw that the Asperger syndrome article was locked because it "Attracted bloat." Those were the only two words in the entire explanation, and neither were blue. So can someone explain to me what "bloat" is? Also, This Very Wiki falls under Web original, right?
openYMMV.PokemonRusty Edit war Web Original
On December 1st, 2015, The Jayman 49 added an Designated Hero to YMMV.Pokemon Rusty even though the trope cannot apply (Designated Hero requires the narrative and other characters to treat a character as an ideal hero even though said "ideal hero" is a jerkass or worse). I removed it on December 18th that same year on grounds of it being factually incorrect.
Then, on the 29th of April this year, The Jayman 49 re-added it, and is now trying to claim the audience reaction is deliberately invoked even though, from the context of the series itself, it isn't. Here is the extended edit history detailing it
.
[ETA] I checked the discussion page, and there was no discussion on the subject.
Edited by TheNerfGuyopen Could someone do a character page the Angry German Kid Web Original
I'd do it myself but i'm banned from editing.

With Twitter now doubled their character count to some users (I havn't have that yet as of 2017/10/01), as I was editing the page to tweak out the recent edit from a user named reterusu, I left out this part out of reluctance to remove it and had to consult to you guys about it first:
I think it's more of a Broken Base than a metaphorical shark jump for having 280 characters, (I myself kinda like that idea. 280 is more than enough to add more tags.) but I'll let you think about it more. I intentionally left that sentence because I thought to myself that removing that might start a potential Edit War.EDIT: Changed some instances of "this troper" to "I to avoid confusion.
EDIT 2: I wasn't being clear here. My bad. The 'this troper' to 'I' edit" was for this thread only.
Edited by alnair20aug93