As your friendly neighborhood Admin Team, the gang here at TVTropes HQ is always working to improve the site.
Many of those improvements begin with suggestions posted right here, on the Community Wishlist. Is there a feature you really want on TVTropes? Post it.
Is there something we could be doing better? We want to know. Do you think we look fat in these pants? We were totally afraid of that. See a bug? Report it.
Important things to know:
- We're all about that content-creation life! The top contenders for our attention are ideas that'll boost current or new page creation, like more namespaces & page types, or like the video clip uploading feature we added. On the flip side, design or layout tweaks won't be our top priority.
- Help us dig through the goldmine of old wishlist items! If you have an old request gathering dust or spot one you're totally on board with, give it a bump and a like. There's a treasure trove of 6+ years' worth of ideas just waiting to be rediscovered. Items without enough love may not make the cut and will be closed.
- Was your wishlist item locked up without an explanation? It was most likely disapproved or just too big of a task versus the benefit it would ultimately have. Time is precious, and we want to focus on updates with the biggest bang for the buck. Don't be discouraged though! We appreciate every idea and we're always listening.
workingLaconic hover feature
When you hover your mouse over a trope link, it shows the Laconic if there is one.
Edited by kory
workingPut Edit comments back at the top when they're seen in the Edit-History
If the edit is really long, it can be kind of difficult to find the comment left behind by the person who made the edit since they're now at the bottom of it.
openGive non-mods the ability to create and edit crowner descriptions and options
Crowners
are tools we use to gauge consensus for important wiki decisions such as the ones done in the Trope Repair Shop, Image Pickin', and Wiki Talk boards. Here's an example of a crowner.
So, back in 2021, there was this "bibble bobble" bug that rendered a lot of crowners into gibberish (and they are all inaccessible now). The admins fixed but I think what they did ended up preventing anyone creating crowners as crowner creation is now attached to the "hook a crowner" mod tool (what mods use to attach crowners to threads. Previously, people would create crowners by adjusting the URL (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/crowner.php/SingleProposition/TropeName) and adding a description and options. We used to have different crowner types like Single Proposition (for crowners with only one option) Alternative Titles (crowners to determine the new name of a trope), and Page Action (crowners that have multiple courses of action).
Before the overhaul, users would create the crowners and then holler a mod to hook them. Users could also edit crowner options and the crowner description. Now, mods have to create and hook them and people rarely send hollers for crowners because mods have to do everything ( people were always free to make their own crowner options and ask us to make them though). I think it would be a lot easier for everyone if non-mods could make their own crowners and fix mistakes on crowner options.
openCut List Challenge button
The Challenge button on the Cut List was made mod-only in a previous update, but only the Cut and Decline buttons are supposed to be mod-only; the Challenge button isn't supposed to be mod-only.
In addition, the Cut List page still references pressing it to challenge requests (though it calls it the "wait" button, so that part will need to be fixed to reference the button's current name):
openWorkshop sidebar links
Currently, mods can see a sidebar link for when there's a Trope Repair Shop and/or Image Pickin' thread for a page. I think it would be helpful if those links could be visible for everyone instead of just mods.
openTrivia Redirects and Flame Bait Redirects
Currently, we have a YMMV Redirects page to list redirects to pages indexed on Audience Reactions and YMMV.Home Page; this ensures that links to those redirects are properly flagged as YMMV. However, we do not have analogous pages for redirects to Trivia pages and Flame Bait pages to ensure that those are also flagged, so a Trivia Redirects page and a Flame Bait Redirects page would be useful.
Edited by GastonRabbit
workingBring back the "gift" function for badges
Way back when The Badge Shop was active, mods and users used to be able to gift badges to other users (this was the icon
◊) but it somehow disappeared over the years. It will be nice to bring back so that mods can fill gift award badges to users
As for where the button should go... I believe it was next to the "add description" and "add badge to profile" options on badges you own in your badge collection.
reference pic
◊
workingFix the search engine
The internal search engine used to work fine, but ever since the most recent update, it's been complete garbage. It literally works better to use a general search engine to find a TV Tropes thread. It used to be that "Search Forums" would only bring up results from within Thread titles, but now it exclusively searches within the text of posts, not in the Thread titles at all. If you search "Social Media", you won't find The Social Media Thread anywhere, just every single instance of anyone saying the words "social media" in a post.
If it has to include the functionality of searching within the text of the page, it should at least prioritize the thread titles first (eliminating any doubles), then bring up threads with that text on the page.
Edited by PushoverMediaCritic
workingImproved TLP Search?
Not sure if this is the right place to bring this up, but searching for 'open book' on TLP (without the quotes) gets 0 results, but 'book' by itself gets 100+ results, most of which don't have 'book' anywhere in the title or Laconic. I guess it's searching for the full phrase in the body of the draft? But that seems... less than helpful.
Alternatively, anyone have any tips for better ways of searching for old drafts?
workingAdditional information when hovering over a link
Currently, when hovering over a link to a trope page, only the link itself is shown, and the only meaningful information it contains is the trope name, which is not always perfectly descriptive and is often redundant anyways (when the article is linked via a pure WikiWord). If the laconic description of the trope was being shown alongside that, it would alleviate the frustration of having to (sometimes slowly) load a full new page just to see what the discussion is about. It can be a personal preference setting, especially if it would slow down too much the hover-over text appearing.
openImplement support for "prefers-color-scheme" (light/dark mode)
Using the "prefers-color-scheme" CSS media query (described here) would allow TVTropes to match the OS settings of each reader seamlessly. This is particularly useful for those who change their color scheme routinely: for instance, I use the macOS/iOS option to change it based on local sunrise and sunset.
Implementing this is generally trivial once alternate color schemes have been designed: in this case we already have the "Night Vision" setting, so the hard part is already done. While using CSS media queries directly is slightly more efficient, a JavaScript observer could be added to perform the function of the "Night Vision" switch without even making significant changes to the underlying code.
I know that many people underestimate the amount of effort needed to implement a feature, but I've done it before and this truly is that simple once you have the color schemes ready. I can provide an implementation myself if that helps.
If preserving the ability to choose the color scheme independent of an OS setting is desired, the standard approach is to replace the existing "light/dark" switch with a "default"/"light"/"dark" switch, where "default" uses the OS setting and "light"/"dark" ignore it. This is marginally more complicated to add (ternary switches are not a common UI element), but still relatively easy.
Implementing this requires very little work, substantially improves the user experience, and has virtually no negative impact. Devices that don't support "prefers-color-scheme" will simply ignore it, so this will never break anything. The only real issue is that it is impossible to tell whether someone currently using Night Vision would prefer "default" over "light"/"dark". Implementing this change would probably necessitate discarding the current setting in favor of "default", which may be a momentary annoyance for the users who don't have their OS setting match.
Edited by Saklad5
workingAdd more post numbers in a forum thread (Also bring back the post number)
I feel like 25 is too short for the number of posts a forum thread, with me often losing track of certain topics due to the limited number of posts in a thread. But at the same time, I feel like more than 100 or 250 is too overwhelming, especially for those with low internet connections.
To get my point, please add the option to increase the number of posts in a thread, with the choices of 25, 50, 100, and 200 posts per thread.
To add, please bring back the post number because I also lose track when it comes to image pickin' and forum games.
Edited by alnair20aug93
workingHave a Following button for TLP drafts
I think one of the biggest contributors to abandoned or barely-contributed-to drafts is because sponsors don't think to check on them, which is in turn because they don't show up on their Forum Threads page since you can't follow them for new replies.
Adding a Following button to TLP drafts, which would allow the sponsor or other tropers to come back to it and contribute to it when it pops up in the Forum Threads section, would help.
workingMove edit reason to the top of the history window's instance
It's honestly kind of annoying that you have to scroll down to the bottom to see it, especially for large edits.
openSecond sort function for Videos page
I was going through the recent videos list and we can currently sort them into four categories: Newest, Oldest, Highest Rating, and Lowest Rating. I think it would be nice to separate this into two sort functions, one for new/old and one for high/low rating.
I would mostly like this because when I sort by either high or low, a lot of old videos show up first (they usually have the most votes, so I understand why) but it would be helpful to see, for instance, the highest rated videos that were published in the last 6 months.
workingLink to Wiki Tools in the sidebar
The Itty Bitty Wiki Tools are really useful and can be quite hard to find if you don't think to start looking in Administrivia. (It took me almost ten minutes of googling and trawling the forums to finally find the "folderize" tool.) A link to this page in the "tools" or "tips" section of the sidebar would be a godsend.
Edited by LongLiveHumour
workingGive a warning when you're trying to leave the editing screen
I've just accidentally closed my browser while making a fairly large edit, losing about 10 minutes of progress. When you're editing Wikipedia and accidentally attempt to close the tab, you're asked if you're sure you want to leave as changes made to the page will be lost. Such a confirmation prompt would be very handy for TVT as it effectively stops a source of data loss. Thank you.
workingPreview button when starting a thread
Because you have to draft the OP in another thread to see how it looks before using the new thread form. I've noticed this was mentioned before, but I'll keep this as a new query.
open[Profile/Forum Threads] Mark thread as read button
While I'm aware that we used to have a "Mark All As Read" button inside thread watch, which caused issues, as it would cause every single forum post on every single thread to be parsed, and marked as read.
Instead, it might make sense to have a "mark as read/unread" button for individual threads, in much the same way that there is an "unfollow" button for them. This would mark the thread as read/unread, in much the same way that there is one for the forums.
Alternatively this could work by simply setting the latest forum post as 'unread', overwriting a previous 'unread' setting, and mark the final remaining post as 'read'.
This screenshot from the Trope Launch Pad in dark mode.
The green is decently visible but the red looks way too desaturated against this background. It works fine in light mode but not in dark mode.
Edited by AudioSpeaks2