Sunday, November 2, 2014

The fail and incompetence of TV Tropes discussion pages.

TV Tropes, despite claims to the contrary by their moderation, runs on a copy of PmWiki, and while most of the features have been heavily altered by Fast Eddie, the core rules of PmWiki still apply, and in this case, this just bit Fast Eddie on the ass recently.

PmWiki has a size limit of 500KB of content per page before data errors in saving occur, and while this can be solved for main pages via splitting them into subpages or archiving chunks of the data on another pages, the talk pages use a customized threading format by Fast Eddie that unfortunately lacks the ability to be archived as effectively as a standard MediaWiki talk page due to the specialized structure of the page (which resembles their Ask The Tropers page without the scrolling feed of the most recent posts), or even a LiquidThreads enabled MW talk page, which organizes talk pages into a topic list it breaks down into subpages automatically.

The result is that he has to manually cobble together a solution for any talk page he wishes to archive that become too large, whereas this can be done by anyone on MediaWiki in a very simple manner regardless what talk page schema you use.

tl;dr - Fast Eddie uses a very imcompetently programmed talk page system.

6 comments:

  1. What's the provocation?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Their Trope Pantheon discussion page is basically causing the database to buckle due to it's sheer length, and thanks to the idiotic way Eddie programmed the discussion pages, they can't simply be archived like you would an actual wiki page, since they are actually in a customized namespace that doesn't have that function, so when talk pages get too long, FE is the only guy who can do what he needs to do on the database end of things to repair it.

    Any user can archive an overly long talk page on any wiki programmed with the slightest amount of competence, so this really stupid from a programming standpoint IMO.

    P.S. - I know this blog will have zero effect on changing TV Tropes, and I know the corruption, fail, incompetence, and illegalities that go on there will never be fixed unless someone with legal or economic clout forces FE to do so, but I figure raising awareness of the problems is better than doing nothing.

    ReplyDelete
  3. "Their Trope Pantheon discussion page"

    So you're telling me they're having problems over a Troper Tales derivative?!

    Jesus, I don't care what the results are as long as SOMETHING changes. If the Pantheon is deleted, it's one less distraction for non-brony tropers. If the site goes down, good riddance.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Well, I at one point liked the Pantheon, believe it or not. I wound up hating it after it became a place for idiots and assholes to write apologist fanfic for their favorite characters and they turned the whole place into a circlejerk for that crap instead of making better use of the entire cast they had at their disposal IMO.

    We even deleted it from ATT after I finally realized there was no way to save what it had become, so I purged it. We also have purged a ton of useless BS we inherited from TV Tropes (such as Unpublished Works), and if you want to help us find any stupidity we missed so we can make a trope site that is less stupid than the competition, feel free.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Speaking of the Pantheon, how much of an otaku would you say you are?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Casual. I watch and enjoy anime, but I'm not shy in calling out the stupid in what I watch (read my Cross Ange reviews) and expecting the writing to not suck.

      Delete

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