The Musings Of The Consensus

Encyclopedia Dramatica is one of my favorite websites. Yeah, it's offensive, perverse, filled with a lot of exaggerations and hyperbole, and did I mention offensive? I have Aspergers, yet I found myself laughing my ass off at their article on autism because it does a great job mocking the hell out of everyone who tries to use autism as a crutch or an excuse for their behavior. I also found myself laughing at their articles on tropers, which I found hilariously spot on. Hell, like Something Awful, they also accused us at All The Tropes of being porn/pedophilia havens, an insult I'm so used to these days it's practically passe. I'm also greatly amused at all the idiots and retards that try to vandalize ED. All ED does is laugh at information already available to the public, so when someone gets pissed over having their publicly available actions given a savage mocking and tries to remove it, I just laugh louder because it just goes to show that somebody struck a nerve...

This is more of reaction to the first post, but for any Goons reading this, there some stuff for you too. I was not surprised the actual substance of anything I had to say was not refuted by the goons, merely written off as a rant at best, but then I realized they have that "don't touch the poop" rule that forbids them from responding, lest they import drama and get their whole mock thread shut down. Frankly, I'm disappointed. Didn't Something Awful make a point of launching raids on other websites? Was I not mean or spiteful enough? Did I say stuff they just couldn't argue with? Are they so afraid of being kicked out of their forums just to engage me in a civil conversation? I don't expect anyone there to change their minds about me, but if it makes you feel any better, I know some shit stains have been making horrible jokes about Lowtax letting his daughters get raped (or something to that effect), and while I think the man is an indolent pill and ...

As you can see, I was mentioned in their TV Tropes mock thread, and since I now know the Goons are reading this, I've got a few things to say. I don't hate Goons simply for being Goons. I DO hate the hypocrisy of the Goons who call other websites depraved, fetid hovels of depravity while ignoring their own. For example: Aatrek, moderator of TVIV for almost five years, convicted child molestor. For all the bitching done about pedophiles on TV Tropes, you are the first community to actually have a no shit pedophile in your community, and to my knowledge, while there have been a bunch of creepy assholes in the troping community (like Chagen, ColonelMcBadass, etc), you guys have yet to find someone in major position of power and influence on TV Tropes who had or has (to my knowledge) a history of raping children. Do I also need to bring up Eggplant Wizard, the ringleader of the porn writing for profit ring on Amazon? Apparently, as long as she wasn't exposed for...

Around June 22 Something Awful's forums died, and it wasn't until June 25 did they come back up. Annoyed they couldn't post there, some goons went to Reddit, some gave Lowtax a hard time on Twitter, and some even went to Something Sensitive (the anti-SA forum). Upon the revival of the forums, Lowtax and the SA mods started lashing out at any thread mentioning any of the above, blatantly punishing people for "defecting" to other sites, and most of the bans reasons boiled down to pure spite. As someone who runs a website myself, that's pretty damned childish. Also, the SA forums are apparently, up in a crippled, halfassed state where a lot of people can't log in, the paywall is up for some people even though it should be down in most places (save FYAD and QCS, among a few others), and is still running the same outdated vBulletin software they had before everything went to hell. To be blunt, I really hoped the SA forums died, not because I hate goo...

I occasionally visit TV Tropes, mostly because I like to to take notes on what they do poorly so I can do better, and sometimes, I occasionally see Nate Spidgewood (ED article, NSFW) being a vandalizing jackass. For those who don't know, that ED article I linked to will fill in most of the blanks, but my personal experience with this idiot has been one of constant butthurt from him over how TV Tropes has become a sterile Wikipedia clone, and while I don't entirely disagree, his biggest bitchfest seems to be over the idea of "namespaces" In PmWiki (what TV Tropes uses), they have main namespace (Main/Pagename, for example), a namespace for site specific stuff (Site/Pagename), and you can make as many other namespaces as you want to keep things separate. Part of the reason TV Tropes does this is because their incredibly customized fork of PmWiki is so different from the official distribution they cannot take advantage of the fact you can have custom titles withou...

This post sums up the Goon position on TV Tropes content policy, and below I've decided to comment on it. Post text in italics, mine comments in bold. ---- Administrivia: There Is no Such Thing as Notability All works are notable. posted:     Wikipedia tries in many regards to be the opposite of what we are. We want to be fun, interesting and a cool place to sink hours of time. Wikipedia wants to be a compilation of previously published facts from respected sources. Serious business. Presented with a choice between serious and fun, we went with fun. I always felt this was a sensible enough guideline. Citations from respected sources = Serious business Cataloging every instance of surprise sex in recorded media = Just for fun This is disingenuous BS that ignores the whole point to listing trope examples in the name of moralistic whining based on a partisan and biased anti-troper Goon talking point. For instance, the trope "Rape As Comedy" is a trope about the...

Recently, the SA paywall dropped, so I went into their TV Tropes mock thread to see if they had anything to say about All The Tropes. Nope, just walls of tl;dr about how much bronies are creepy (okay, I can't say I disagree) and tropers are perverts and pedophiles (SA's stock accusation about tropers.....though they seem to want to forget they had an actual pedophile on their own mod team for almost five years). However, I did find this post interesting, since it mentions a member of our site I'm quite pleased with, and who had a bad time on TV Tropes. Below is the content of the post, post text in italics, my comments in bold. ---- That was something that stood out to me about Miss Aspie, 23, Desperately Seeks Husband, actually. The thing is, if you're modding on a site that's pretty much Let's List Things Dot Com, you're going to get a certain amount of ASD in your natural readership. Being able to handle that should be a basic skill for mods...

We recently changed our copyright on All The Tropes to include the option for CC BY SA 4.0 licensing. In fact, here's the relevant excerpt from our Copyrights page: All The Tropes uses a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license (CC-BY-SA). All text on the site is licensed under CC-BY-SA unless otherwise noted; images may or may not be under this license -- you'll have to check each image individually. This is part of our Terms of Service .  All CC-BY-SA content is also available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license, i.e. the previous revision of the same license. This is a compatibility mode with Wikipedia and Wikia.  To explain what this means, we have dual licensed our content for redistribution . CC BY SA 3.0 still applies to everything, but now you can license to the newly created CC BY SA 4.0 when redistributing the content as well. All content on our site since the change is now available under bot...

As the title might inform you, this is going to be an angry post, just trying to give everyone fair warning. Anyway, I hate shitposting, and by that, I mean in the "what the hell is this nonsense?" kind of shitposting sense, though I can laugh at the types who are really good at this on forums, where it can usually be entertaining in limited doses. However, I run a wiki, and thus I have zero tolerance for that, and I consider it the most ridiculous idiocy you can ever do on a community project. Shitposting in a wiki sense means posting inane BS that has nothing to do with the wiki subject at hand. In fact, it's very similar to spam, except in the case of spammers (whose graves I consider worthy of pissing on), those assholes are deliberately trying to pimp their worthless sites by Google Bombing their BS wherever they can find a place with an editing function. Shitposters tend to be less deliberately malicious, and some even do so out of utter ignorance, but the fol...

One of the things I realized when I, Brent "Vorticity" Laabs, and Bob Schroeck realized when we were ironing out how ATT would work was that TV Tropes is absolutely TERRIBLE at public relations. For one, TV Tropes is an insular community. Sure, it has social media outlets, but the moderators of TV Tropes have very little presence on them. Also, outside of the site itself, there are almost no blogs, forums, or discussion of any kind of TV Tropes policies, site goals, or culture with input from any currently active moderation staff. Me, I think that's counterproductive. If you run a public website, you need to communicate with the public. The Wikimedia Foundation spends a lot of time doing outreach to educators, programmers, sponsors, and the general public because they want to succeed, and they know the best way to do so is by approaching their audience on multiple fronts, and given how they have ballooned over the years, I believe it's more than fair to call them ...

In this blog post , I remarked on how JesuOtaku (a goon) apparently raised a personal army to troll TV Tropes in locking any pages on her out of butthurt and I found that pathetic. In light of having discovered she was harassed and stalked, I would like to apologize for my ignorance and issue a retraction of that statement. I deplore stalking and harassment of anyone, and while I'm not a fan of Something Awful at all, no one deserves to be harassed and stalked, and I would like to offer my support to JesuOtaku on the matter, and personally pledge any content about her work on my site will not allow such action to take place.

I recently submitted a post to the fucknoTVTropes Tumblr about my stance on being criticized and I got a nice reception to it, and I plan to take into account anything they might have to say about how I can avoid the fail of TV Tropes. That said, I got my first criticism, namely that the 'Breast Expansion" article is one  of our most popular articles, and that that's kinda creepy. Let me be clear: I agree wholeheartedly with that sentiment, but I must correct an error in the assumption we endorsed it in the first place. I had the DynamicPageList extension installed and added a section to our main page that showed popular articles (by page click views), but due to the Cloudfront caching that Orain uses, it was effectively frozen in time and kept showing the same articles as being highly popular. I know this was the case because tests on my localhost test wiki showed different results after visiting several different random pages. I have since removed that segment ...

Criticism gets a bad name on TV Tropes, and one of the reasons for that is due to the fact Fast Eddie himself cannot tolerate it. And that's not an exaggeration: This is a site that has as an actual rule "Happiness Is Mandatory". Personally, I think trying to enforce that is madness. No one, especially me, is perfect, and even though I'm the chief admin of All The Tropes (and its sister site on Wikia), I'm not a god. In fact, one of the things I insisted on when All The Tropes was founded was that I be answerable to someone so I didn't get to the point I acted like an egomaniacal ass and thought I was above criticism, which is why I try to take criticism very seriously, especially if it points out legitimate flaws in my conduct as a site administrator. To that end, respectful dissent will never be banned on any site I administer, because if I screw up, I should be held accountable for my errors. Fast Eddie may think enforcing Happiness Is Mandatory is pr...

I'm not one of those people who think My Little Pony:Friendship is Magic is a bad show. I've watched it with my nieces and it seems harmless enough, though I just don't get the appeal of the show enough to stick around to watch it on a regular basis. However, some of it's fans creep me out. Go on any random image board or 'booru site, and you will find some of the most jacked up MLP Rule 34 in existence. There is a fanfiction saga (in bound book format no less) called "Fallout:Equestria" that crosses over MLP with the post apocalyptic Fallout series, which makes me (as a casual Fallout fan) have a WTF look on my face every time I think about it. There are literal sex toys designed after the characters (excuse me while I bow my head over a toilet on that note) and there are some creepy, creepy people who claim to be married to the characters (who are FICTIONAL TECHNICOLOR PONIES I MIGHT ADD). Don't get me wrong, I'm not naive. I know that ever...

Hello, I'm GethN7, administrator of the All The Tropes wiki, and I decided to start this blog because I really miss having a blogging feature on our wiki (which died due to technical issues) and I wanted to vent my spleen. Today, in-between upgrades to the Orain wiki farm service a troper named Supergod from TV Tropes showed up, made an account, stuck around for ten minutes, made an edit or two, then decided to leave, putting the following message on his user page before departing: Forget it. This place was a waste of 10 minutes. Found out that one of the main reasons for this site's existence is the fact that some people couldn't bear to not have pages about animated kiddie porn, and I don't want to be involved. It's pretty dead for a wiki that's been around for so long as well. While I don't begrudge him his opinion and he's welcome back anytime he wants to return, I'd just like to address this message and clear up any misconceptions about ...