Greetings, fellow Dopers! I have asked for and been granted permission to bring you news of a website. You may or may not be aware of the controversies that have surrounded the popular TV Tropes site in the last couple of years - the short version is that, due to a desire to aggressively conform to Google’s policies for AdSense, the administration of TVTropes instigated several purges and reorganizations, even going so far as to temporarily expunge works like Nabokov’s Lolita, due to the work (not the article) containing prurient content.
Incensed by censorship, annoyed by aging wiki software, and generally discontent with the administration of TVTropes, some folks I’ve been talking to have launched an alternative. It contains a copy of the TVTropes database as of last June, before TVTropes changed their licensing from CC-BY-SA to the more restrictive CC-BY-NC-SA. (AllTheTropes could use TVTropes’ current content under those terms, as it is an ad-free, noncommercial site - but the administration of AllTheTropes wants the material on their site to be freely available under CC-BY-SA terms.)
I’m going to add this to my long list of rebuttal points for use when people snark at me for being paranoid and conspiratorial about the influence of marketing.
In real, real small words, folks:
A very popular and useful wiki
(stop and google “wiki” here while you’re at it)
is censoring its content
in order to be ad-friendly.
How is the new site going to be supported? Granted, I’m not familiar with the issues here, but if the new site has a way to survive without Google, why couldn’t the old site fund itself that way too?
It’s my understanding that the individual who runs TvTropes uses it as his primary source of income. Possibly this isn’t the case for the people running this new site.
Out of pocket from the masterminds handling the technical stuff. With optional donations from folks who want to, but the guys seem to think they can handle the hosting costs for now.
Management costs can be zero. Hosting costs are typically negligible. Bandwidth costs can be substantial for a popular site. Go much over a few gigabytes per month and they turn on a meter.
As wikis are nearly self-running operations, I see it as more a case of trying to make a profit off of a community-knowledge endeavor.
You see these all the time in Craigslist and other job boards - “I have this great idea and need [some drones] to [make it happen for me] so I can become rich and famous, since just having the idea is the important part.”
This sounds like a good idea. That said, I’m sorry, but I don’t truck with using Wikipedia/Wikia-style code on a Tropes site. It’s like painting a Nike swoosh on my Converse.
Justifiable, perhaps, in that at least it keeps it clear where we’re not.
I’m one of the admins of All The Tropes. I got linked to this thread, so I thought I’d say hi.
Yeah, I didn’t want to use Mediawiki, but my attempt to have a friend do some custom wiki development ended in a string of broken promises. So I was finally forced to go with expedience. Sorry about that.
Not that I’m really complaining about Mediawiki. The namespace thing in Pmwiki is not a good way to organize content, and the TVT custom markup is very um, questionable.
Well, I’m a full-time software developer, and I think that some of our wiki farm staff are as well.
I have been a part of running an ad-free wiki before – I was on the board for wikispot.org – wikis can be run on very little cash. Too much popularity is a problem I’d like to have. Also note that services like Cloudflare have made bandwidth effectively much cheaper than, say, 5 years ago.
Hey, Vorticity! Welcome to the Straight Dope boards. This board’s raison d’etre has a similar academic bent to Tropes sites of all stripes, so I think you might enjoy it here.
And in case you needed another reason, TVTropes now claims ownership of anything you post to their site :
“By contributing content to this site, whether text or images, you grant TV Tropes irrevocable ownership of said content, with all rights surrendered …
We are not required to attribute content you contribute to you, nor do you retain ownership of anything you contribute. Anything you contribute may be deleted, modified, or used commercially by us without notification or consent, to the extent permitted by applicable laws. For that reason, we strongly recommend that you do not post material on our site, whether in text or image form, that you wish to receive commercial benefit from in the future.”
What does that mean for post-June TVTropes content?
Does it have some sort of tool analogous to the Watchlist?
How much of TVTropes original culture (WRT Trope names, Wiki Magic, lack of notability, etc.) still holds in the new place?
I’m lazy and slowly withdrawing the time and effort I used to invest in TVTropes, so I’m kind of reluctant to put up shop elsewhere unless I can transfer everything that I maintain with minimum hassle.
I’m hoping Vorticity might answer #2, because I am honestly not sure, and he might expand on my answers to the others.
#1 - It’s ambiguous. There’s some indication that TVTropes can’t do some of the things they’ve done with regard to copyright, legally. I am not a lawyer, so the best I can offer as an opinion on the matter is ‘seems shady’. AllTheTropes still doesn’t want people just cutting and pasting TVTropes’s pose-June 2012 content over, though.
#3 - The culture should be similar, though there are some changes. The best way to see the culture you want is to be there and offer your voice, of course. The biggest change I am aware of is the forums - while ATT plans to use forums to discuss wiki policy, there aren’t plans to have a broader, more general forum if memory serves.
I am glad you put this thread here, I’m fond of TV Tropes and I hate censorship, so I’ve been conflicted about it. This new site solves the problem, it is bookmarked, for sure.
That said, I wish your title had been more to the point. When I opened the thread, it was out of sheer curiousity, I had no idea it was about a censorship free version of TV Tropes. A lot of people may be missing the point of this thread … I know I almost did.
Indeed, from the discussion in the ATT development thread, there was a special concern about making sure that any forums don’t become, well, more cliquishly important and domineering than the wiki itself.
Hopefully the new TVTropes website is not the hugbox of autism, rape jokes and pedophilia the original one was. TVTropes tries to make storytelling a paint-by-numbers affair, and tropers seem to think creativity equates to ‘pack as many tropes as possible into my story’.
While its fun to learn about trivia about a show or book, there is simply too much sperging over anime girl breast sizes or pedo rape fanfiction. Fast Eddie did a terrible job managing his website, and instead of self-enforcing rules he let everybody go hog wild until it got to the point that people started to complain. When that happened he went full reverse (hence the omission of ‘Lolita’).
This board’s raison d’etre has a similar academic bent to Tropes sites of all stripes, so I think you might enjoy it here.