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[TuefelHundenIV]

Greetings folks.  This is from another forum I visit and we wanted to check around various communities online for opinions.  We are hoping to actually use the information to improve the site and see what we may doing wrong/right.

So please answer as best as you can.

If you have never heard of tvtropes just say never heard/visited/ however you wish to indicate no knowledge of it.

Please try to be civil about it.

If you want to list it as shit or whatever please tell us why you think that way.

Thanks in advance for those who choose to answer.


Please answer these questions:

1) How often do you use/visit TV Tropes? Do you edit it, or simply read it?
2) How useful and/or interesting do you find the site? Which parts do you find the most useful/interesting?
3) What criticisms do you have toward the wiki? What criticisms have you heard from others?

[Glowcat]

1) How often do you use/visit TV Tropes? Do you edit it, or simply read it?

I read it whenever somebody links an article I haven't seen before.

2) How useful and/or interesting do you find the site? Which parts do you find the most useful/interesting?

Useful? I read it more for entertainment value. Sometimes I link a trope to illustrate a particular concept to others so I don't have to.

3) What criticisms do you have toward the wiki? What criticisms have you heard from others?

My only criticism is that I've seen some awesome article names get downgraded to meh.

[breadbocks]

Pretty much what Glowcat said, with the addition of the criticism that there should be a warning about how extreme the wiki effect is there. I get pissy whenever someone links a page for the fact that for those people who haven't read half the wiki, they can lose hours to it.

[Enzo]

1) How often do you use/visit TV Tropes? Do you edit it, or simply read it?

Probably about twice a month these days. Used to read it a lot more. I don't think I've ever edited it for any reason besides correcting spelling errors.

2) How useful and/or interesting do you find the site? Which parts do you find the most useful/interesting?

I wouldn't call it "useful" exactly, not in the sense of being a research tool or anything. It's useful for wasting time, I guess, and increasing one's breadth of knowledge in nerd trivia. Does that count?

3) What criticisms do you have toward the wiki? What criticisms have you heard from others?

I'm pretty sure I've heard that it will ruin your life.

[Osmosis Jones]

1) Read it often, never edit it. It's one of the few websites not blocked by a filter at work, and provides a great distraction during my 16+ hour shifts.

2) Mainly read it for entertainment value, so it's not terribly *useful* per se, but definitely falls under very interesting.

3) As Glowcat's point is about all.

[Phmcw]

Same as everyone.

[Dutchling]

Same as everyone.

[Angel Of Death]

1: I don't visit it much. If someone posts a link to an artical, I usually stay on for a few hours, though.

2: Interesting? Very. Useful? Not so much. I just view it when I'm in need of a little humour (some articals are funny, to me) or if someone posts a link

3: Sorry, I didn't even know a TV Tropes wiki existed until now

[Enzo]

3: Sorry, I didn't even know a TV Tropes wiki existed until now

Then...what...

[Angel Of Death]

3: Sorry, I didn't even know a TV Tropes wiki existed until now

Then...what...

Oh. I don't concider TV Tropes to be a wiki. I just concider it to be a website.

[Balistic604]

1) How often do you use/visit TV Tropes? Do you edit it, or simply read it?

I read when I have nothing else to do.

2) How useful and/or interesting do you find the site? Which parts do you find the most useful/interesting?

I read it more for the entertainment value of the various concepts.

3) What criticisms do you have toward the wiki? What criticisms have you heard from others?

My criticism is that awesome article names get downgraded to meh as Glowcat said, and the addition of the YMMV tab was unnecessary.

[Strife26]

1) Just about every time I'm on the computer. I might edit a very rare typo or comment in a headscratcher (which is an inferior name to Just Bugs Me) where someone who works with tanks in real life might be able to comment.

2) A fair bit, I like to study fiction itself for my own work, and it's always interesting to see all the myriad ways there are to play with expectations.

3) YMMV tab was stupid, and some of the name changes were as well. Largely, I think that TV tropes is going downhill with more wikish bickering, but it's still not that bad. There's an over-prevalence of big fans in comparison to luke-warm ones on most pages (except for the few that are totally hatedom controlled), which makes valid criticism somewhat tough to keep on now and then.

[Patchouli]

1) How often do you use/visit TV Tropes? Do you edit it, or simply read it?
-I only read it.

2) How useful and/or interesting do you find the site? Which parts do you find the most useful/interesting?
-It's interesting at times. I only read like 5% of the articles though, a lot of it seems like overlap or just plain uninteresting. The 5% is really entertaining though.

3) What criticisms do you have toward the wiki? What criticisms have you heard from others?
-My only real beef is when people use an obscure trope in speech whose meaning isn't obvious from the name or context. It doesn't really bother me much, but it's also really easy to tell when people are just trying too hard to "get a piece" in an article by making some ass-backwards twisted connection so they can say, "It definitely fits in here!" That's not really a site problem as much of a people problem though, and it's nothing too bad.

[Darvi]

1) Former troper. I don't need to visit anymore, I can link just fine without. Hurhurhur. Don't edit much either.
2) Again, former troper. There's not much left there for me.
3) again, name downgrades, and the contributor vs. admin wars that happen apparently in the forums. Not that I'd know since I kept away from the forums.

[Starver]

1) How often do you use/visit TV Tropes? Do you edit it, or simply read it?
Only read, probably initially ever few months (when someone links to something I haven't seen before), but then I build up a "portfolio" of tabs in the browser with further linked-to items (mostly a problem when I find myself stumbling over anything Discworld-related, especially, given the diaspora of links you can get from that starting point alone) which I work through until I decide it's got beyond a joke or I'm forced to reset the machine I'm on.  (Other tabs might get bookmarked, for reinvestigation shortly after, but I know I'll come across TVTropes again, so won't bother to do that with this.)

I've been tempted to edit, but it seems like there's a viable enough community and I can only add minute quantities of new matter, so as yet I've refrained.  (Consider it an extended lurk, so that when I finally do post I'm already aware of the conventions. )

2) How useful and/or interesting do you find the site? Which parts do you find the most useful/interesting?
Usefulness, probably low. Although I've used it to identify similar things and themes to those items from the real-world I already found interesting.
Interestingness, well, it's always nice to see new takes on something (or indeed an initial take on something I may have not considered).  Usual wiki-wise pinches of salt are always taken with opinions, of course.

3) What criticisms do you have toward the wiki? What criticisms have you heard from others?
The usual wiki-effects apply.  Whether that's a criticism is itself subjective.

Last time I went to the site, however I noticed (and it might have been around for a while) I noticed a set of sub-page icons.  I tend to avoid icons that are "Facebook like/follow", "Retweet", "Linkedin", or similarly related, so I'd been ignoring them, until I realised that these "Moments" icons weren't aanything like that, and that there were (perhaps interesting, perhaps not) additional aspects to the page, on top of the YMMV and quotes links which I all too often forget about normally anyway...

Not sure what I'd do about that, though.  Compare to the fact that I remember imdb.com before it was imdb.com (in its first-flush-of-the-web Cardiff era, not ever really using the r.a.m version), and it used (even a number of years after Amazon purchased and remodelled it) to have an intuitive way of getting to quotes, frexample.  But now it doesn't.  Stay away from those kinds of changes, if that makes any sense.