All The Tropes:Weirdest Inbound Link of the Day

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.



With the implementation of Matomo Analytics for All The Tropes in late August 2018, it once again becomes possible to track, albeit broadly and crudely, links from other sites into the wiki.[1] This page is for bringing anything odd, unusual or amusing among those links to the attention of the wiki community. Please add new entries below the banner and above the previous entries.

Weirdest Inbound Links

2024 April 2

  • Thanks to an April Fools prank engineered by Labster, we've gotten no few links from the long-dead meta.orain.org.
  • A big hello to everyone at Salt Lake Community College who've come to us via slcc.instructure.com!
  • We've received a half-dozen or so links from vf.politicalbetting.com, a (British-oriented, maybe?) subdomain of a site entirely for betting on elections and other political activity.
  • We've also gotten a very few links from Backstage.com, which appears to be a jobs/employment site for the entertainment industry.
  • And finally, one solitary link from "anomalopteryx". That's it, no top-level domain, just a single word -- and Google has no idea what it might other than the Linnaean classification of the Bush moa. This is very strangely similar to February 5, 2019's "aepyornis" links, especially given that the aepyornis was another large, flightless bird.


2024 February 19

  • We've gotten a few hits from the Steampunk fashion and accessories site my-steampunk-style.com. Sadly, it doesn't lend itself well to finding where the links are coming from.
  • The LLM behind the AI chat site chat.openai.com seems to have given links to us in a few of its responses.
  • One that we need to mention if only for the site name -- this page at the blog "Tales From The Brazier's Grotto" (by Katriina Etholén) links to our page on Hideto Matsumoto, aka "hide", in the course of describing a pilgrimage of sorts Etholén made to his memorial site during her first visit to Japan.


2023 October 17

  • A quick hello to whoever at South Texas College is linking to us through blackboard.com!


2023 August 9

  • Our top referrer recently is a site called "tipz.io", which multiple sources describe as "deceptive" and "a malicious browser extension". We strongly recommend that any of our users employing (or forced to employ) tipz remove it from their systems, using the instructions found on these and other sites.
  • For some reason, Google Lens -- a visual lookup app from the big G -- has recently sent us almost a hundred links.
  • The hookup site girlsaskguys.com has sent us over fifty links as well. Why? Who knows?


2023 May 2


2023 March 23


2022 October 11

  • We're still getting links from Apple's "starshot.scilliance.com" service, the exact nature of which still seems to be a mystery to the Web at large.
  • We've had a few links from the website for the team project manager Trello. Unless some of our tropers are working as an organized group, the why of this is another mystery.


2022 April 29


2022 March 31

  • Outside of a couple other Miraheze wikis, Reddit and Facebook have sent more links our way in the last month than any other locations on the web. Too bad we can't track back and see the context(s) those links came from.
  • We've gotten a few links from an odd little service called Random Webcomic!, which is Exactly What It Says on the Tin -- hit the big blue button on its page, and it'll send you to a random web comic elsewhere. Why they've linked to us... well, as usual, it's hard to determine.


2022 March 15

  • Enthusiastic greetings to the Balcombe Grammar School of Victoria, Australia, whose intranet has sent a dozen or so links our way.
  • We've gotten a few links from "starshot.scilliance.com", which judging by the series of redirects following that link will take you through, is some manner of service provided by Apple... and although it (briefly) displays "Annotation service" when you connect to it, what it actually is seems to be a complete mystery to the web at large.
  • We've also had a few links from I Remember This Movie..., a site that helps people find movies from which they juuuuust barely remember a few details.


2022 January 14

  • Hacker News has sent several links our way.
  • Tanelorn.net, a German FRPG site, is now linking to us.
  • We're still getting links from Apple's tryrating.com.


2021 December 21

  • We've gotten a dozen or so links from tryrating.com, an Apple-owned service which crowdsources freelance workers to improve the accuracy of Apple Maps. Why we've gotten those links is a mystery, given that we don't have a physical location
  • The fanfic/interactive fiction site Questionable Questing has sent some links our way.
  • Similarly, the Monster Girls Redux forums have linked to us.


2021 November 23

  • We've recently gotten a couple dozen links from feminist website Ovarit.com. Their search function doesn't lend itself well to finding exactly why or to what.
  • Welcome to West Chester University, which is now linking to us.
  • We're starting to get links from Stackexchange.com's English language section citing us for various purposes.


2021 September 16

  • Apparently the Great Firewall of China has no problems with us -- over the last few weeks we've gotten hundreds of inbound links from Sogou.com, a Beijing-based company providing a search engine and assorted other products.
  • Yet another online learning environment -- this time classroom.google.com -- is connecting to us.
  • And we suppose we should note that we're still getting links in from some of the oldest entries on this page, like musictheoryprof.com, the Guardian, and of course The Other Tropes Wiki.


2021 July 21

  • We've been getting hundreds of inbound links from a Korean wiki, Namu (Namoo) Wiki. It's hard to be sure working through Google Translate, but it seems to be a Korean-specific attempt at a counterpart to Wikipedia.


2021 June 16

  • Links from Higbee & Associates have finally stopped appearing in the analytics. Hopefully that means they've given up on trying to find something for which they can demand money from us.


2021 June 3

  • We're starting to get links from Microsoft Sway, an online publishing/presentation tool that seems to be part of the online Office suite. Because of how little specific information we get from Matomo Analytics, it's impossible to tell if the links are from someone's project on the site, or from some manner of guidelines from the site itself.
  • We've also begun to get links from the "Angry Metal Guy" blog, which seems to be a review/commentary site for all Metal music varieties. It's difficult to figure out just which of its articles (or their comments) are linking to us, so we don't know the context for those links.
  • And finally, we've had a few links from Zauberhogwarts, a German site which appears to be an online community supporting an immersive Harry Potter roleplaying experience.


2021 May 24

  • Taste the irony. Kidzsearch.com, "The #1 Kids' Safe Search Engine", is sending little tropers to us -- at the very least along with and possibly instead of TV Tropes. This may be because TVT is so heavily filled with online ads -- many kid-friendly services like Kidzsearch screen out advertising the better to comply with the United States' Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. An advertising-free alternative to TVT would be very attractive in that case. And after all that work TVT did to make themselves suitable for kindergartners, too...


2021 May 1


2021 March 17

  • We have no idea why, but we had nearly 50 inbound links this past week from In$ide Paradeplatz, a German financial news site.


2021 January 13

Yeah, we haven't seen anything interesting in more than a year. Sorry.

  • We've recently gotten a bit more than a dozen links from a blog called donnylaja's place. What pushes it into "weird" territory is the blog's subtitle - "i write strong naked characters".
  • We've also gotten about half a dozen links this week from a site called prolikewoah.com. What makes this one weird is that the only content on its page is "go away". Presumably if one has the proper cookie or one's IP address is recognized it's a bit more welcoming.
  • We're still getting an average of one inbound link from TV Tropes a day.
  • Finally a welcome to all the elementary and high schools who seem to be linking to us from behind various web-based services. If there's anything we can do to help you, please ask.


2019 March 11

  • An odd little site called Igrep Directory lists us under "Entertainment". Amusingly, it also lists TV Tropes, but with the note "(deprecated)" next to it.
  • We may already be winners? Somehow we got a link from The Publishers Clearing House website.


2019 February 5

  • "aepyornis". That's it. No top-level domain, just a single word. If that's not weird, nothing is.


2019 January 27

  • Aaaaaand we're still getting inbound links from TV Tropes -- in fact, they haven't stopped. We seem to get an average of one a day.


2018 November 29

  • Someone somewhere on the Dark Net likes us -- a .onion address is in the list of this week's referrers.
  • Similar to the Troup County School System link below, both Manhattanville College of Harrison, New York and Central Piedmont Community College in Charlotte, North Carolina have links to us on their Blackboard sites.
  • And someone in Russia is interested in us, given the 5 referrals provided by Yandex, the Russian counterpart to Google.


2018 October 3


2018 October 1

  • This is an odd and interesting one. AlternativeTo, a site where you can get crowdsourced recommendations for software, will recommend us if you ask it for an alternative to TV Tropes.


2018 September 29

  • The DOOM Wiki links to us on several of their pages. There's nothing weird about the links -- but it turns out that the DOOM Wiki has coded "allthetropes" as a link markup in exactly the same way that we have "wikipedia" as a markup; their users just have to type in something like "[[allthetropes:Ascended Meme]]" (with perhaps optional pothole text) to have a link to us.
  • Meanwhile, you've got to wonder what's up at the Troup County School System that they're linking to us.


2018 September 28


2018 September 24

  • Four days later, and El Reg is now this week's largest inbound referrer, with almost a hundred links. Someone find the article and what it links to!


2018 September 20

  • Snarky IT news site The Register has suddenly popped up with more than a dozen inbound links.
  • Gaming wiki 1d4chan's page on TV Tropes links to us as its "most notable fork"; they are our third largest referrer this week, after AOL and Reddit.


2018 September 18


2018 August 26

  • Confounding all our prejudices and expectations, we have multiple inbound links from TV Tropes of all places! Isn't it still an autoban to even hint that we exist there?


  1. ↑ Given the actual power of Matomo Analytics as described at their home page, we should be able to get more info and finer detail, but at the moment that's not available to us.
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