Category talk:Forum Roleplays

Per Topic:Tj9mu9gf9z6z2kcy I will be tagging @Labster & @Looney Toons into this conversation.

While this category does not contain all of the forum roleplays on the wiki, which my ongoing voyage regarding giving needed pages more categories have shown, it seems like all 3 of us have come to a conclusion regarding some of the pages that are going to be found in this category that are a holdover from the TVT fork.

Of course we likely won't need to delete every page here, the amount that would be deleted will likely be a high percentage, so this might be a big project, as we will need to search to see if the roleplay is active/still exists, etc.

Any thoughts?

If we find a dead roleplay, should a delete template be added to the page first?

I know for you, you would have to, as you don't have admin rights.

In terms of us admins, I think we should only need to in edge cases where it's a bit fuzzy etc.

Exactly. I think for each RP we come across we should check a few things before making a decision:

1. Does it still exist? If there's a link in the article follow it, and look to see when the last activity was, if you can. If the link goes nowhere, check the Wayback Machine. If it can't be found there then delete the article. A work that no longer exists is no work.
2. If it exists only in the Wayback Machine, see how big or complex it was before it died. If it's large enough -- based on the size threshold below -- reserve judgment for the later steps. God knows we document enough other works whose only existence remains Wayback Machine copies.
3. If there's no link in the article, Google as best you can. Also check TVT to see if their copy of the page still exists. If no copy can be found anywhere or TVT has nuked their page, we should probably delete our copy as well. If both, definitely delete it.
4. If the link is live and there have been recent posts in the roleplay that are more than "I'm still here" or the like -- stop here and leave the page alone.
5. How recent is "recent"? We need to set a threshold for "death" for any roleplay that doesn't exist only in the Wayback Machine -- something like 6 months or a year (or more) since the last post with real content. I throw the discussion of that threshold open to the wiki at large, and the other admins in particular.
6. If the roleplay is dead by whatever that measure turns out to be, but still exists in some form (either on a live web page or just in the Wayback Machine), we should probably maintain the article if the body of work is large enough. This requires that we also establish a hard rule for the minimum size of a "dead" roleplay that we'll consider documenting. If like a recent example in the forums it only got 25 messages or so before dying out, we'll want to delete the page. But I foresee that this one will be a fuzzy criterion -- we might want to consider both duration it was active and amount of material that got posted. If it was only active a few weeks, but it produced 10s or 100s of Kb of RP text, we might want to keep the page. If it lasted several years but the messages were short and widely spaced, nuke it. If it had a short life and shorter content, nuke it.
7. Finally and optionally: If the page hasn't been deleted by the time you get to this point, it might be worth checking the TVT page again to see if there's been anything added since 2012. While we can't copy new material word-for-word, we can certainly grab any new tropes listed and write our own entries for them -- if someone's willing to go through the RP and find where they happened.

Okay, that's just off the top of my head. I open up the floor to discuss, revise or ignore these suggestions.

I want to factor in how the page quality as well in terms of how it looks here.

Agreed, both with you and Labster below. A half-assed page for even a good RP is not worth keeping. But that's a whole different set of criteria. At least a paragraph of description, a link to the work, more than half a dozen tropes probably should be a bare minimum. If it's big enough to have subpages it's probably worth keeping -- at least long enough to apply the criteria above to decide if we want to keep it.

Page quality is important, and it's highly correlated with work quality. Not that we have any lower limits on work quality, but sometimes I wish we did. Looking at you Whateley Universe.

If the page contains 5 examples with no context, and a sentence fragment of a description, it's not going to be useful to anyone. In general we don't delete pages with prejudice so they can be recreated if needed. I was going to make a list of short pages, but it turned into a bug report instead.

Judging by the the other issues and how long they take to be solved you may be waiting a while.