Topic on User talk:TrueUtopian

... but you may want to take a look at the edits I made to it afterward. I had to do a lot to clean it up. First, you somehow got two page type templates -- {{trope}} and {{work}} -- on the page at the same time. You put all your main text inside the code and nowiki tags used to make the "put your text here" message pop, totally ignoring the instruction in that message reading "Remove this line and the markup around it when you place a description on the page." (Emphasis mine.) You had a number of redlinks for tropes -- including one trope that doesn't exist on this site. (The editor will pop up a list of suggestions in the upper right corner when you start creating a link -- if nothing is offered or things stop being offered after you've typed a few letters, that means you've made a mistake somewhere.) You had the "work needs tropes" template -- used when the trope list is empty -- at the top of a very large trope list.

Those are the big issues, but there were a few other ones -- a duplicate trope entry, your alphabetization of the trope list was essentially random, some grammar and spelling -- that all combined made for a page that was something of an unreadable mess. Please pay closer attention when you create or edit pages in the future.

Thank you.

-- Looney Toons, admin

@Labster @Looney Toons @GethN7 @Robkelk @QuestionableSanity @Derivative @SelfCloak

Thank you for your corrections.

I'm still struggling to adjust to this format. I was hoping that, once I finished with the page, I could edit again to properly adjust the tropes. I struggled with the template, and I'm genuinely sorry for that.

I promise it won't happen again.

You're not in trouble, you're not going to get punished in any way for it -- our page How We Do Bans Around Here (which you should read on general principle) lays out exactly what we mods are allowed to ban people for, and it's not on the list. If my tone sounds irritated, it's less to do with you and more to do with me being short on both sleep and coffee, and I apologize for any concern I caused on your part. (I'm also a freelance writer and have a bit of OCD when it comes to the written word, and that doesn't help either.)

It's only if someone is highly resistant to advice on how to stop making the same mistake over and over again that we get into bannable territory, and that's more to protect the wiki than to punish the user, although I'll admit they'll look like the same thing from the user's POV.

And we know, especially for people whose only exposure to wikis is TV Tropes' custom implementation of the antique and obsolete PMWiki engine, it takes a while to get a handle on coding pages. No one gets punished for not knowing everything right away, and we Mods are going to do our best to point you at everything you need to know when you need to know it. Speaking of which...

• Our Style Guide -- how we want pages to look and feel
• Help:Formatting -- how MediaWiki markup works (quick summary: some of it is like TVT/PMWiki, but a lot of it isn't)

We also use MediaWiki's "template" feature to automate a lot of common features, such as page headers and footers, common banners and headers... Now that I think of it, we should probably set up a list somewhere of what they are and what they do so we can point people at them.

In any case, thanks for your patience with my grumpiness this morning, and we really do look forward to your future contributions.

Now that I think of it, we should probably set up a list somewhere of what they are and what they do so we can point people at them.

It took most of a week, but we now have this page -- All The Tropes:Our Custom Templates -- in case you're interested.