TV Tropes meta thread

Aegis P crumbles into dust

We were talking about this club’s 20 year anniversary, not Avengers: Infinity War.

Well, Tony Stark better defeat Thanos or I will never come back!

Does anyone even know what date TV Tropes went online?

Somewhere March 2004.

Apparently we all have collectively missed the 20th anniversary.

Well, that’s just prime. x_x

Wikipedia says April.

Good thing we're not wikipedia and can check by ourselves.

Huh, never seen that early version of TV Tropes. You'd think with a website created just 20 years ago we'd have better records of its creation.

If nobody documented it back then, then that's how it is. You can see the rest at Timeline.TV Tropes.

As a prospective writer, this interests me. There's obviously many resources for writers here, like So You Want To and the Writer's Block forum, but the site feels more geared towards resources for audience members and fans nowadays, a way to analyze tropes as a viewer, not as someone using the tropes in writing.

It's ironic given how the website was less professional in its youth, yet it posits itself as a resource in a way it no longer does.

Doesn't stop me from repeatedly pressing the "random trope" button in hopes of finding something I can use to tie a story together. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't.

I think the site hasn't been "for writers" nearly never and is mainly a wiki for wiki sake, what others do with it is up to them. It's not like we actually encourage writing outside a designated subforum or actively make Analysis pages.

Its for people who like the idea of writing and coming up with endless ideas for a story they're too distracted to write!

Ohmygosh, it's like it's made specifically for me!

Regarding the site's launch date, I think someone previously brought up the fact that Eddie's account was specially coded to say it was made on April 2004 due to that being when the site was made, despite registration dates only being tracked since 2009 (meaning his original account would say January 2001 without that coding, which is what mine says despite being made in 2008), but I noticed that both his original Fast Eddie account and his eyebones account (the latter of which was made a while after the site started tracking registration dates) are coded to say they were made in April 2004.

Edit: Also, the Wayback Machine archive Amonimus posted still says April and not March (the banner says "4 Apr 2004") and there are no captures before that one, so I don't see how it contradicts what Wikipeda says. I did notice the timeline says that the site moved from tvwiki.sytes.net to the current tvtropes.org domain on April Fools' Day of the following year (or at least that's when the current domain name was registered), so I guess April is the anniversary of both the site itself and the current domain name.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Apr 28th 2024 at 10:53:00 AM

The end of a page has a last edit timestamp, which is earlier than the capture's date. There isn't a real way of knowing when the site factually went public, Web Archive only has when someone first decided to capture it.

As I've mentioned at Timeline.TV Tropes, one page had a history from even January.

Edited by Amonimus on Apr 28th 2024 at 6:55:52 PM

Interesting... overlooked that edit timestamp earlier. I also noticed that there's a link to a General Suggestions page, which explains why the link to it is orange (I think the fact that it's orange despite no longer existing was brought up in this thread a while back, but I'm not sure if anyone had an explanation at the time), even if it's not clear why it's still orange years after it was discontinued.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Apr 28th 2024 at 1:24:33 PM

Oh hey, I turn 20 this year too. Neat.

The TV Tropes ads that encourage signing up / going ad-free, are pretty good because they also mean that the bad ads aren't happening too?

I wonder if it'd be a good idea for the site to have an option to choose which ad provider they want. It seems Google is pretty good at not being bad?

That wouldn't really make sense, the ads people get are usually either targeted or randomized. (And google ads aren't always perfect, there's been a lot of issues recently)

Reading JustForFun.Ad Of Win makes me sad because nowadays we're lucky if we get adds that just aren't intrusive, let alone funny or ironic.

Edited by WarJay77 on Apr 29th 2024 at 3:21:02 PM

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Funny/TVTropes

It pains me unintended image glitches will NEVER reach such an hilarious high again.

I remember that day. You never knew what the imagine would be when you went to a page.

ah, the original tv tropes. i only recall one or two people who were still troping in 2012 who had been on the original site, and im not including gus or janitor

I know tropes are tools but I am realizing there are almost no positive LBGT tropes anymore. That's a sad state of affairs... and now I realize if negative storytelling is SO COMMON shouldnt it be People Sit On Chairs?