On the subject of Notifiers (and how to improve them)

But when you make custom links in notifiers, they don't break. I just don't understand why the pre-made notifiers themselves would inherently come with broken links, when the PM system doesn't break links.

For now, that's not true. I've just sent myself a test notifier for ZCE with one additional link to Administrivia.Zero Context Example. Both links from that message to that administrivia page are broken — both the one in the predefined PM and the one from the additional note.

It only works if you copy the whole text to a new message and fix the link manually in a normal PM.

So this discussion kinda died, I think because of the broken-link issue, but hey, why not revive it? I'm still interested in the issue.

I'm wondering if we could make space by getting rid of "Thanks" and "None"? Both of those fill niches that could easily be handled by just typing a normal PM anyway, especially since "None" is completely blank, so you still need to fill out the message on your own. Though, honestly, I could handle keeping "None" since I guess it's more convenient, but I asked before who actually uses the "Thanks" notifier when they could just write their own thank-you message to someone in a normal PM. I just think that one in particular is very superfluous.

The "thanks" notifier does seem a little pointless, unless the point is to encourage people to send more thank yous by making it as effortless as possible.

Definitely like the idea of combining similar notifiers to accommodate the limited number.

Maybe some of the things like natter, word cruft, and grammar could be combined to alert people they're making "common writing errors" with a link to that? Or are people finding they're usually wanting to highlight one specific type of writing problem when they send those and want them separate?

I say those can be kept separate, though maybe Natter and Indentation can be combined? They usually go hand-in-hand.

War Jay, You forgot to put in your “wrong part of the wiki” notifier the part about tropes only belonging on the main pages.

Edited by PlasmaPower on Mar 6th 2020 at 2:06:14 PM

Erm, because that's not what the notifier is about? Do people commonly make tropes in the wrong part of the wiki, is that common enough to deserve a notifier?

The notifier is about people putting YMMV/Trivia/etc on main pages or what not- a very common issue.

Unless you mean that objective tropes don't get put on YMMV/Trivia pages?

Edited by WarJay77 on Mar 6th 2020 at 1:08:29 PM

Yea, I meant that there should be a part that says that objective tropes shouldn’t be on YMMV and Trivia.

Sorry, I should’ve made it more clear.

Edited by PlasmaPower on Mar 6th 2020 at 2:14:39 PM

I've seen some "that's not a YMMV trope, it goes on the main page" edit reasons before!

I've run into it before too, so it probably should be part of the notifier. The issue is that main tropes don't get little icons, so they're harder to identify for people who don't know which tropes are which, and I'm not sure how to concisely explain it in the already-bloated notifier.

Good point! It doesn't fit with the "look for the icons" explanation... guess leave that up to the edit reasons and people can write a custom one if they want to notify?

Annnd I realized the problem with combining natter and example indentation like I suggested is that sometimes the extra bullets are just plain wrong indentation for multiple examples, not adding commentary as a bullet item, so... ima think more on this.

Right, and natter isn't always in the form of a subbullet; so it's tricky.

Attempting to combine some other related things without getting overly general, overwhelmed with links, or bloated... This smashes together mis-play and murky example with the suggestion a notifier for misidentified tropes.

I suspect, though, that mashing these up is itself a murky example of how someone's edit has problems...

I think that might be good enough, especially with the links; people will probably be able to identify the exact thing they did wrong, and if they can't, they can just ask.

Is this discussion actually leading to changes? Because I also have a request to add an entry for Misplaced Character Tropes. It's actually the only reason I would be using the notifier feature. Too often users don't know that they should add character tropes to the character sheet if in existence instead of the main work page.

If not, I will create my own template.

Edited by eroock on Apr 10th 2020 at 5:00:08 AM

Changes ultimately won't happen unless/until the admins code them, and who knows when that'll happen. I think the final result of this thread needs to be a sandbox page where all of the proposed changes to the notifiers and their writeups are put in bulleted form so the admins have something to go off of.

That'd be fine with me, even just the possibility of fixing this issue would be good.

Just brought up in ATT how there isn't a notifier right now for Square Peg, Round Trope which brings me back to here... sandbox?

Hello again! Someone I sent the indentation notifier to let me know the link it send them was broken. The words Example Indentation linked to https://tvtropes.org/'https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Administrivia/ExampleIndentationInTropeLists/'

That's a known glitch that only the admins can fix. Obviously we're at their mercy as to whether or not it ever does get fixed.

But yeah, a sandbox at this point could be useful.

Now that I think about it, how come no one thought of an Edit Warring notifier?

Because thats what Ask The Tropers is for

Yeah, at the point someone is edit warring a notifier won't do much.

Aye. That said, there are actually some moderator tools for fixing certain link issues, which I've used to fix the indentation notifier.