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

Thanks!

So it seems to me that people are sending unilateral notifiers for stuff that is a lot less serious than the stuff I had envisioned the notifier being used for. IDK if this is an actual issue or simply me having a different metric of what constitutes a truly unilateral change, but the notifier itself is written under the assumption that these are serious changes being made, not things like changing youtube links.

Edited by WarJay77 on Sep 4th 2023 at 2:16:19 PM

I think it's the usual people not reading what the thing is for past the title.

Honestly, I am still not sure about the notifier or that particular situation itself even after mod consensus but moving on...

It's always been tricky to define unilateral changes but yeah I didn't think the notifier would count for small changes that don't effect much.

Either way, going on a spree to change things isn't something I'd encourage but the question if it's always worth intervening I guess.

Edited by MacronNotes on Sep 4th 2023 at 2:23:19 PM

It may be a case of people wanting to send a notifier but not having anything that fits exactly; tbh my main concern is whether or not the misuse of this notifier will lead to people misunderstanding what sort of stuff really qualifies as a problematic unilateral change, as I don't want the term to be watered down into meaninglessness. But that may not be something we can fight, especially since I don't know if such small changes are worth a specific notifier at all.

Maybe we can have an inquiry notifier? "Hello, I would like to ask you about your edit on [page]." It will link to a specific edit, but wouldn't count as rule violation. Effectively a PM with a template.

That may actually fix a lot of problems, yeah. So that it doesn't always default to an accusation of rule-breaking.

Reminds me; since we're supposed to start messaging people about their ATT threads going forward, I'm wondering if it would be at all possible to have a way to send some sort of notifier that links to an ATT thread instead of an edit. That's a question for Kory of course, but personally I get super anxious when it comes to confronting people outside of pre-written notifiers and I especially get anxious about the idea of sending people ATT links, and I think an actual notifier template for such a thing would work if it is indeed going to become a requirement going forward.

Edited by WarJay77 on Sep 4th 2023 at 3:02:03 PM

Didn't he say he'll fix pinging in ATT? We can just make a guideline that if a query is about a specific troper, they should be pinged and if community opinion isn't needed, the query should also be private.

This reminds me my old suggestion to make a new query section specifically for rule reports, but I'd be going off-topic and should go elsewhere.

Edited by Amonimus on Sep 4th 2023 at 10:22:30 PM

NVM

Edited by MacronNotes on Sep 4th 2023 at 3:14:52 PM

Yeah, it is; I made a wishlist post for my idea actually but if you want to give your counterpoint there as well feel free, I hadn't thought about pings so that would also take care of this idea.

The bottom of the notifier list has two "unreleased works" notifiers with the same text.

Deleted the duplicate.

Looks like the pagename infill on the Unreleased notifier isn't working - just sent one and it shows as:

"Your edit on [page] looks like"

fixed

More of a general question about notifiers, but how about how old must an edit be for a notifier to no longer be appropriate?

There's no standard for that. You can send notifiers any time you see an issue. I don't think I'd send notifiers for edits that are over 1-2 years old though personally

The sinkhole notifier says nothing about Chained Sinkholes, which are more conerning.

I'm going to second that, especially since I've gotten DMed about it before, and literally not too long ago.

Thirding

Those are everywhere. Heck, I'm guilty of them sometimes.

Agreed. They're incredibly rampant.

That's what "turn a sentence completely blue" refers to (chopping a sentence into blue links), but it is misleading. Changed to

The [page] edit you made inserted a hidden link to another page which isn't relevant or appropriate on this page. We call them Sinkholes and they distract and confuse the reader. We particularly don't like those which misuse tropes or stick multiple potholes adjacent to each other rather than properly structuring the links. Please feel free to take such links out if you encounter them.

I've noticed that the indentation notifier is very small and doesn't actually get into any details. In the past, I've heard people say that they received the notifier but didn't understand what they did wrong because they didn't click the link. An expansion could help:

• Hi there. Your [page] edit has some indentation issues. Lone subbullets are never allowed, and all examples for a work should be on the same indentation level. Please have a look at the Example Indentation in Trope Lists article to learn more about how we'd like to keep things organized.

That's good to me.