Sometimes I'll go through the TV Tropes tag to see if anyone's been getting the "do you have a TV Tropes account?" ask lately, because everything about this thing just baffles the fuck out of me.
The way this works is that when you post a post in the TV Tropes tag, you'll get an anonymous ask asking if you have a TV Tropes account. Fairly innocuous ask, so most people answer fairly unguardedly.
I got an ask like this ages ago, and I answered it openly. I took it as an expression of interest, like "oh hey you're talking about TV Tropes, are you a troper?". And then I got this ask back, where the asker is telling me to pass on a message to a moderator on the site:
The anon has a message they want to send to a specific moderator on the site. They want the staff to read an email that the asker wants to send, but before the rest of the staff sees it they want this particular mod to have a look.
They post their entire, uncensored email address - which they want you, the receiver of this ask, to send to a specific TV Tropes mod on their behalf - and they want this specific mod to tell the rest of the mod staff not to access the TV Tropes email account until they've read an email from this email address first. But to that end, they don't want this mod to tell the rest of the staff what their email address is in the first place. And then they want me to report back and tell them what this mod says to their proposition.
So this ask, when I received it a year and a half ago, really confused and bothered me. The ask isn't about mutual interests, it's about being a gofer between this presumably former TV Tropes user and a prominent mod on the mod staff. And like I'm a stranger in all of this - I didn't sign up for any of this.
And I wanted to ask at the time - what are you going to tell this mod? What sort of message am I heralding, here? Because if you can't contact this TV Tropes moderator by yourself, and you're asking absolute strangers on the internet to use their TV Tropes accounts to pass messages to the mod staff, I have to assume it's something like a ban appeal.
But the website has a ban appeal process. There's a forum thread for people who've had their editing privileges suspended, where they can communicate with the mods on whatever issue they're getting pulled up on. Where the website gets tough is when a user is determined to have a specific type of wonk or issue - posting that a character is an irredeemable monster for every single one of their edits, for example - where they continue to edit pages in a way that violates the TOS, ignoring the different warnings they receive from the site's moderators until the site IP-bans them to stop whatever damage they keep doing to the wiki.
That's the frame of reference I'm working with when a person tells me to start messaging a website's moderators on their behalf. Maybe I'm being uncharitable, but that's where I'm at when I receive a message like this - someone who's been IP-banned from the site, trying to get me to trojan-horse a message through to the site's mod staff on their behalf because they're too much of a Known Quantity to do it themselves.
And I'm not going to do that, because the website has VERY STRICT RULES on importing and exporting drama. If I try to drag the mods into whatever is going on here, my ass is potentially on the chopping block. I have my issues and criticisms of the website at times, god knows I do - I specifically remembered this ask because of something that just happened on the website. But I'm not going to stick my neck out for a stranger who's being extremely shady in my askbox.
I got this ask back in August of 2024:
And to this day, I continue to see people posting anonymous asks on the TV Tropes tag, asking them if they have an account. And I feel like these users are probably approaching it from the same angle I did - they assume this is someone trying to connect over a mutual interest in the website, so they engage with the message in good faith.
I don't want to share this asker's personal information, which is one reason why I never responded to their ask. They sent this on anonymous, meaning that I can't send my reply to them directly - and again, their whole-ass email account is in their ask, so posting this ask publically would dox them! But this ask has been driving me absolutely nuts for the last year and a half, and I just had to dig it up and talk about it.
I want to ask the anonymous asker some stuff, because I know they're still trawling the TV Tropes tag on Tumblr - they wouldn't be sending those blanket "do you have a TV Tropes account" asks to this day if they didn't. Feel free not to respond, but I've gotta try and satisfy my curiosity here.
Why do you need someone with a pre-existing TV Tropes account to use their connection on the inside to contact mods on your behalf?
Why do you want someone to single out this particular mod, to see if they'll monitor the TV Tropes email account for your message? Why is it imperative that it's this mod?
Why single out a mod at all - why does the message have to be screened by someone before the rest of the mod staff know about it? Why not just send the email and let the cards fall where they may?
And probably the most pointed question I have to ask:
Considering that you've been engaging in this behaviour for years at this point, seemingly to no avail - why are you still so determined to get in contact with TV Tropes through the good graces of strangers on the internet? Why not move on?
I really don't know what else to say. I just wanna know what tf is going on here.
stormborns
origamiaround
kianamaiart
yousharknotpass
blakekathryn
snowghoul
