They've had a couple of rounds of deleting anything that might be considered sexual, NSFW, or controversial reference or language, as well as renaming articles. This is to make the site more attractive for advertisers because the admins want moar moniez.
It's also worse on tvtropes than most wikis because there is a very limited revision history on most pages (might be the weird software they use rather than admin-imposed), and anything that falls of the end of it after long enough is gone forever.
Trying to learn about that game so I could understand a good fanfic was what alerted me to the problem, and not surprisingly the first fork of the site I looked at, back when it was announced on HN (can't find the link, unfortunately), the front page (Wikimedia) highlighted that title.
I would appreciate some more detail, too. I've noticed that I find TVT much less engrossing than I did a few years ago, but I thought I'd just grown out of it. If there's an explanation for the decline I would be very interested to hear it.
edit: How accurate is the Encyclopedia Dramatica article on TVT? I normally avoid ED, but I gave in this time because it seems to be pretty comprehensive.
edit 2: I found this blog: http://tvtropeshistory.blogspot.com/ Obviously it's hard to verify histories like these, but it seems pretty in-depth.
I made the same questions when I discovered All The Tropes, these are the most relevant links I found:
* The Google Incident [1] explains first-hand why TV Tropes adopted tighter guidelines against sexual fan fiction, from which several forks were created as reaction.
* The fork All The Tropes explains how they are different[2], and why they made the fork [3].
* This recent discussion at MetaFilter have lots of details and reaction from the community [4].
* These are the most juicy discussions at TV Tropes itself: [5] [6]
How does a site like tvtropes need thousands per month? they must be doing something wrong...
Stick it on a few linode or AWS VPSes and add some backend code to bring in new ones as load goes up, maybe with physical servers for database backend. Switch to nginx if it doesn't use it already (can't remember (edit: yep, using Apache; also seems to only be on a single IP, hosted by ServerBeach)), add memcached, perhaps put the whole thing behind cloudflare, and problem solved.
You say "add memcached" like it's easy to do on 10 year old wiki software. TVT is running a highly custom Pmwiki install, with no upstream updates in a long time. The something wrong isn't the hosting costs, so much as the sole developer/owner/admin running the site.
I'll also note that the forums make up most of the traffic of the site, and that's the one place you can turn off adverts for free. The wiki supports the core product, which is apparently the forums.
If I was an admin there, I'd probably have made upgrading to some new software (that actually supports special characters etc. in titles, doesn't drop edit history off the end of the page into /dev/null, doesn't have the weirdest way of creating links I've seen, etc.) a key priority.
