[MeFi Site Update] January 2025 January 22, 2025 3:49 PM Subscribe
Hello and welcome to the first Site Update of 2025!
You can find the last update here.
Profit & Loss
You can find this month's P&L report here (Please note that this month's report doesn't include the Ad revenue as it went to the new bank account, we'll fix that in the books as soon as possible). The previous P&L reports are at this link.
Admin
Loup has been working with the board to transfer and route all MeFi accounts towards the Community Foundation’s bank and updating Payroll systems in place, as well as prioritizing reducing AWS costs again (which is something we do periodically)
Debate on how to handle Twitter links is currently a hot topic across the web; please see the ongoing discussion in MetaTalk and add your perspective.
The board has requested standardizing account closures to expand options and better serve privacy needs while making them less disruptive to other members. In addition to standard account closure, members may Anonymize posts by default, with the ability to request selective, per-subsite, or blanket erasure of comments/posts, with the latter better targeted at the requester's own content to avoid incidental removal of other people's contributions. This is currently a manual process; new site architecture should make it more automatable or self-serve.
Progress continues on implementing certain community-written userscripts to add helpful site features, pending further testing and eval with frimble. Depending on the reception, these could also be targets for inclusion in the new site (see below).
The board met with staff today to discuss efforts to organize volunteer oversight. An update on recent MetaFilter Community Foundation (MCF) work is coming by the end of the month regarding this project, recent banking changes, and progress on setting up a voting platform for members.
General News & Notes
Current Site
Frimble has been recovering from surgery while doing maintenance and catching up.
BIPOC Advisory Board
The January BIPOC Board Meeting is in the process of being rescheduled due to Thyme’s availability this month. New date pending, and all pending minutes were updates by Thyme, but are still pending approval from board. More to come!
If you have any questions or feedback not related to this particular update, please Contact Us instead. If you want to discuss a particular subject not covered here with the community, you’re welcome to open a separate MetaTalk thread for it.
You can find the last update here.
Profit & Loss
You can find this month's P&L report here (Please note that this month's report doesn't include the Ad revenue as it went to the new bank account, we'll fix that in the books as soon as possible). The previous P&L reports are at this link.
Admin
Loup has been working with the board to transfer and route all MeFi accounts towards the Community Foundation’s bank and updating Payroll systems in place, as well as prioritizing reducing AWS costs again (which is something we do periodically)
Debate on how to handle Twitter links is currently a hot topic across the web; please see the ongoing discussion in MetaTalk and add your perspective.
The board has requested standardizing account closures to expand options and better serve privacy needs while making them less disruptive to other members. In addition to standard account closure, members may Anonymize posts by default, with the ability to request selective, per-subsite, or blanket erasure of comments/posts, with the latter better targeted at the requester's own content to avoid incidental removal of other people's contributions. This is currently a manual process; new site architecture should make it more automatable or self-serve.
Progress continues on implementing certain community-written userscripts to add helpful site features, pending further testing and eval with frimble. Depending on the reception, these could also be targets for inclusion in the new site (see below).
The board met with staff today to discuss efforts to organize volunteer oversight. An update on recent MetaFilter Community Foundation (MCF) work is coming by the end of the month regarding this project, recent banking changes, and progress on setting up a voting platform for members.
General News & Notes
- Based on a suggestion from taz, we'll be putting highlighting community related posts in the sidebar with [COMMUNITY]
- Warriorqueen asked for volunteers for the Moderation Oversight Committee and 26 people answered the call!
- Brandon reviewed requested account wipes for 2024 and shared the information with the community
- Speaking of community, y’all did a great job of investigating issues with FanFare and Recent Activity feature. Thank you!
- DirtyOldTown has started posting a weekly wrapup of what’s going on in FanFare.
- Updated guidelines for dealing with an expected higher volume of political and news type posts
- The codebase is open source and available on GitHub
- Volunteer coders have been sent invitations to access to the codebase. If you’d like to contribute, please MeMail kirkaracha with your Github username
- Mods will be able to start testing the weekend of January 25-26; testing will be open to all members by the end of February
- Screenshots of MetaFilter home page, step 1 of signup wizard, and login form (the dark gray box in the lower left corner is a development tool and not part of the site design)
- Screenshot of new status page in development
- Se inició el trabajo para que los controles y el texto del sitio estén disponibles en español.
Current Site
Frimble has been recovering from surgery while doing maintenance and catching up.
BIPOC Advisory Board
The January BIPOC Board Meeting is in the process of being rescheduled due to Thyme’s availability this month. New date pending, and all pending minutes were updates by Thyme, but are still pending approval from board. More to come!
If you have any questions or feedback not related to this particular update, please Contact Us instead. If you want to discuss a particular subject not covered here with the community, you’re welcome to open a separate MetaTalk thread for it.
This month's P&L report shows spending on contractors/consulting is about half what it has been in recent months ($9k versus ~$20k). Does that reflect a reduction in spending or just something that crossed over into the new year?
posted by ssg at 4:33 PM on January 22
posted by ssg at 4:33 PM on January 22
Thanks Brandon.
ssg, I think it's a combination of incomplete information due to some recent banking changes and new-year crossover; we've seen something similar when payments for one month dropped only to double up the next reporting period. 1adam12 has been rerouting the payments; I'll ask him if he knows the exact cause.
As the update mentioned, we had a meeting today with loup and some of the mods briefing about some of the ongoing volunteer efforts for community oversight. frimble and kirkaracha also attended and discussed both work on the existing codebase and the transition to the new site. I think kirk already sent MeMail invites to people who expressed interest in testing. As for the existing site, we've been workshopping the implementation of select classic userscripts into the site to add new features for everyone, regardless of device. There have been a few technical hiccups, but at worst they can serve as a model for additional features to pursue in the new codebase, which promises to make development much easier and open to the community (the source code is already on Github).
More context on account closures: it was something that was originally implemented pretty hastily as a safety measure, and left a lot to be desired. Brandon collected some stats earlier this month, but basically it shook out to three options:
- close account
- close account, soft-delete all posts (still accessible via link and with searchable comments), hard-delete all comments and Ask posts (inaccessible even with link)
- close account, hard-delete all posts and comments (including thousands of other people's comments on those posts, which weirdly still showed up in search but created lots of broken links)
The second was incomplete, the last was pretty rare but *super* disruptive, and there wasn't really an option for people who were satisfied with anonymity without removing things wholesale. Better to give people more flexibility:
- close account
- Anonymize everything
- Anonymize everything but delete specific posts/comments/subsite areas with sensitive info (like all Ask posts)
- Anonymize everything, hard-delete all comments and Ask/Projects/Music/Jobs posts, replace all other post bodies with a generic placeholder, [deleted], etc.
This approach preserves the value of existing MeFi/MeTa/FanFare discussions, and allows people to remove their own personal content if needed in a more reliable way, which is important for people facing stalking, harassment, doxxing, etc. (And of course any particular posts/comments from other users revealing or linking to personal information can be handled on a case-by-case basis.) This will likely prove automatable in the new site (which is looking mighty fine, btw), but until then we on the board felt it important to give people more specific and secure options -- especially now.
That said, it's important to be mindful of information security on the internet and know that anything posted here is publicly available to the world. There is a minimal profile option in your preferences if you want to hide your account details from non-members, and the site robots.txt blocks various AI crawlers, but ultimately the best protection is to be cautious about posting or linking to personally identifiable information here (or anywhere).
posted by Rhaomi at 4:55 PM on January 22 [3 favorites]
ssg, I think it's a combination of incomplete information due to some recent banking changes and new-year crossover; we've seen something similar when payments for one month dropped only to double up the next reporting period. 1adam12 has been rerouting the payments; I'll ask him if he knows the exact cause.
As the update mentioned, we had a meeting today with loup and some of the mods briefing about some of the ongoing volunteer efforts for community oversight. frimble and kirkaracha also attended and discussed both work on the existing codebase and the transition to the new site. I think kirk already sent MeMail invites to people who expressed interest in testing. As for the existing site, we've been workshopping the implementation of select classic userscripts into the site to add new features for everyone, regardless of device. There have been a few technical hiccups, but at worst they can serve as a model for additional features to pursue in the new codebase, which promises to make development much easier and open to the community (the source code is already on Github).
More context on account closures: it was something that was originally implemented pretty hastily as a safety measure, and left a lot to be desired. Brandon collected some stats earlier this month, but basically it shook out to three options:
- close account
- close account, soft-delete all posts (still accessible via link and with searchable comments), hard-delete all comments and Ask posts (inaccessible even with link)
- close account, hard-delete all posts and comments (including thousands of other people's comments on those posts, which weirdly still showed up in search but created lots of broken links)
The second was incomplete, the last was pretty rare but *super* disruptive, and there wasn't really an option for people who were satisfied with anonymity without removing things wholesale. Better to give people more flexibility:
- close account
- Anonymize everything
- Anonymize everything but delete specific posts/comments/subsite areas with sensitive info (like all Ask posts)
- Anonymize everything, hard-delete all comments and Ask/Projects/Music/Jobs posts, replace all other post bodies with a generic placeholder, [deleted], etc.
This approach preserves the value of existing MeFi/MeTa/FanFare discussions, and allows people to remove their own personal content if needed in a more reliable way, which is important for people facing stalking, harassment, doxxing, etc. (And of course any particular posts/comments from other users revealing or linking to personal information can be handled on a case-by-case basis.) This will likely prove automatable in the new site (which is looking mighty fine, btw), but until then we on the board felt it important to give people more specific and secure options -- especially now.
That said, it's important to be mindful of information security on the internet and know that anything posted here is publicly available to the world. There is a minimal profile option in your preferences if you want to hide your account details from non-members, and the site robots.txt blocks various AI crawlers, but ultimately the best protection is to be cautious about posting or linking to personally identifiable information here (or anywhere).
posted by Rhaomi at 4:55 PM on January 22 [3 favorites]
Se inició el trabajo para que los controles y el texto del sitio estén disponibles en español.
Does this mean the site is going to be entirely bilingual? If so, that's quite cool.
posted by Violet Blue at 5:09 PM on January 22 [1 favorite]
Does this mean the site is going to be entirely bilingual? If so, that's quite cool.
posted by Violet Blue at 5:09 PM on January 22 [1 favorite]
I'm going to have to learn Latin to read the front page?
Well that's just fucking great.
posted by Lemkin at 5:17 PM on January 22 [2 favorites]
Well that's just fucking great.
posted by Lemkin at 5:17 PM on January 22 [2 favorites]
Is there a story behind this? I've searched in MetaTalk and don't seem to be able to find any discussion of this.
Kirkaracha is adding language localization to the site, starting with Spanish.
Does that reflect a reduction in spending or just something that crossed over into the new year?
The latter. December payroll came from the Foundation's bank in the beginning of January (we timed the transfer of funds, expenses, payments so that the LLC wouldn't have any transactions in 2025)
posted by loup (staff) at 5:20 PM on January 22 [3 favorites]
Kirkaracha is adding language localization to the site, starting with Spanish.
Does that reflect a reduction in spending or just something that crossed over into the new year?
The latter. December payroll came from the Foundation's bank in the beginning of January (we timed the transfer of funds, expenses, payments so that the LLC wouldn't have any transactions in 2025)
posted by loup (staff) at 5:20 PM on January 22 [3 favorites]
I'm going to have to learn Latin to read the front page?
Abhinc menses nuntiavimus.
posted by kirkaracha (staff) at 5:25 PM on January 22 [2 favorites]
Abhinc menses nuntiavimus.
posted by kirkaracha (staff) at 5:25 PM on January 22 [2 favorites]
MetaFilter activity stats update: added a chart breaking down users by activity level.
In the last completed month, December 2024, across all subsites:
- 2,800 users made one or more comments or posts
- 1,000 users made 5 or more
- 500 users made 10 or more
- 200 users made 25 or more
- 83 superfans made 50 or more
posted by Klipspringer at 5:38 PM on January 22 [1 favorite]
In the last completed month, December 2024, across all subsites:
- 2,800 users made one or more comments or posts
- 1,000 users made 5 or more
- 500 users made 10 or more
- 200 users made 25 or more
- 83 superfans made 50 or more
posted by Klipspringer at 5:38 PM on January 22 [1 favorite]
Kirkaracha is adding language localization to the site, starting with Spanish.
Personally, I'm cool with the site becoming bilingual (or more!), but this does seem like a big change. Are we expecting people to be posting and commenting in Spanish and eventually other languages on the same site? Or are we launching MetaFiltro? What's the thought behind translating the site?
Making the site localizable while rebuilding makes total sense, but actually translating it (a big job!) seems like a whole other story.
posted by ssg at 5:40 PM on January 22 [5 favorites]
Personally, I'm cool with the site becoming bilingual (or more!), but this does seem like a big change. Are we expecting people to be posting and commenting in Spanish and eventually other languages on the same site? Or are we launching MetaFiltro? What's the thought behind translating the site?
Making the site localizable while rebuilding makes total sense, but actually translating it (a big job!) seems like a whole other story.
posted by ssg at 5:40 PM on January 22 [5 favorites]
but actually translating it (a big job!) seems like a whole other story.
I have several translation apps attached to my browser. My favorite appears with a highlight and a click, but the apps also allow for the translation of full pages at a click. I've used them for a couple of years to translate from languages as disparate as Russian, Swedish, Ukrainian and Portuguese — and the translation is, generally speaking, flawless. The only languages I've had trouble with are German and Finnish, probably partly because speakers of both languages tend toward high fluency in English, so there's less call, but also because both invert the order of words in sentences in the ways that English does not — and that seems to currently be beyond the skillset of automatic translation.
kirkaracha would have to say for sure, but I suspect adding a translation/bilingual feature really only amounts to some code or a widget these days.
posted by Violet Blue at 6:29 PM on January 22 [1 favorite]
I have several translation apps attached to my browser. My favorite appears with a highlight and a click, but the apps also allow for the translation of full pages at a click. I've used them for a couple of years to translate from languages as disparate as Russian, Swedish, Ukrainian and Portuguese — and the translation is, generally speaking, flawless. The only languages I've had trouble with are German and Finnish, probably partly because speakers of both languages tend toward high fluency in English, so there's less call, but also because both invert the order of words in sentences in the ways that English does not — and that seems to currently be beyond the skillset of automatic translation.
kirkaracha would have to say for sure, but I suspect adding a translation/bilingual feature really only amounts to some code or a widget these days.
posted by Violet Blue at 6:29 PM on January 22 [1 favorite]
Will there be a way for users to manually delete posts without closing their account?
I have some stuff I’d like to clean up for opsec as a trans person and don’t want to have to wipe my account to do if, but neither do I want to have to message a mod about each individual instance.
posted by brook horse at 7:19 PM on January 22 [1 favorite]
I have some stuff I’d like to clean up for opsec as a trans person and don’t want to have to wipe my account to do if, but neither do I want to have to message a mod about each individual instance.
posted by brook horse at 7:19 PM on January 22 [1 favorite]
I’m still holding out hope for BIPOC Board minutes…
posted by Vatnesine at 7:37 PM on January 22 [2 favorites]
posted by Vatnesine at 7:37 PM on January 22 [2 favorites]
Mod note: I have some stuff I’d like to clean up for opsec as a trans person and don’t want to have to wipe my account to do if, but neither do I want to have to message a mod about each individual instance.
It would be totally fine, others have requested this, so definitely feel free to put your request in!
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 7:59 PM on January 22
It would be totally fine, others have requested this, so definitely feel free to put your request in!
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 7:59 PM on January 22
Sorry, to clarify, I don’t have social anxiety, I’m just busy. Thanks for the reassurance but I’m asking for a UI solution rather than having to gather links to a bunch of individual posts/comments.
posted by brook horse at 8:38 PM on January 22 [1 favorite]
posted by brook horse at 8:38 PM on January 22 [1 favorite]
- Anonymize everything, hard-delete all comments and Ask/Projects/Music/Jobs posts, replace all other post bodies with a generic placeholder, [deleted], etc.
To be clear - is this hard-delete the user's own comments and posts, or also the comment responses to a user's post?
Given the site is being reworked, it seems to me there should be a way to anonymize/delete posts without having the comments to that post being deleted. A user should not be able to delete other users' comments via deleting the post the comments respond to - especially without providing any reason why that's necessary.
posted by saeculorum at 8:53 PM on January 22 [4 favorites]
To be clear - is this hard-delete the user's own comments and posts, or also the comment responses to a user's post?
Given the site is being reworked, it seems to me there should be a way to anonymize/delete posts without having the comments to that post being deleted. A user should not be able to delete other users' comments via deleting the post the comments respond to - especially without providing any reason why that's necessary.
posted by saeculorum at 8:53 PM on January 22 [4 favorites]
brook horse, would flagging the post/comment with a note work? That notifies the mod on duty and I think they can see who's flagging what, so it shouldn't be abusable.
saeculorum: "To be clear - is this hard-delete the user's own comments and posts, or also the comment responses to a user's post?"
It kind of varies by subsite -- MetaFilter posts by definition are not supposed to be about your own work, and both FanFare and MeTa discussions are more topic-focused, so Anonymizing the poster and erasing the post body are generally sufficient to protect privacy (MeTas about sensitive issues directly involving the poster are an exception but could always be targeted for selective deletion if needed).
Projects/Music/Jobs threads, though, are explicitly about things the poster created themselves or have a direct stake in. So while it's good to avoid deleting other people's comments, in those cases erasing everything is a safer bet since the discussion is about something the requester is personally involved in (plus the threads are usually shorter, which limits the damage). IRL is kind of a wildcard -- meetup posts are undeniably personal, but also communal. Would Anonymizing and/or removing all username mentions of deleted users in old threads be enough? I've only ever been to one meetup, so idk how attached people get to keeping memories of them here.
As for Ask, those definitely involve more personal matters and should probably err on the side of hard-deleting whole threads if requested. Any "human relations" questions, for example, would need to be nuked from orbit. I could maybe see the argument for retaining select broadly popular questions like "what's your favorite dessert" or "recommend places to visit in London" or "how do I fix this goddamn printer" -- provided the poster is Anonymized, their own comments are deleted, any mention of their username removed, and the question itself zeroed out or replaced with a nondescript summary -- but imho even that would need to be the exception rather than the rule. Respecting everyone's stake in community discussions is a valid concern, but the most important thing is to ensure people can reliably remove their own identifying information (or direct discussion of it) if needed.
This is all in the context of account closures ofc -- deletion of comments for still-active users is a trickier question. For safety reasons yes, that should definitely be done, but making any comment deleteable automatically/on-demand could have downstream effects on moderation and how people behave that need to be considered pretty carefully before embracing.
posted by Rhaomi at 10:21 PM on January 22
saeculorum: "To be clear - is this hard-delete the user's own comments and posts, or also the comment responses to a user's post?"
It kind of varies by subsite -- MetaFilter posts by definition are not supposed to be about your own work, and both FanFare and MeTa discussions are more topic-focused, so Anonymizing the poster and erasing the post body are generally sufficient to protect privacy (MeTas about sensitive issues directly involving the poster are an exception but could always be targeted for selective deletion if needed).
Projects/Music/Jobs threads, though, are explicitly about things the poster created themselves or have a direct stake in. So while it's good to avoid deleting other people's comments, in those cases erasing everything is a safer bet since the discussion is about something the requester is personally involved in (plus the threads are usually shorter, which limits the damage). IRL is kind of a wildcard -- meetup posts are undeniably personal, but also communal. Would Anonymizing and/or removing all username mentions of deleted users in old threads be enough? I've only ever been to one meetup, so idk how attached people get to keeping memories of them here.
As for Ask, those definitely involve more personal matters and should probably err on the side of hard-deleting whole threads if requested. Any "human relations" questions, for example, would need to be nuked from orbit. I could maybe see the argument for retaining select broadly popular questions like "what's your favorite dessert" or "recommend places to visit in London" or "how do I fix this goddamn printer" -- provided the poster is Anonymized, their own comments are deleted, any mention of their username removed, and the question itself zeroed out or replaced with a nondescript summary -- but imho even that would need to be the exception rather than the rule. Respecting everyone's stake in community discussions is a valid concern, but the most important thing is to ensure people can reliably remove their own identifying information (or direct discussion of it) if needed.
This is all in the context of account closures ofc -- deletion of comments for still-active users is a trickier question. For safety reasons yes, that should definitely be done, but making any comment deleteable automatically/on-demand could have downstream effects on moderation and how people behave that need to be considered pretty carefully before embracing.
posted by Rhaomi at 10:21 PM on January 22
Making the new site open-source is very cool, thank you for doing that! I'm mostly a front-end gal so I don't really have the knowhow to set up a test copy, but maybe I'll look into it someday.
posted by one for the books at 12:34 AM on January 23
posted by one for the books at 12:34 AM on January 23
Having localized UI is pretty awesome for inclusivity!
If the rest of the site remains an English language discussion site, it seems more like virtue signalling than actual inclusivity to me, but as an anglophone, I admit I am not in a great position to know whether that is true or not.
Unless the intention is to provide translation tools that enable actual non-English content and conversation?
posted by jacquilynne at 5:59 AM on January 23 [2 favorites]
If the rest of the site remains an English language discussion site, it seems more like virtue signalling than actual inclusivity to me, but as an anglophone, I admit I am not in a great position to know whether that is true or not.
Unless the intention is to provide translation tools that enable actual non-English content and conversation?
posted by jacquilynne at 5:59 AM on January 23 [2 favorites]
But if you're going to provide those translation tools for the content, they can work equally well on the UI. There's no reason to translate the UI for an English-language discussion site.
posted by bowbeacon at 6:46 AM on January 23 [2 favorites]
posted by bowbeacon at 6:46 AM on January 23 [2 favorites]
I was thinking in the sense of what Facebook et al do when they detect that a post or comment in your feed isn't in your language, which is provide an opportunity to view a translation. It doesn't affect the UI, just the specific bits of content that aren't in the user's chosen language, so having the UI also be adaptable would be helpful there.
posted by jacquilynne at 6:50 AM on January 23
posted by jacquilynne at 6:50 AM on January 23
the most important thing is to ensure people can reliably remove their own identifying information (or direct discussion of it) if needed.
Everything you said can be accomplished by at least requiring a reason for deletion and preferably specific identification of posts. MetaFilter's ad hoc policy of allowing wholesale deletions with no reason and no specific identifiable information selected has caused me to reduce my activity on the site. I consistently see my answers on AskMeFi deleted due to account wipes even when they answers have no identifiable information at all. This doesn't improve user safety at all, but does have an impact on contributors to the site.
A norm for high quality content needs to be matched with a norm that content is preserved at least if possible.
posted by saeculorum at 6:51 AM on January 23 [3 favorites]
Everything you said can be accomplished by at least requiring a reason for deletion and preferably specific identification of posts. MetaFilter's ad hoc policy of allowing wholesale deletions with no reason and no specific identifiable information selected has caused me to reduce my activity on the site. I consistently see my answers on AskMeFi deleted due to account wipes even when they answers have no identifiable information at all. This doesn't improve user safety at all, but does have an impact on contributors to the site.
A norm for high quality content needs to be matched with a norm that content is preserved at least if possible.
posted by saeculorum at 6:51 AM on January 23 [3 favorites]
It doesn't affect the UI
It doesn't, but it COULD. If we can automatically translate long interpersonal drama questions in Ask, and their responses, in a satisfying way for non-English speakers, then it's trivial to translate "post comment" and "posted by jacquilynne at 11:50am" and "Archives" automatically. There's no need to invest human effort in doing that translation.
posted by bowbeacon at 6:57 AM on January 23 [1 favorite]
It doesn't, but it COULD. If we can automatically translate long interpersonal drama questions in Ask, and their responses, in a satisfying way for non-English speakers, then it's trivial to translate "post comment" and "posted by jacquilynne at 11:50am" and "Archives" automatically. There's no need to invest human effort in doing that translation.
posted by bowbeacon at 6:57 AM on January 23 [1 favorite]
I think maybe we are talking about slightly different things. I wasn't really considering who would do the actual translation of the words in the interface -- people vs. machines -- just whether or not the actual coding necessary to enable a localized interface was useful without also doing the coding to enable translation on the content itself.
posted by jacquilynne at 7:15 AM on January 23 [1 favorite]
posted by jacquilynne at 7:15 AM on January 23 [1 favorite]
Ah. The key is that there's no coding necessary to enable a localized interface, if it's being machine-translated. It's only necessary if it is a human translation.
posted by bowbeacon at 7:24 AM on January 23 [1 favorite]
posted by bowbeacon at 7:24 AM on January 23 [1 favorite]
I would imagine there's still some coding that's likely to be necessary to distinguish things like usernames, which probably shouldn't be translated even where they may be translatable, from things which should be. If it's just full-page machine translation, I am not sure what that would bring that users can't already get from the built-in translation tools in their web browsers.
posted by jacquilynne at 7:44 AM on January 23
posted by jacquilynne at 7:44 AM on January 23
So the translation seems like a bigger deal that probably needs more planning. Tabling for now.
posted by kirkaracha (staff) at 8:05 AM on January 23 [3 favorites]
posted by kirkaracha (staff) at 8:05 AM on January 23 [3 favorites]
Isn't mefi an English-language site? Aren't we also a smaller user base than ever? How is encouraging people to use a different language lead to anything other than a fracturing of an already shrinking audience?
posted by Dysk at 8:22 AM on January 23 [4 favorites]
posted by Dysk at 8:22 AM on January 23 [4 favorites]
Tabling for now.
I guess this should be localized, perhaps automatically, for us non-Americans.
If we can automatically translate long interpersonal drama questions in Ask, and their responses, in a satisfying way for non-English speakers, then it's trivial to translate "post comment" and "posted by jacquilynne at 11:50am" and "Archives" automatically. There's no need to invest human effort in doing that translation.
I'm glad this is being tabled/shelved for now and hope we can have a community discussion before moving forward with something like this, but wanted to note that this isn't how translation works. Translating full sentences and paragraphs is something that computers do quite well. Translating isolated words or phrases well is harder, because the context is missing. So computers tend to be worse at translating menu items, making human translation more valuable for UI. Maybe a machine translation would still be good enough in this case, but it's not really clear what we would be doing here or what the goals would be, so hard to say at this point.
posted by ssg at 9:54 AM on January 23 [2 favorites]
I guess this should be localized, perhaps automatically, for us non-Americans.
If we can automatically translate long interpersonal drama questions in Ask, and their responses, in a satisfying way for non-English speakers, then it's trivial to translate "post comment" and "posted by jacquilynne at 11:50am" and "Archives" automatically. There's no need to invest human effort in doing that translation.
I'm glad this is being tabled/shelved for now and hope we can have a community discussion before moving forward with something like this, but wanted to note that this isn't how translation works. Translating full sentences and paragraphs is something that computers do quite well. Translating isolated words or phrases well is harder, because the context is missing. So computers tend to be worse at translating menu items, making human translation more valuable for UI. Maybe a machine translation would still be good enough in this case, but it's not really clear what we would be doing here or what the goals would be, so hard to say at this point.
posted by ssg at 9:54 AM on January 23 [2 favorites]
I just looked at this page in Google Translate in Spanish and, while it is certainly understandable, the header and footer are definitely weird (Campo de golf for Links, etc).
posted by ssg at 10:01 AM on January 23 [1 favorite]
posted by ssg at 10:01 AM on January 23 [1 favorite]
Campo de golf for Links
This is the funniest machine translation fails I've seen for a while, don't know why this cracked me up but it did.
posted by Dysk at 10:09 AM on January 23
This is the funniest machine translation fails I've seen for a while, don't know why this cracked me up but it did.
posted by Dysk at 10:09 AM on January 23
« Older Is it time to quarantine and perhaps ban Twitter?
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Is there a story behind this? I've searched in MetaTalk and don't seem to be able to find any discussion of this.
posted by ssg at 4:15 PM on January 22 [2 favorites]