Amara support

"Sorin started a topic 6 months ago (2013-02-08) Moldovan? There is no Moldovan language! Only Stalin believed that. Or ordered that. Moldavian is just a dialect of Romanian. It is just Romanian, how many times do we have to teach you? Adding that to the language lists is stupid, like adding the American language. It's not even "Moldovan", the way you try to spell it, but "Moldovenească". Instead, you are ignoring the Aromanian language, which IS considered a separate language, although very close to Romanian. Do your homework."

"Buzbee at Amara started a topic a day ago (2013-08-06) I can think of a few things that would improve search for captioners. I'd like the videos to be sorted into types. There are certain types of videos I prefer to caption. Probably it's the same for everyone. You have to listen to it several times before the work is done, so it might as well be something you like, right? There are certain videos I couldn't get through, by the same token. And sometimes 200 of those seem to be uploaded all at once. (From the same place.) Doesn't matter which so I will leave that vague. Aside from being able to search categories I would also like to be able to search: Videos which need English captions (can substitute language of choice there; right now can only search for videos which HAVE a given language - or which have no languages - but the latter often has incomplete captions and I prefer not to step on any toes) Videos which have been uploaded - that day, that week, that hour, etc. Videos from favorited channels (captioner can pick 'favorite channels') Videos from favorited topics (this can include a musical artist, key word for title, etc.) Videos by length - this can make a difference if the captioner is tired or hasn't much time that day. Or may be looking for a long project by the same token. Anyone have other ideas for improving search? Making it more efficient? Please specify if the idea is for benefit of Captioners or Viewers. (Both are important, I just think it's important to keep the two searches separate, since there are different needs.)"

"Buzbee at Amara started a topic a day ago (2013-08-06) I would love it if I were able to create a sort of 'watch list' or favorites list. A 'Save til later' list, if you will. Slogging through page after page in the "Watch" list, to try to find ones with 0 languages including no incomplete captions - seems the best way to find ones that someone put here, but which haven't had any work done on them yet. The downside of that, is, there are also many many pages to slog through...As I browse to see which one I will caption next, I run across several "maybes." It would be great to be able to bookmark those "maybe" videos, to come back to later on. For one thing I might be in different moods different times - wanting to caption music one day, a lecture the next, something silly the day after that...etc. But (being able to make a favorites/saved list on my account page would) also simply save time and would make sure I can find the videos again easily. It is too unwieldy to type a list elsewhere, and my computer bookmarks are a mess already, without adding more literal (computer) bookmarks. A saved list or favorites list, right here on this site, would be great. (This could of course be very handy for viewers also - not only for captioners.) I should add, this would not imply that the person has "dibs" on that video - that is a separate issue. If anything it would decrease competition since each person would have several videos handy that they can work on. Thoughts?"

"Claude Almansi started a topic 10 minutes ago (2013-07-30) Proposals for the elimination of theses paradoxes and issues The paradoxes and issues described above could be eliminated by an approach to deletions directly based on copyright law and Amara's Terms of Service: A) Proposal for the deletion of subtitles: The only persons allowed to delete - or entitled to request the deletion of - a set of subtitles must be its author and the right holder on the video. As per Amara's Terms of Service, section 5: the author of the subtitles cannot delete them if the deletion would also delete or mess up the work of other people (co-subtitlers, people who have translated the subtitle set). Team admins / owners can only prevent subtitlers from deleting subtitles they made for the team's videos, but only if this is explicitly specified in the team's description. B) Proposal for the deletion of Amara video pages The only persons allowed to delete - or entitled to request the deletion of - an Amara video page must be the person who created it and the right holder on the video that streams in it. As per Amara's Terms of Service, section 5: the creator of the page cannot delete it if other people have already started to create subtitles for the video that streams in it, unless s/he is also the right holder on the video. Could Amara developers create software rules that would allow users to delete their subtitles and the video pages they've created, with the restrictions explained in these two proposals? A 3. (the restriction in favor of team owners/admins) might be a bit of a headache, technically. But it should be feasible by adding something to the /settings/permissions/ page of teams AND by making these permissions settings automatically viewable by all."

"Claude Almansi started a topic 5 months ago (2013-03-15) It would be nice if there were a search tool for subtitlers' profiles, on the model of the one for videos in the Watch page or in teams' video page, but with different criteria. I.e. something like: Search box: "Search subtitlers" 1st filtering criterion: "who have made subtitles from (droplist of languages)" 2nd filtering criterion: "into (droplist of languages)" 3rd filtering criterion: "covering more than (droplist with > and some duration values) minutes of video." This way, people who need subtitles for a given video could view various members' profiles fitting the chosen criteria, check some of their work, then contact them - also for paid subtitling. I take it our subtitling activity produces the data corresponding to these criteria, somewhere in the Amara server? In the unlikely case of privacy issues with this proposal, having one's profile included in such a search tool could be made opt-in."

No reply.

"CC started a topic 8 months ago (2012-11-30) I currently download Youtube's Auto Captions from Youtube, and then upload them to Amara as a good starting point (both for the captions and the timing of the captions), and then start editing the subtitles that way. Is there a way you can auto-import those machine captions so we can skip a step? Thanks! "

Erroneously tagged "Implemented".

"Eyal Herzberg started a topic 25 days ago (2013-07-05) It would be easy and elegant if, as part of the process of translating a video from another owner, the user will be able to send an automated message to the owner explaining about amara.org and suggesting that they link their channel with this useful service. "

"Zikoinak started a topic 13 days ago (2013-07-15) Hello Amara developers, Thank you for you great work. I do often translate subtitles in Amara. I find it difficult to do in the new editor. The upper part of the screen is fully occupied by the video and the keyboard instructions. I suggest that you enable hiding this upper part, so that the two columns of the text are more visible."

Reply from PCF support

"Veroneblack 2013-07-09 (ongoing discussion) Half of the time when I submit my subtitles the loading still thinking during hours. I can download the subtitles but I can't send it back to the same video. Editing is not working anymore This is happening to me and few other people since your big upgrate, everything was fine before. Here is an example : http://www.amara.org/fr/videos/MctiWJgOXCyL/info/kid-cudi-going-to-the-ceremony-produced-by-wzrd/#video Plus : 'Rollback' seems to be down as well" Following comments: me: rollback didn't work for me either. Verone: http://www.amara.org/fr/videos/Xd7tj3biEGM1/info/skylar-grey-feat-angel-haze-shit-man-dont-look-down/ not even editable from scratch me: able to edit Verone's subs from the subtitle page and to make them incomplete again, so that he could edit them from the main page. Incoherence of this graying out subs marked complete in the main page droplist, while they can still be edited from the subtitle pages. 2013-07-14 Verone: asked me to edit and save the French subs of http://www.amara.org/fr/videos/ASpv6drn0LEm/info/king-los-love-you-down-becoming-king/ 2013-07-15 It worked for me, from the subtitle page

Presently in the Your suggestions to make Amara great board. Amara staff should reply to this topic, then move it to another board: Help me, please, or I have a question.

"Jules Rincon started a topic 9 months ago (2012-10-23) A special thanks for all the wonderful Amara community volunteer captioners, translators, subtitlers, promoters and sharers who joined us in the live broadcast. We'd love to get more feedback about the new Amara platform mockups we shared on the October 23rd, 2012 Townhall. The video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXj9Qcneo_s&feature=plcp With Communication Access Realtime Transcription (CART) provided by Jason Bradley from bradleyreporting.com (Thank you so much Jason and Michael!) The slides with the mockups of the new Amara look are here: goo.gl/gPdZe IMPORTANT INFO Before adding more ideas: This forum is an "idea" forum. Every separate post can be voted up or down (and discussed), we can also track the progress of the ideas, to see which ones will be implemented and see how they are progressing. We suggest: Post one idea per topic. Add really descriptive titles. Vote ideas up instead of duplicating, feel free to expand through replies."

So far it is not possible to track the progress of the ideas submitted by users in this board, due to lack of - and lackadaisical - tagging of posts by Amara staff. However, this could be corrected if developers start reviewing the submitted suggestions, and this could help them in applying UXD to further changes they make to the software.

"56 Suggestions for features in Amara, changes in the documentation, suggestions for new articles and much more [Suggestions can be tagged:] Recent Popular Planned In Progress Deferred Implemented Not Taken"

A) Out of presently 56 users' suggestions, only 7 have been tagged by Amara Staff, of which 3 erroneously and one perhaps erroneously: 1 Add a feature that imports Youtube machine Auto Captions directly into Amara for editing http://support.amara.org/support/discussions/topics/9560 : "Implemented" erroneous. 2 Restore the Send a message link in users' profiles http://support.amara.org/support/discussions/topics/10250 : "Planned" erroneous (should be "Implemented") 3 Representing each volunteer's work http://support.amara.org/support/discussions/topics/8513 "Planned" (correct, but some news would be welcome) 4 Give more info about the implications of team settings choices http://support.amara.org/support/discussions/topics/9095 "Planned" (correct, but some news would be welcome) 5 Independent subtitle sets for each video http://support.amara.org/support/discussions/topics/8897 - "Planned" erroneous: this has been implemented. 6 Reliable history of revisions http://support.amara.org/support/discussions/topics/8896 - "Planned" (correct, but some news would be welcome) 7 Allow us to save & exit "approve"-tasks http://support.amara.org/support/discussions/topics/8857 "Planned" (perhaps erroneous: it seems to have been implemented) -> Amara staff should review the topics of this board and tag them correctly. B) Due to the overall lack of official response on the support forum, some users have started using this board not for suggestions, but presumably in the hope that it would get more attention than the other ones from Amara staff. See: - Edit doesn't works anymore http://support.amara.org/support/discussions/topics/25695 by Veroneblack - Why did you remove so many subtitles ? + BETA new editor http://support.amara.org/support/discussions/topics/24682 by Veroneblack Such topics should be replied to by Amara staff, then moved to the proper bard.

"Jules Rincon started a topic 9 months ago (2012-10-25 October 25th: Yesterday, we made a significant update to Amara, including a number of bug fixes and a new infrastructure setup that makes Amara much more robust in case of AWS failures. As part of the update, we re-index all the videos in the system. Last night during the update we had a few video indexing issues, which may have made it seem like videos disappeared from your team. We attempted to repair this last night, but need to make some additional changes before the repair is complete."

Example of how issues caused by an upgrade should be announced in the Updates and News board of the help forum. A similar announcement should be made about the issues caused by the June 29, 2013 upgrade: - Disappeared subtitles and subtitle revisions (solved) - Slow server -> Bad Gateway (perhaps solved) - Disappeared video language setting in Amara video pages - Problem with viewing subtitles in player - Subtitle editing problems - Legacy translation editor replaced by Legacy transcription editor - Deleted line breaks etc: the post could be marked "in progress" so as to accomodate new issues.

"Jules Rincon started a topic 9 months ago (2012-11-01) Hello! You may have heard us mention that we were expecting to do a few hours of planned downtime for a database migration, and that time has arrived. When - The Amara service will be temporarily paused at 8pm EDT tonight (Nov 1st). We expect the service will be back up in 1.5 - 2 hours, but our designated window is from 8pm EDT - midnight EDT. Why - This downtime is for a database migration that will increase the accuracy of subtitles. We're really excited to get these underlying components improved-once they're all complete, it will pave the way for many more visible changes to Amara!"

Only bookmarking this announcement, because there should have been a similar official announcement about the June 29, 2013 upgrade: all users knew was that Amara was not available while it was taking place, and that a lot of recent subtitles and subtitle revisions weren't showing any longer when it was done. Moreover, if unavailability due to an upgrade is not officially announced, it is difficult for users to know if the unavailability is due to an upgrade or ust to the server maxxing out (see "Bad Gateway" pages after the June 29, 2013 upgrade). Such official announcements should be made for each future system upgrade.

"Jules Rincon started a topic 7 months ago (2012-12-20) We're excited to share with you the infrastructure upgrades, as well as the new team dashboard and user profiles. We have some under-the-hood improvements around the corner that will make way for the new editor and streamlined workflow system. Team dashboard New team landing page will direct users towards tasks (or untranslated/uncaptioned videos, if workflows are off), based on their personal language settings. Shows user's active tasks at top, and will generally help people find relevant subtitling jobs for any team, even if most of the recent videos have been subtitled. Updated user dashboard and profiles Users can now see all the activity they've done over time, plus have a nicer layout with larger user avatar (image) and list of videos they've added to Amara. Updated message area Users can now see more details for inbox + sent messages, plus can mark all messages as read. In the coming weeks, we're about to have a bunch of new automated testing functionality come online, which will speed up our test/release process even more. We'll keep you posted!"

1. Team dashboard suggestions remain unusable due to language settings being made even cruder than they were during the Dashboard preview. See "Preview of Amara Team Dashboard" http://support.amara.org/support/discussions/topics/9105 , last comment; "Scrap the team dashboard page" http://support.amara.org/support/discussions/topics/10229 2. Users' profiles: the content of the main (activity) tab has been disrupted by the June 29, 2013 update in many users profiles. This doesn't mean that this topic should be updated, but a new official "Updates and News" topic should be created about the June 29, 2013 upgrade, and the issues with team dashboards and activity in users' profiles should be addressed.

"Jules Rincon started a topic 7 months ago (2012-12-28) Starting Jan. 2, we will activate the amara.org domain. Customers can adjust the Amara base URL from universalsubtitles.org to amara.org at that time. On Jan. 10, we will start redirecting all traffic from the universalsubtitles.org domain to amara.org. If you're using our API, please either be sure that your clients will follow redirects, or update your base URL from www.universalsubtitles.org to www.amara.org."

No comments on that topic, so apparently OK.

"Jules Rincon started a topic 6 months ago (2013-01-18) For any users signed up to transifex (to assist in translating the website into different languages): Unfortunately, due to the major improvements being currently made to the software (what we call DMR), updates to the localized versions of Amara have been temporarily put on hold. They will be resumed when this major renovation is over. We are sincerely sorry for any inconvenience this may cause."

The original language file has not been updated on Transifex after that announcement, and no translations made since has been pushed to the website. It might make more sense to only update the original file when the new editor replaces the legacy editors. However, an official update of this help topic is needed now.

"Veroneblack started a topic a month ago (2013-06-29) Firstly, since your last update we lost so many susbtitles. http://www.amara.org/fr/videos/z4f1iVSassHe/info/michael-jackson-smooth-criminal-michael-jacksons-vision/ http://www.amara.org/fr/videos/5JBdZuQlcVBj/info/kendrick-lamar-ft-rza-ronald-regan-era/#video ... Hundreds of them. ___________________ Secondly, I tried your new beta, here is what I think : Subtitling will be a lot slower because we can't adjust subtitles on the timeline (holding left click). Today I spend around 10min to moderate a 5min video (To check if every subtitles can be read easily), with your beta it will be around 1h We lost the 'Re-play last 4s' button as well, 're-play last subtitles' will be a big waste of time to undertstand where we are every time we click on it. And a last thing : 'Tabulation' was so much easier to do play/pause than 'shift+space'. Specialy when you're doing it 100 times per videos. (and so much more convenient to use with 're play last 4s' button 'shift+tab')"

I refered Veroneblack to "My subtitles are gone" for the deleted subs, and added his remarks about time codes etc in the new editor, in the https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0ApuzSw0MoY82dDlPYnB3cUlwQlNJV2VVWS1XSy1DSWc#gid=0 spreadsheet linked to in Let's try the new subtitle editor and report about it http://support.amara.org/support/discussions/topics/23464 . Amara staff should reply about the new editor, then move the topic to another board (Amara questions?)

"Anne H started a topic 3 hours ago (2013-07-28) Hi! I'm part of a volunteer team translating the Crash Course subtitles, and just noticed that in several of our videos both the original subtitles and the translations are randomly missing spaces that were there before (for example: http://www.amara.org/en/videos/owRxJImTTlI1/en/77200/ (0:07, 0:16 etc.)). Is this a known bug that can be fixed, or do we have to re-proofread our subtitles and press space a lot?"

I crosslinked to: - "What happened to all the LINE BREAKS within subtitles? They're all gone now. Does it have to do with the upgrade?" http://support.amara.org/support/discussions/topics/25104 and -"Video language selection deleted after (by?) the June 29, 2013 upgrade" http://support.amara.org/support/discussions/topics/26382 (also relevant for the video mentioned by Anne H. And I suggested leaving things as they are on Amara as the banged-together words don't really hamper translation, and as the YT subtitled remained unafected, thanks to the YT channel not being connected to Amara.

"Claude Almansi started a topic 9 months ago (2012-11-10) Mystery meat navigation where links are hidden and only appear when you mouse over them may be esthetically tempting for designers, but it's a pain for users in general and it excludes users with motor and sight disabilities, as well as those using mobile devices. So please replace such hidden, mouse-over only links by their former directly visible version. Two examples (but there might be more): "Decline task" in videos added to teams who enforce workflowed tasks Actions bottom-right of messages in Amara messaging. Update Nov. 14: the screenshot in the How can I decline a task page in the Amara teams part of the Solutions section here still shows the directly visible version of the "Decline" button"

No Amara reply Comment: See your own How compatible is Amara with Dragon NaturallySpeaking? FAQ - http://support.universalsubtitles.org/solution/articles/49647-how-compatible-is-amara-with-dragon-naturallyspeaking-

"Rodrigo started a topic 4 months ago (2013-03-26) Dear, When I try to search for a video to subtitle, in the "with" filter, could be an option that I could choose the language that has not been choosen to be subtitled. For example: I translate to Brazilian Portuguese, so I want to filter the videos that are not subtitled in my language. I need it to show me the videos that are not subtitled in my language, to make it easier to me, to search directly the videos not subtitled in Brazilian Portuguese. Regards, Rodrigo."

No reply. In a way, this is what the suggestions of team Dashboards attempt to do from the opposite perspective, but Rodrigo is speaking of videos in general, not just teams' - and the Dashboard suggestions don't work.