News

  1. Sorry, today I noticed that the backchannels discussions directory linked at the end of the 29 november 2016 post had been mistakenly made private since around 30 may 2018 due to an unfortunate configuration mishap. I deeply regret the error, which has now been corrected.

  2. In the wake of the predictable collapse and shut down of the former Crowdin-based Discord i18n process (on 31 july 2018), I posted a suggestion on feedback.discordapp.com that would solve everything, but of course, Discord being Discord, they immediately NAZI'D it. (Proof: archived VS live)

    Read my suggestion for a good laugh, I guess.

  3. So. On 28 november 2017 they FINALLY added a Quebec French subproject. Yay!
    (Better 1 year 3 months late than never, LOL!)

    I quickly joined, and within less than a week I was already in the top 10 (#8)! Woo!

    I had translated more than 50% for Quebec French, at a very high quality, and I was just about to complete the rest, but then Mikesky the filthy abuser appeared and ruined everything for everyone! Yay! (And shoutouts to management for letting him shit on a top contributor without any pushback, thus demonstrating that they don't give a flying fuck about quality or ethics.)

    I don't feel that explaining the situation would help with anything, but let's just say that now that I've been banned from the translators server for no reason whatsoever, I can't participate in the project effectively anymore, moreso because I'm strongly assuming that now I'll never get proofreader status, despite my demonstrated exceptional abilities. So it's all hopeless and I'm deleting my Crowdin account in protest, again. Thanks for all the fish, again.

  4. I went to check the activity logs of the "managers" at i18n.discordapp.com. As I suspected, all of them except DiscordDan and Discord_Shuu have been completely or almost completely inactive since mid-october (and I'm pretty sure those 2 are doing this only part-time). That's 2 people to cater to 42 language subprojects. Let's just say that that explains a lot about the problems that I've seen. (Obvious issues unattended for months, a few false accusations with zero basis in fact resulting in an immediate tightening of the "rules" rather than some sort of investigation, etc.)

    This entire translation project is a complete afterthought, people. They don't give a shit.

  5. In reply to this:

    Yeah, and I bet that's where the quite a few false (and/or misguided) complaints/accusations came from, too.

    Your avoidance tactics are pretty lame. That's a recurring pattern of behavior with you.

    Here's another fucking clue, Fyce:

    You might have been the key to bring the entire set of "Quebec French VS France French" issues to an early resolution if you had ever so slightly challenged the notion that we should make a global French translation (borrowing the best parts of all French "dialects") instead of a France-French specific one. (You were a major early contributor, for fuck's sake. You had weight. Why not use it?) If you had done that, the logical next step would have been to directly ask management for clarification on the issue, and we might have gotten the answer that this was supposed to be France-French specific. That would have shut down my entire nascent crusade right there. Instead, you chose to post a long-ass tirade on a long-dead forum thread (which you knew wouldn't generate any notification anywhere, since you were a heavy forum user, and that thus took me 3 weeks to stumble upon) and then went into secret self-imposed exile (and apparently tried to undermine me from a distance?). Great communication strategy.

    So yeah. Plenty of blame to go around. Don't worry though, the biggest culprits are Crowdin and Discord management. The way the entire translation project is structured simply doesn't scale. And this thing is just way understaffed. Can you believe there hasn't been a "build" (basically the process through which new validations are actually reflected in the app) in TWO FUCKING MONTHS?? It's pretty clear at this point that the entire translation thing is just an afterthought for Discord, they don't actually care. Or if they do, they're hiding that pretty well.

    And I can't fucking believe they're still not going to open a Quebec French translation subproject, after everything that has happened. Oh, sure, let's open translation subprojects for such obscure languages as, I don't know, Basque, Bosnian, Latvian, Macedonian, Romanian, Serbian (twice!), Slovak, Slovenian, Croatian, Estonian, Lithuanian... Even before users ask for it. But an explicit, urgent proposal for a Quebec French translation subproject that would solve tons of problems? And that manages to garner 25 votes despite the extremely low number of active users in the project? Nah, let's ignore that, that's not important enough, it's just a 5+ MILLION USERS market, after all. And it's not like we have an expert on hand that could productively spearhead that new project instead of fighting, in the end, meaningless battles.

    PS: For those following at home, I had contributed about a third of the validated strings for the French translation subproject at the time I left the project. (And much besides. Too bad the "Quebec French VS France French" issues overshadowed everything, if it hadn't been for that both my actual and perceived track record would have been nearly perfect.) I wish I had thought of taking a screenshot before leaving the project, that would have been a nice keepsake. Anyway, here's how to check some interesting statistics like that for your own account, it's a pretty cool feature that I figure very few people know about and it's pretty fun: Go to your profile, and click on the three dots besides the Discord project. That will open a menu and there's an option for checking your statistics, I don't remember what the option is called, exactly. And then you can see your "translations for export" number, that's your number of validated strings. On another page you can see the total number of strings. Divide that first number by the second to know what % of validated strings you've contributed. There's also some other interesting information. Check it out!

  6. I've deleted my Crowdin account, since this is all hopeless and meaningless and I don't want to think about it anymore, and Crowdin sucks so much shit that I don't want to use it anymore, under any circumstances. You'll now see me as "REMOVED_USER" or "REMOVED USER", notably in the activity log and on the forum. I always thought "REMOVED_USER" was for people banned from Crowdin. Apparently not. The more you know...

    (Seriously, if you go to this page it says "This account has been removed from Crowdin.", which definitely makes it sounds like a ban. But I was definitely not banned, I just deleted (or "removed") my account. Of course Crowdin was going to be ridiculously shitty until the last second. Speaking of which, their "last comment" box was way too small, so I wasn't able to truly convey to them how deeply they suck shit. Too bad.)

  7. (This news entry is way longer than I would like, and pretty sloppily written, and barely scratches the surface of the story. But hopefully it helps some of you get a bit more of a fucking clue.)

    I have poured my soul into this project. The way things have unfolded is very unfortunate. We could have avoided all of this with a few minor adjustments (or proper general project management). Foremost, if the Quebec French subproject had been created about THREE MONTHS AGO, when I first proposed it, all problems would have immediately been solved and everyone would have been happy. I don't need to tell you that 85%+ of the problems in the French project was because of "Quebec French VS France French" issues.

    And by the way, there simply NEVER has been an OFFICIAL policy on whether the "French" project was a global "French" project or a France-French-specific project, until DiscordDan randomly declared that the project is France-French-specific (on 23 november 2016), almost making it seem like that had been the case all along. The fact is, long ago I had declared in I think at least 12 separate conversations that the project was a global French project, not France-French specific. (Unfortunately Crowdin sucks so much shit that it doesn't support comments search, so verifying this would be pretty difficult.) I think that was the best default assumption to make, and as far as I remember nobody has ever contested that notion, which effectively made it a DE FACTO policy. There sure has been a lot of "X is what we use in France", but as far as I remember, nobody ever went: "No, you're wrong, this is actually a France-French-specific project". (I'm not counting the cases were someone initially said that, and then I explained why a global French project was much better, and then the conversation stopped right there or the notion was not contested again.) I had been assuming all along that management had at least some kind of eye on the project, and thus that I would be more or less quickly corrected if I was mistaken in any way on what the policies were. But again, I don't even think management had any notion of if the French project should be a global French project or France-French-specific.

    (By the way, as for the stupid "It's the France flag, of course it's France-French specific" argument: What flag would you use to represent a global French translation, not specific to any country? The France flag, of course. If the subproject had been called "France French" from the start, there would have never been any ambiguity and I can certify that I would simply NEVER have joined the project in the first place, since I don't give a flying fuck about France French, as I'm sure has been made abundantly clear. I've said that somewhere in a comment, but again, good luck finding it since Crowdin sucks so much shit that it doesn't support comments search. This has caused me recurrent, lasting grief.)

    Anyway, I wasn't even writing this news entry to talk about all of the above, that happened by accident. What I wanted to tell you is that I've decided to publish the 4 formerly private conversations that I had deemed interesting enough to keep in my messages box. This gives a perhaps unprecedented look into what has been going on in the backchannels, from my perspective. These are full, raw, completely unedited conversations, so you'll excuse any sloppy writing on my part. I'm not revealing what were meant as private internal conversations lightly, but I think it can give a useful view into what has been going on. Much of it is "neutral", I did most of the talking and I'm not publishing these to annoy or embarrass anyone. But I think it does at least prove that I poured my soul into this project, and that I did the best I could. And hopefully it can help you understand how I was handling things and why. Anyway, here they are.

  8. The Discord translation project is too hopelessly mismanaged, so I left it.
    Thanks for all the fish.

  9. This site is now technically up, although there's almost nothing here yet.