Participatory Culture Foundation

Of course, there are legitimate tasks that produce banners with:

Draft only Showing Revision X, created [Date] by  Y.

These legitimate tasks are the ones a team's admins choose to implement via the team's settings and assign in a clear  manner, and they must be respected.

But this post is not about these legitimate, human-to-human assigned tasks. It's about a glitch in the Amara software that's been blocking work on subs of videos added to any team by imposing ghost tasks that create the same banner and block further editing of the subs, even when the admins have not chosen to use tasks in the settings, since June 6 ca (see the "(in progress)" ghost subtitles thread, in particular Laura Monzon-Storey's comment dated June 12 @ 11:24 AM).

However, this software glitch only blocks subs that are in progress. So to avoid the block, just lie to the software. If you must interrupt your work , no matter how incomplete it is:

• while making first subtitles from the video: sync what you've done any how, go to stage 4 and submit your work, ticking the box next to "These subtitles cover the entire video"
• while translating existing subtitles: copypaste any filler text in the remaining empty boxes, which you or someone else can replace later with real translations, go to stage 2 and submit your work.

The software will then mark the subs 100% complete in both cases and won't task-block them.

Add a comment to the subs explaining that they are not really 100% complete, but that this was the only way to avoid the software-triggered block, or something to this effect. Otherwise, other human users might be surprised.

Blast! Saying that subs were complete when they weren't worked 3 times with the French subs of
Niños Incómodos, a video added to the NewsHour team (1), on June 12, 2012: revision 0 to revision 2 - see attached screenshot.
Then this morning, June 14, I went on translating the subs. But though I marked them complete again, the Amara software nonetheless task-blogged revision 3.
So I downloaded the task-blocked Spanish, Mexican subs and translated them with the Google Translator Toolkit, downloade the translation, uploaded them to the Amara page again: the software didn't taskblock this revision 4.
So I tried to do some corrections in it, marked the subs as complete, and the software task-blocked revision 5.
So I went back to the translator toolkit version, did the same corrections, downloaded the translation, uploaded them to the Amara page again: the software didn't taskblock this revision 6.
So far, at least.

It's becoming difficult to admit that this is just caused by a bit of code gone haywire. It looks more and more like the developers being hell-bent on imposing blocking workflowed tasks on all videos added to any team. I hope it's not so, but they'd better come out in the open and give some explanations in the Amara blog, with a link to the post on top of all Amara pages.


(1) The video mentioned by Laura Monzon-Storey in the "(in progress)" ghost subtitles thread.