Participatory Culture Foundation

Amara's silence

On July 16, Amara replied for the last time on this help forum to issues raised by users: that was Darren Bridenbeck's reply in the Unable to edit subtitles thread started by Eugene.
Then on July 19, Darren Bridenbeck also closed all support tickets too, with an automated notification for each ticket telling us to use this help forum instead - see my July 20 comment in Tickets v forum discussions? - which makes his and Amara's silence here all the more paradoxical and problematic.
For some issues, we users can help each other. For other ones, we can't:

Missing accents when a transcript is uploaded as .txt file

 

On July 22, Verone Black wrote a post entitled HI THERE IS A COMMUNITY HERE ! "Copy/pasting text into Amara's transcription" issue.

Actually, Amara's removal of the possibility to copypaste a transcript dates back to June 20: see the Can't upload subtitles directly today thread started by Richard Gresswell. In that thread, on June 22, Darren Bridenbeck announced that "Uploading unsynced txt files should be available in the next release of Amara." On the same day in the same thread, I mentioned likely encoding problems with  .txt files we'd have to upload.

On July 3, after 2 weeks in which plain transcripts couldn't be used at all, the new release of the software enabled the announced upload method. And on July 5,  Verone Black reported the accents encoding problem caused by this method: see his comment in the July 3rd Amara Update thread, where he also attached a screenshot of the issue.

After 11 days, on July 16, Darren Bridenbeck replied in the same thread:

I'm going to look into the possibility of restoring copy/pasting text into Amara's transcription interface, as well as the issue with the letters "à,è,ê,ç" not displaying correctly. Have you noticed that these letters don't show up at all, or only when uploading .txt files? The more information the better, since this is likely an issue that will need to be passed to our developers.

Verone re-explained that the accents issue arose when uploading .txt files. No further feedback from Amara after that on this issue, in spite of several other messages about it by Verone, up to the mentioned HI THERE IS A COMMUNITY HERE ! "Copy/pasting text into Amara's transcription" issue thread, where he has listed testimonials from 9 members of the TraduZic.com team about the seriousness of this issue, and I added mine.

This problem with accented letters and other special characters does not only obtain in French, but in all languages that use such letters. They are not an optional decoration, but part of the written words. In some cases, the meaning of a word changes if it loses its accent, or a browser search within a page won't find it.

Now in his automatic message for closed tickets, Darren Bridenbeck also wrote: "Our support staff is switching focus to building better documentation, which will make the platform easier for everyone to use." And indeed, the FAQ have been updated since. However they still describe the possibility to copy-paste a plain transcript.

Therefore Amara developers should reinstate this possibility, which never caused problems with accented and other special letters.

But there are other issues Amara users can't solve themselves:

Erroneous subtitle sets that must be deleted

 

Sometimes, a subtitle set must be deleted, either because a user created it by mistake, or because a software glitch created 2 sets instead of one. And users can't delete these subtitle sets themselves, only Amara people can. There have been several requests for deletion of such erroneous subtitle sets since Amara stopped responding on this forum.

Therefore Amara people should respond to these deletion requests - or enable users to delete these sets themselves, if no one else has used them or has translated from them.

Other requests / questions

There have been other requests and questions since Amara went silent on this forum. Amara should address them too.

Documentation

If Amara's silence is due to the fact that Amara's "support staff is switching focus to building better documentation",  - as Darren Bridenbeck wrote in his July 19 ticket closing message - the result is not convincing:

• The menu of the Solutions section that should give this documentation now has the "Getting Started as a Team Member" subsection at the top, which therefore opens automatically when you enter the Solutions part. It was much better when the FAQ subsection was the top / opening one, because people who need help getting started as team members are only a tiny portion of all Amara users, while the FAQ are for everybody
• For the same reason, it would make more sense to unite the "Getting Started as a Team Member" and "Amara Teans" subsections in a single one.
• The "Transcribing and Translating" subsection still appears empty, even though there still is a How do I translate subtitles page, still unlinked, still in need of serious editing, in spite of the exchange with Amara people I had on April 25 when I submitted the ticket #822 about it.
• The items of the "How-tos" subsection are largely redundant with the FAQ.
• The items of the "Troubleshooting" subsection could also go in the FAQ
• The subsection entitled "The Amara Community" is still empty. It's high time Amara defines it, its relation with the Amara people and the tools for enacting this relation
• As to the FAQ: in some cases, "Universal Subtitles" has been replaced by "Amara" - but not everywhere. Some obsolete screenshots have been replaced - but not all. Overall, this is just a partial facelift.

New unadressed issue: the bypassing, imposed by Amara developers, of the "primary" indication for a URL in video pages which have several, resulting in the player streaming the "original" URL, which often leads to a deleted video. As this is accompanied by a barring users from deleting the original, now useless URL, they can't even fix the issue themselves.
See BIG TRAP. "Make primary" doesn't work anymore.