Why are some requests for translation shoved into the random chat thread?

ADMIN: why is this request for translation shoved into the random chat thread?

the poor girl has made one post - where and how would she know to go look for her post?

Read these Terms Of Service

polishforums.com/thread-title.html


Nobody knows that when they make their first post! We can have a poll on that for you too ;)

Why not?

Because when you make your first post, you're new, and stupid, and don't expect - or understand why - your post is suddenly gone! You find out how the rules work gradually as you go along :) Ask the others - I'm sure they'll agree ;)

Edit: Do you remember how you changed my grammar question titles when I joined? It used to irritate the sh*t out of me, but gradually I understood and started to do it right - it must be OK now, because you don't change them any more ;) So change the title if it bothers you - explain - do anything but don't just remove a translation request from a new member just because you can?

When I visit a site that is 100% free, and make a first post I'm extra cautious not to make a stupid mistake and not to add unnecessary work for other people who do the moderating job for free. Besides, those who are new and request translations only aren't usually the members we all need.

Admin

This is because you run a site and know what it involves. I, on the other hand, had no idea.


My first request was a translation one. How many of the other members who post regularly have stumbled onto this site looking for translation or Polish grammar help? Would be interesting to know how many actually, because I have read numerous intro threads that said: Was looking for translation help / am learning Polish and need help, and then joined / stayed because it is a nice site.

Possibly he meant those who only ever ask for translations all the time and contribute nothing else.

Yes, sort of. If someone registers and then posts a few translation requests in a row (and/or ignores the topic title rules), it's usually a clear indication of using the site as a free translation service, nothing else.

Admin

Admin, If somebody wrote 6 posts and all of them were translation requests then should have his/her butt kicked but moving first time posters' topics isn't good.

We rarely move first-time posters - we correct the mistakes for them if it's their first post. The problem is that it usually doesn't help with most members.

How could he possibly know from one post whether this person is going to only ever ask for translations?


Again, you cannot make this deduction from one post! :/

Well, nobody could. I actually meant those people who only ever appear here now and then for translations and nothing more.

But can from hundreds of members whose posts have been corrected for them and 80% of them still did the same mistake on their next post. So, according to the Pareto principle, it's not worth focusing on the 20% in the long term :}.

Admin

I know the Pareto principle - luckily I have seen too many exceptions to rules in this life ever to be bound to and dragged down by something as flimsy and manipulable as statistics.

Not saying that they are not useful - they can also be a hell of a nuisance.

Pareto principle may sound like a catchy gimmick to shoot back but the fact remains that many people who come here do have experience with other boards. Moving threads is just fine, as long as the original topic remains intact with the link included to the new location of the thread. As per ceratin source, both your hardware and bandwidth can handle the moderate traffic and storage requirements. And yet some moderating efforts look like a constant fight to for every single bit and bite of information sent, stored or retrieved through your machine and connection.

Also, some of the merging, especially of grammar and translations, seems a little silly. Very long threads are created and this actually frustrates some of the users, resource usage potenatially increases as searches executed to find the moved threads are often fruitless.

As I said before, the forum is fairly well run, but some of the non-standard (unexpected) quirks don't seem to be really necessary. This is not to say that you won't offer a justification. I'm sure you can. My point is that if this forum is for an audience then you may as well take into your consideration what that audience would be more comfortable with.

It works the same is in a real life. You get what you pay for.

Average monthly expenses: $330
December 2007 Support: $71.00 [22% of the monthly expenses]

Nov 2007 support: $20 [6% of the monthly expenses]
Oct 2007 support: $85 [26% of the monthly expenses]
Sep 2007 support: $105 [32% of the monthly expenses]

Have you donated lately?

Not to trivialize the need for donations but look at this 100% free forum. It may take a while to read some threads and to see how it is run. It uses a free forum software which has pretty much all that users expect. There are commercial ones too ($100 to $200 per year) which allow for even greater functionality out of the box.

Personally, I find it regrettable that the admins of PF chose to devote so much time, effort and some funds towards the development of their own software instead of using ones available for free or for a relatively small fee. As per Admin's note a few weeks ago, they don't want to follow the crowd though. Well, sadly the crowd isn't following them either.

PF has a great income potential. I think the admins should use it. It can be done pretty subtly, easilly pay for all the incidentals plus a trip to Poland for the Admin every year and still maintain a decent number of hits.

Nothing is really free z_darius. Somebody, somewhere is paying for it. I don't like the forums congested with adds.

Maybe this is why the Admin has their own rules. The PF is theirs.

It seems to draw enough of a crowd anyway. Many people have a short attention span and move on when they feel they don't get enough attention/applause here.

Of course someone pays for it. Admins shouldn't, unless just starting, making users pay would drive almost all away. Advertising revenue is logical then. Did you pay for every forum you ever visited?


"Congested with ads" is a bit of a scare mongering.


Sure it is. The input is of a few thousand visitors to the site. It's a symbiosis. No forum without the site, but also no forum without the visitors. If the premise of this site is to serve the visitors then the visitors' comments may as well be seriously considered. Not just considered and rejected a priori after some more or less lame reasons are given.

Yes, advertising pays for everything, never underestimate the power of advertising.
I'm an avid reader of Consumers Reports, because it does not accept advertising. They don't need to praise, let's say, the Ford product because Ford paid for it. They can afford to say what they think about Ford.

The same here. I don't want to see "XYZ" add, just because it works for some...did not mean any scary mongering "global warming is gonna get you" stuff.


Yes, there will always be forums, the paid ones or not. The ones who are paid for/donated,without adds, might be a better quality one in a long run. People can debate without being attacked.

On the other hand, I would not want a forum to turn into a club, where everybody chirps the same.
Trolls, annoying at times, put a different spin on any topic.

That example has nothing to do with ours little chat here, since there is no way posts could be controlled to the exend eliminating honest opinions. I certainly cannot see how any add could affect the way a fulfill someone's request for translation, or how it would change Michal's opinion about "simple minded Poles".

Maybe shoving some requests for translation into some random, deletable topic is a way of teaching the public - pay attention, you are at 'some" website, check it out, read some...whatever...or, maybe it's just a tired, fed up moderator. I don't know.


Hehehehe, I don't think there is anything on PF which can change that. Nothing goes thru his thick skull :) - frozen in time circa 1980.

You clearly have little idea about running a website. Not sure why you focus on "software" where hardware/hosting covers most of the fees. If you check hostgator.com/dedicated.shtml you may understand what I mean.

Admin

You clearly have no idea what I do for a living or what my experience with websites is, so I'll leave your uninformed comment at that.


because of this:



I already checked that about 1 hour after I found your forum. I also checked all other info that can be had for free :)

Now that you mentioned that, is your dedicated server provider related to you? I wouldn't be able to find another reason why you selected that particular, overpriced service over such reliable and less expensive providers as the likes of serverbeach or lunarpages.

Being able to check WHOIS info versus running a website with thousands of daily visitors are two different things. Same as putting ads on the site versus finding and working with direct advertisers.

If you weren't able to find a reason, the current server is pretty stable compared to other (less or more expensive) servers.

BTW. The site you refer to uses more expensive hosting (if you add backup which is a must).

Being able to check WHOIS info versus running a website with thousands of daily visitors are two different things. </div>
I didn't say it was the same. I just pointed out to you that I had already covered the itsy bitsy part of ground you pointed me to, so don't keep feeding your unjustified assumption of my alleged ignorance in the subject.

Other than some admin functions unrelated to the Internet, I run two minicipal websites, a couple libraries and I am on the technical commitee of websites whose functionality, complexity and associated financial liability yours doesn't even come close to. Your daily hits are likely comparableto our hourly ones. Check it out: yourniagara.ca. And yes, I am one of the website's designers. And in case you wondered abiut the hardware part we don't even rent little servers somewhere out there but opted for 64 bit, multicore big brass, with redundancy and automaic failover spread over 3 different locations within Niagara Region. I am also on BEC Technical Commitee. BEC is one of the site's sponsors.

I hope that will suffice as the final point about my qualifications. If you need technical advice, there will be no charge.


Yes, there is a difference. You need an opinion or two elsewhere, where people discuss these things and implement some geat ideas without overwhelming users with their sponsors' ads. The illustrations of possible shape of PF, should ads be introduced, look really scarry the way you posted them in one of the FAQ threads. It's kinda like showing a kid someone who broke his leg while going out to a party. See? Going to parties will cause injury. Crafty, but not really true.

Programming has already been done many times over. IMO it's pointless to rediscover the wheel. Unless it's just all about a hobby of coding a website. In that case... well, hobbies can cost.

Inspite of your declaration, you still follow the crowd, only the crowd is way ahead. Remember OOP, code reuse? Yup, this is it. Plop in some extra code to allow for Polish diacritics and then just enable features (at a click, or two) as you become comfortable with a prepackaged solution (free or commercial). Concentrating on content rather than form, may be someting to consider.


serverbeach runs on the same bunch of backbone as google. Their reliability is also superb. Onle the price is "worse", i.e. lower.

Referring to the bold sentence above should be enough:

Yourniagara.ca has a traffic rank of: 1,861,447
Polishforums.com has a traffic rank of: 144,016

(the lower the number, the bigger traffic)
Source: alexa.com

But I'm not here to provide professional or any other comparisons and I appreciate your input on the technical matters.

Admin

yourniagara.ca was deployed two months ago
your site was deployed what? two years ago?

Also, yourniagara.ca is a portal that covers other our projects, such as geosmart (region wide mapping app used by both public and authorized municipal staff), public transportation site etc. Those sites are all on different domains and some are hit by visitors directly, so checking just the yourniagara domain is a part of the story.

One last comment, if I may (no need to respond if you don't feel like it). Years ago I was taught about two, sometimes conflicting, approaches to software development and maintenance - user centric and developer centric. The former always wins. When users, like myself, ask questions abotu the software's functionality it might be a good idea to listen to and discuss with them, and then with your staff. Not all users' ideas are good, but if the same issues keep popping up then there is a reason to look into it.

A decent source of info (don't be shy to ask them) is one I already linked to once before. I detest the owner, but he's sitting on loads of good ideas, provided by his visitors too.

Good luck and I hope you'll look into generating some revenues to cover the cost of your great idea for a site.

thank you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ;)

I know that those who only come on wanting translations are not contributing to the forum... but maybe, by finding that translation they want, they are helping a fellow Polish person: were it a fellow Scot, I'd be pleased about something like that and not annoyed...why isn't it allowed/okay?

I would say it's been online since 2004 - web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.yourniagara.ca


What if 50% of all members were coming here just to "want translations"? I'm not sure how a person who even learns English or Polish could benefit from a random text posted in a translation section. Plus, those who are long-term members and are genuinely interested in discussions about Poland tend to be annoyed by a person who out of the blue requests or demands translations (sometimes in unrelated threads because "it's urgent").

A similar situation is/was with the job section people from different countries wanted to post inadequate job offers or requests.

Admin