Pages in topic: < [1 2 3] | PROZ.COM membership for X KudoZ Thread poster: savaria (X)
| You already did... | Jul 31, 2006 |
Gábor Széles wrote:
SO: to whom should I mention my idea?Or everything is a is ait a situation like Don Quiote with the windmills and the site admins are really hungry for the money they get easily from the thousands of partoial and whole membership payers and my suggestion will be swept away?
Unfortunately, Gábor, that's just the way it works here: Once you present your idea here on a forum, and others refuse to understand what it was you were trying to say (for whatever reason they might have), you are stuck with a great idea, and no way to get it implemented.
On the other hand, if you stick around long enough, you'll see that many ideas actually do get implemented, but mostly that that nobody ever asked for then, and most people find useless, or even invasive. You'll also find that some popular ideas that had a lot of merit also do get implemented, but poorly or only partially or unworkably. And finally, any bugs that you do happen to report might or might not get fixed at some point in the next century or so, depending (apparently) on the position of Jupiter relative to Venus and Alpha Cenutrii, but only when the north wind is blowing due south strongly on a calm sunny day at midnight, if it is snowing in Brazil and raining in the Atacama desert.
At least, that's the impression that I have managed to gather... I may well be wrong, but that's the way it looks from the outside.
In any event, it would seem that the final semi-official consensus of opinion here regarding your proposal about discounted membership, is that if you really want to get a discount on membership, then do not, under any circumstances, try to contribute usefully to the site. Instead, just go around clicking on as many "agree" boxes as you can find, (regardless of whether or not you actually agree), and very quickly you will have thousands of "Browniz" points, that you can happily use to claim a discount, even though you did absolutely nothing worthwhile to get it.
[Edited at 2006-07-31 19:13] | | | gianfranco Brazil Local time: 15:40 Member (2001) English to Italian + ... Some clarifications | Jul 31, 2006 |
Dear Stuart,
I have another view about new features, bug fixing and peer-grading.
Stuart Allsop wrote:
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Unfortunately, Gábor, that's just the way it works here: Once you present your idea here on a forum, and others refuse to understand what it was you were trying to say (for whatever reason they might have), you are stuck with a great idea, and no way to get it implemented.
Some good ideas are implemented quickly, some others require longer, depending on programmers availability and other priorities. Inevitably, some suggestions are also not implemented, for a number of reasons, including the fact that some, are just not good ideas at all.
Similarly, some bugs are fixed immediately and others require lenghty investigation, more testing and more time to be identified and fixed.
I know for sure that all programmers are dedicated to their job and follow a demanding delivery cycle, which includes new development and bug fixes.
Stuart Allsop wrote:
...
At least, that's the impression that I have managed to gather... I may well be wrong, but that's the way it looks from the outside.
...
ProZ.com has not infinite resources and staff, and not even large resources by any means, but given the amount of work, the resources are quite limited and dedicated to many parts of the site.
Stuart Allsop wrote:
...
In any event, it would seem that the final semi-official consensus of opinion here regarding your proposal about discounted membership, is that if you really want to get a discount on membership, then do not, under any circumstances, try to contribute usefully to the site. Instead, just go around clicking on as many "agree" boxes as you can find, (regardless of whether or not you actually agree), and very quickly you will have thousands of "Browniz" points, that you can happily use to claim a discount, even though you did absolutely nothing worthwhile to get it.
I'm afraid, but this is a quite bad advice. Indiscriminate peer-grading (the monkey with a mouse, as you call it) is noticed quickly and blocked pretty soon.
Stuart, you and many others may not know openly about this aspect of the site, but any ProZ.com Moderator noticing a pattern of indiscriminate peer-grading would remove immediately from that person the right to peer-grade, for a period of time or for ever, depending on the extent of the abuse.
We don't publicise too much what happens behind the scenes, but we have seen the lot, believe me, and the tactic that you are suggesting is not even very clever. The ProZ.com moderators do not hesitate in blocking such behaviour because peer-grading has a specific function in the KudoZ area. Abusing of it to collect BrowniZ is misleading for the askers and unfair for other users of the site.
There are many "positive" ways to collect at least 4000 Browniz per year, which is the maximum currently allowed in the BrowniZ discount scheme.
bye
Gianfranco
[Edited at 2006-07-31 20:30] | | | Bug fixes take time... (not)... | Aug 1, 2006 |
Gianfranco Manca wrote:
Similarly, some bugs are fixed immediately and others require lenghty investigation, more testing and more time to be identified and fixed.
You mean like, for example, it might take a programmer several months to figure out how to write one single line of code that says: "IF (number of open questions is greater than 10) THEN (do not allow posting new questions)"?
Is that what you are talking about, Gianfranco?
I mean, I reported this bug MONTHS ago, and I was not the first person to do so. But it is still there. The last I heard, the programmers were "working on the issue". So I guess this must be one of those cases that requires “lenghty investigation, more testing and more time to be identified and fixed.”…
I might buy that if I didn’t know much about programming, Gianfranco, but the trouble is, I'm a bit of a programmer myself, and I run my own webservers, so I KNOW that this is not exactly complex to do! There is ALREADY code inside of Proz.com that correctly calculates the number of open questions. There is ALREADY code inside of Proz.com that works correctly to prevent you from posting questions based on some condition (such as for example, if you didn’t pay proz.com enough money). This is simply a no-brainer: All you have to do it is to connect the condition "more than ten questions open" to the code that prevents questions being asked, and BINGO! Problem solved. Yet nobody has done it…
Sorry, Gianfranco, while I admire your quick jump to the defense of Proz.com, with all due respect I think you are waffling about things that you have not checked into it fully (which is not unusual with moderators in my experience).
The ONLY reason why no programmer has bother to marry the code "IF more than 10 questions open" to the code "do not allow posting new question" is because Proz.com really doesn't give a damn if people actually have more than 10 questions open! Plain and simple. If somebody DID care, then it would have been fixed within an hour or two. It has not been fixed, hence nobody really cares. Period.
This is not rocket science. It is simple programming. Any two-bit programmer with access to the code could do it within a few hours (assuming that the code is reasonably well documented…).
So why would it be such an amazingly low priority to fix this bug? Why, that too is obvious: Somebody figured out that it might be counter productive to the revenue stream! How do I know this? Because the code that prevents you from posting questions if you have not paid enough money works PERFECTLY, while the code that prevents you from posting questions if you have too many questions open does not work AT ALL.
Period. | | | Bad advice... | Aug 1, 2006 |
Gianfranco Manca wrote:
I'm afraid, but this is a quite bad advice. Indiscriminate peer-grading (the monkey with a mouse, as you call it) is noticed quickly and blocked pretty soon.
Stuart, you and many others may not know openly about this aspect of the site, but any ProZ.com Moderator noticing a pattern of indiscriminate peer-grading would remove immediately from that person the right to peer-grade, for a period of time or for ever, depending on the extent of the abuse.
Yes, Gianfranco, I know it is bad advice. It is exactly counterproductive to the entire concept of proz.com. Yet it goes on all the time. And that is precisely why I phrased it the way I did, and why I posted the other suggestion, about this use of Browniz being banned totally.
It wasn't exactly "advice", in any event: My post was supposed to be a rather sarcastic and caustic response to the head-in-the-sand attitude expressed in some responses on both threads.
And yes, I'm sure that good moderators such as yourself, do look for this type of abuse pattern in the pairs that they moderate, and that they do try to prevent it, but it happens all the same, all the time, as others have pointed out.
In the Spanish-English pairs for example, there IS NO moderator at all, so who is taking care of looking for that pattern, which is one of the busiest pairs, as far as I know? I guess it must be "nobody", because it pops up regularly. We have both Browniz "mouse-monkeys" and Kudoz "point grabbers", but nothing ever seems to be done to stop them. And when I tried to stop one of them myself a while back, I got exactly the treatment that you say is reserved for those who "abuse" the site! For telling someone to "stop guessing" when he posted 30 or so major stupid guesses in one day, I got my "right to peer grading" removed, and by a moderators from a totally unrelated language pair. Fortunately, a moderator with some intelligence came to the rescue, reinstated my rights, and warned the point-grabber to shut up.
So I'm sure that your intentions are good, Gianfranco, and maybe the intentions of the owners and operators of Proz.com are good too, but in practice it just does not work. Not all moderators are as professional and altruistic as you are. And not all language pairs even HAVE moderators. Not to mention the fact that some moderators seem to be far more interested in protecting their buddies from embarrassment, then in protecting Proz.com from abuse.
So please excuse me for being more than just a little bitter about how the rules are NOT enforced, and the bugs do NOT get fixed, while time is wasted on implementing new features that don't work, aren't wanted, or just plain seem pointless! | |
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The feature is working | Aug 1, 2006 |
Stuart Allsop wrote:
The ONLY reason why no programmer has bother to marry the code "IF more than 10 questions open" to the code "do not allow posting new question" is because Proz.com really doesn't give a damn if people actually have more than 10 questions open! Plain and simple. If somebody DID care, then it would have been fixed within an hour or two. It has not been fixed, hence nobody really cares. Period.
You are prevented from asking new questions if you have 10 or more questions that have been open for at least a week.
This feature is working.
Enrique | | |
Enrique wrote:
You are prevented from asking new questions if you have 10 or more questions that have been open for at least a week.
This feature is working. No it is not. You can ask as many questions as you want.
Sorry, but you are wrong. It IS broken. I just checked. I did it myself. And so can you.
Unless it was just fixed in the last couple of minutes (without anyone bothering to report it on the bugs forum), then it is NOT working, and is still just as broken as it has been for the past few months.
In fact, I managed to do it myself a few days ago (by accident, not design), and I ended up with 13 questions opened. The system NEVER questioned ANYTHING about the additional three questions. It just accepted them and posted them, as normal.
Did you actually try to break it yourself, by posting eleven questions, Enrique? Or did you just repeat the party line that all Proz.com moderators are trained to recite when people complain about bugs? “It’s working just fine. You are mistaken.”. Yeah right….
Enrique, would you like me to post some links here, to the profiles of people who have more than 10 questions open, and who have posted questions TODAY? How about a link to one person who currently has FOURTEEN questions open, ALL of which were asked in the last four days?
With all due respect, Enrique, you really should take the time to get your facts straight before making statements like this. I strongly suggest that all moderators should actually CHECK on things they report to the forums, before just spouting boilerplate platitudes.
This is EXACTLY what I was ranting about in my previous post! This attitude is part of the ingrown culture of Proz.com, and part of what is killing this place. | | | On testing bugs | Aug 1, 2006 |
Stuart Allsop wrote:
Enrique wrote:
You are prevented from asking new questions if you have 10 or more questions that have been open for at least a week.
This feature is working. No it is not. You can ask as many questions as you want.
Sorry, but you are wrong. It IS broken. I just checked. I did it myself. And so can you.
Unless it was just fixed in the last couple of minutes (without anyone bothering to report it on the bugs forum), then it is NOT working, and is still just as broken as it has been for the past few months.
In fact, I managed to do it myself a few days ago (by accident, not design), and I ended up with 13 questions opened. The system NEVER questioned ANYTHING about the additional three questions. It just accepted them and posted them, as normal.
Did you actually try to break it yourself, by posting eleven questions, Enrique? Or did you just repeat the party line that all Proz.com moderators are trained to recite when people complain about bugs? “It’s working just fine. You are mistaken.”. Yeah right….
Enrique, would you like me to post some links here, to the profiles of people who have more than 10 questions open, and who have posted questions TODAY? How about a link to one person who currently has FOURTEEN questions open, ALL of which were asked in the last four days?
Dear Stuart,
Did you read my posting above? I repeat here:
You are prevented from asking new questions if you have 10 or more questions that have been open for at least a week.
This feature is working.
Or from the KudoZ asking page:
In addition, askers with more than 10 questions that have been open for more than a week are asked to close their questions before asking new ones.
This means that to test this properly you have to have questions that have been answered but you failed to close for at least a week. This means that if you have 14 questions open in the last 4 days, then none of them is older than a week, and therefore the rule does not apply, as the total of open questions older than a week is zero.
And yes, I did test this personally, I can provide links to the corresponding test questions.
With all due respect, Enrique, you really should take the time to get your facts straight before making statements like this. I strongly suggest that all moderators should actually CHECK on things they report to the forums, before just spouting boilerplate platitudes.
This is EXACTLY what I was ranting about in my previous post! This attitude is part of the ingrown culture of Proz.com, and part of what is killing this place.
I really don't know what I should answer to this. Anybody can make a mistake or two every now and then, of course.
Enrique | | | Embarassment.... | Aug 1, 2006 |
Enrique wrote:
Dear Stuart,
Did you read my posting above? I repeat here:
You are prevented from asking new questions if you have 10 or more questions that have been open for at least a week.
This means that to test this properly you have to have questions that have been answered but you failed to close for at least a week. This means that if you have 14 questions open in the last 4 days, then none of them is older than a week, and therefore the rule does not apply, as the total of open questions older than a week is zero.
And yes, I did test this personally, I can provide links to the corresponding test questions.
With all due respect, Enrique, you might want to stop embarrassing yourself like this, and ACTUALLY check into this issue PROPERLY before you reply again.
This is a KNOWN BUG in Proz.com. It has been around for MONTHS. There is a SUPPORT TICKET OPEN FOR IT that has been open for nearly a month. But nobody has been able to fix it. (Or nobody wants to fix it. Or nobody cares…)
I have kept track of users who have dozens of questions open, going back not just four days, or even four weeks, or even four months, but as much as FOUR YEARS in some cases, yet they are STILL able to ask new questions. I have offered to provide links to the profiles of the users, but nobody ever bothered to ask.
It is BROKEN, Enrique.
One example that I just checked on one minute ago, has 21 questions open, going back to December of 2005. FOURTEEN of those open questions are older than a week, yet this person happily asked eleven new questions in the past week, and two of those were asked TODAY.
So please don't tell me that there is no problem here. Those of us who are just users of Proz.com, actually do know what we are talking about occasionally, believe it or not.
But you are supposed to be STAFF here, Enrique. So would it have been so very difficult for you to just check YOUR OWN SYSTEM, and find THIS?:
http://www.proz.com/topic/50736
Patrick wrote:
[b]We are working on the problem.[b]
Dear Stuart,
Thanks for notifying us of this problem.
We have a support ticket regarding this issue and will notify you when the problem is fixed.
I appreciate your patience.
Regards,
Patrick
That was on Jul 6, nearly a month ago. I have not been notified. It has NOT been fixed. It is STILL broken. (And I was not actually the first person to report it. Just the first to report it repeatedly, in the vague hope of getting it fixed.)
I’m sorry to be so harsh here, Enrique, but your responses on this thread are a perfect example of what I was talking about in terms of the attitude of Proz.com. It’s an attitude of “We really don’t care what happens to the site, as long as you guys just keep on sending us money: If the site is making us money, then it is working just fine, and there are no bugs.”.
It’s not exactly hard to find examples of this ten-open-questions rule: You too can find numerous examples, if you would only LOOK!
I really don't know what I should answer to this. Anybody can make a mistake or two every now and then, of course.
Enrique
Yes they can, Enrique. But when most people realize that they have made a mistake, they double check their facts before opening their mouth again, to avoid compounding their embarrassment by adding yet more mistakes on top of the original... | |
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justin C United States Local time: 13:40 English The KudoZ bug was fixed on July 25th | Aug 2, 2006 |
Hi Stuart,
Just FYI, I fixed the bug on Tuesday, July 25th. If you notice that anyone has gotten around the open question limit (more than ten open questions with at least one non-declined answer that were asked more than a week ago), please send me a profile mail with the URLs to their profiles, and I will address the problem.
This thread has gone way off topic, so if you wish to reply again about the open question limit, please do so in the thread you started about th... See more Hi Stuart,
Just FYI, I fixed the bug on Tuesday, July 25th. If you notice that anyone has gotten around the open question limit (more than ten open questions with at least one non-declined answer that were asked more than a week ago), please send me a profile mail with the URLs to their profiles, and I will address the problem.
This thread has gone way off topic, so if you wish to reply again about the open question limit, please do so in the thread you started about the issue - http://www.proz.com/topic/50736.
Please keep your posts respectful, and factual.
Best regards,
Justin ▲ Collapse | | | Going into some more details | Aug 2, 2006 |
Some more details that may explain a different evaluation of some particular test case:
“you may not ask further questions if you have 10 or more questions open that are older than a week. Each of these questions must have at least one un-declined answer.”
Please note that questions without answers are not computed, as it would be unfair to use them as part of a limit. The same applies to questions where all answers have been declined, meaning that the asker did n... See more Some more details that may explain a different evaluation of some particular test case:
“you may not ask further questions if you have 10 or more questions open that are older than a week. Each of these questions must have at least one un-declined answer.”
Please note that questions without answers are not computed, as it would be unfair to use them as part of a limit. The same applies to questions where all answers have been declined, meaning that the asker did not find them useful.
And again, the feature works properly as explained above and in the page for asking KudoZ (it considers only open questions older than a week).
Stuart didn't undertand the way the limit works and this explains the different perceptions we had on this issue.
There should be no embarrassment when two persons exchange information in a professional fashion and concentrate on the facts.
Regards,
Enrique ▲ Collapse | | | Respectful. And factual | Aug 2, 2006 |
justin wrote:
Please keep your posts respectful, and factual.
Justin
Thank, you, Justin, but I take offense at your insinuation that my posts were anything but "respectful and factual". I do not take kindly to being called a disrespectful liar, so I challenge you to show me even ONE place where I lied, or to withdraw your borderline-slanderous comment. You may not LIKE what I have said here, and I'm sure that you don't like the way I have worded it, but the fact remains: I have not lied. Everything I have said is factual, and on those occasions where I have had to point out to people that they do not know what they are talking about, I have consistently used phrases such as "with all due respect", which I rather think conveys the concept of "remaining respectful". If not, then your definition of "respectful" must be rather different than Mr. Webster's.
In any event, I am also sending you an e-mail with a link to a profile where there are, at present, 18 open questions. The two oldest questions date back to Apr 28 and Apr 10, 2005, and they both have at least one answer. In one of those two questions, the only answer was declined, but in the other case (Apr 10) there are two answers, neither of which was declined. Following that are two questions dated Jun 14 of this year, both of which have no answers. The remaining 14 open questions are dated July 28 up to yesterday (Aug 1), and they all have at least one answer.
So, if I understand the programming rule correctly, this person should not have been able to ask any questions yesterday (Aug 1), since their two oldest questions date back over a year, yet they did in fact ask questions yesterday.
In other words, one of the 18 open questions dates back more than a year and has valid non-declined answers, and in total there are more than ten open questions, yet this person can still ask questions. The way I see it, they should not have been permitted to post new questions until they deal with that very old one.
(They probably don't even realize that they have open questions from that far back, simply because the system never reminds them of it. If the rule were working, then they should not be able to ask more questions until that old question from last year is closed.)
Maybe I misunderstood your explanation of the rule, and it actually wants ALL TEN questions to be both older than a week, but if that is how the rule works, then it is flawed, and needs changing! If there are ANY open questions from more than a week ago with at least one answer, AND a total of more than ten open questions, then more questions should not be permitted. THAT should be the rule.
Otherwise there would be a rather silly and gaping loophole: If the rule works in the manner I am starting to suspect that it does, then it would be perfectly valid to leave nine questions open eternally, never closing them at all, then ask 5 (or 20) new questions each day, closing each of those inside a week. The rule would allow you to do that forever, theoretically having as many as 149 questions open, nine of which date from years back. This behavior would be within the rules, but certainly not within the spirit of Proz.com.
They way I understand it from the original discussions on this rule, the intention of the rule was to force people to close their old questions. If the rule allows you to carry on asking questions WITHOUT forcing you to close the old ones, then it is not working. This is what I am seeing. People with open questions dating back years are still able to ask questions, and this defeats the intention of the rule.
With all due respect, if the rule does not force people to close ancient questions, then the rule is wrong and needs to be changing. And that is a fact.
(I am posting a copy of this on the other thread, as requested, to continue the issue there). | | | justin C United States Local time: 13:40 English Thanks, Stuart | Aug 2, 2006 |
Maybe I misunderstood your explanation of the rule, and it actually wants ALL TEN questions to be both older than a week
Correct.
(I am posting a copy of this on the other thread, as requested, to continue the issue there).
Thanks! We can continue with discussion over there.
Best regards,
Justin | |
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gianfranco Brazil Local time: 15:40 Member (2001) English to Italian + ... Usefulness of KudoZ | Aug 2, 2006 |
Dear all,
I would like to bring the discussion back to the initial topic, which was a suggestion to use KudoZ for a membership discount.
Gábor Széles wrote:
...
This way,translators would be more motivated to give answers,and KudoZ can also be used for something useful,not only as a way of expression of expertise in the field of the subject matter.
...
I would like to point out that KudoZ points are already used for something useful (as you put it, they seem to have no purpose) and there is already sufficient motivation.
Answering to KuodZ questions and, occasionally, have our answers selected as the most useful, is abundantly motivated by:
- help a colleague having a terminology problem
- create an interesting glossary
- improve the visibility in the directories
- show expertise in our language and working field
I don't see any real need to add a discount scheme, in particular because this is already provided in exchange for other contributions to the site.
bye
Gianfranco
[Edited at 2006-08-02 19:44] | | | Thanks, Gianfranco | Aug 2, 2006 |
Gianfranco Manca wrote:
I would like to point out that KudoZ points are already used for something useful (as you put they seem to have no purpose) and there is already sufficient motivation.
Answering to KuodZ questions and, occasionally, have our answers selected as the most useful, is abundantly motivated by:
- help a colleague having a terminology problem
- create an interesting glossary
- improve the visibility in the directories
- show expertise in our language and working field
I don't see any real need to add a discount scheme, in particular because this is already provided in exchange for other contributions to the site.
Well said, Gianfranco. I concur. | | | Pages in topic: < [1 2 3] | To report site rules violations or get help, contact a site moderator: You can also contact site staff by submitting a support request » PROZ.COM membership for X KudoZ Trados Studio 2022 Freelance |
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