G'day everyone Let's talk about privacy in Pootle.
At the moment, new users are not told how their details will be used and how much of it will be made public. This is actually kinda crucial. Users are not told, for example, that their e-mail addresses will be visible to the public, to anyone who downloads the PO file, or to anyone who encounters the PO file at any stage. It is important that they be told of this. The assumption is that the e-mail address a user uses for contact with Pootle will be the same e-mail address he wants to use for attribution in the PO file (assuming he is aware of the attribution). But this is a false assumption, I think. Many people have multiple e-mail addresses for different purposes. What's more, many people munge their addresses in PO headers, but with Pootle, there is no such option. Users are forced to have their real e-mail address in the PO file. I've had contact with quite a few volunteers who prefer to remain anonymous or who would not like it to be publicly known that they contribute work for free. I'm not sure if the GPL permits anonymity, though. Another somewhat related problem I have, is that there is no mechanism for users to contact each other. And finally, there is a problem with attribution that I had mention previously, namely that only the last translators is credited in Pootle's PO files. If translator X does 99% of the work, and translator Y logs in and makes one single change, translator Y's name is listed as the translator of that PO file, and translator X is not mentioned at all. For these reasons, I would propose the following: 1. When users register, there should be an additional set of fields for attribution, where the user can fill in his name and e-mail address as he would like it to appear in the PO file. There should be a note informing translators that this information will be available to the public, and that if they prefer to remain anonymous, they should leave the fields empty. 2. There should be two tickboxes in the account page, namely: * Allow other translators in my language to contact me * Allow any other user of this Pootle server to contact me If the user ticks the first option, the administrator would have permission to tell translators of each other and let them contact each other. If the user ticks the second option, it makes it possible for later versions of Pootle to display the user's contact details on the site itself, to any user who has logged in. 3. If a user has administrative privileges in his language and project, it stands to reason that he should be contactable by new users wishing to join his team. Perhaps there should be an option on the user's account page that detects if he is an administrator of a project, and gives an option for him to enter a preferred contact method for each project, which will be displayed to all users who visit the main page of that project. There should be a text field per project per language that he is an administrator user of, so that he can fill in either an e-mail address or an IRC nickname (along with which channel he is frequently found in) or some other way to contact him. 4. The bug in Pootle that adds only the last translator to the PO file needs to be submitted. But first... what is your opinion about it, and how can it best be dealt with? Looking forward to your responses. Samuel -- Samuel Murray [EMAIL PROTECTED] Decathlon, for volunteer opensource translations http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/decathlon/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Moblin Your Move Developer's challenge Build the coolest Linux based applications with Moblin SDK & win great prizes Grand prize is a trip for two to an Open Source event anywhere in the world http://moblin-contest.org/redirect.php?banner_id=100&url=/ _______________________________________________ Translate-pootle mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/translate-pootle
