The right Ideas venue for #memoQ in #xl8

To request access to the memoQ Ideas Portal, e-mail ideas@memo.com

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Yesterday I had an interesting chat with some of the memoQ team involved with the new Regex Assistant in memoQ 9.8, and before we finished, one of the fellows in the session offered me a tour of that "development portal" described in a January 2021 blog post but which I had never accessed myself, having seen similar user forums for other tools go straight down the toilet after many people had invested a lot of effort in them. However, in this case, I was quite surprised by the quality of what I saw, and then tweeted:

It looks like #memoQ is getting its shit together for user feedback on how to improve. I was properly introduced to the new Ideas Portal yesterday and find it encouraging.https://t.co/YcfgiWpgLp pic.twitter.com/Qfm4cF0dbI

— Kevin Lossner (@GermanENTrans) June 12, 2021

This thing really does look good, and I don't mean just its clean appearance:

As far as I can tell, the thing is implemented with WordPress; it uses gravatars for those users who want to have a chosen image appear by their posts and comments. The official company explanation of the portal, its purpose and how to use it is here.

One user had this comment about the new platform for suggestions:

This seems like a much more reasonable approach to user feedback than "send your suggestions to a support address so we can promptly shred it". Fingers crossed that we can get non-LSP oriented features & QoL improvements! #l10n https://t.co/hqKE1bqCz4

— Lucile Danilov (@JustAnotherTL) June 12, 2021

Although memoQ's support team is generally excellent, they deal with tens of thousands of users and their ongoing troubles, and the form letters they used to send for requested features often had a somewhat impersonal feel, which frustrated many people. And there was little chance to see if others had similar requests or to discuss these. All that has changed for the better with this new portal.

The most encouraging thing for me, however, is the clear commitment to this platform which I saw in the memoQ product owner, Zsolt Varga, in a group chat with another responsible person. He's a consummate professional and no bullshitter, and it's clear he plans to watch the portal closely to inform efforts of many kinds with memoQ software.

So, for now I have abandoned my initial reservations about yet another user campaign, and I am taking this as seriously as the decision-makers I trust are. My friends at memoQ will probably also welcome the respite from late-night e-mails and Skype harangues about things I feel are harming the productivity of many of my LSP and independent friends in the translation sector. Many people in the translation world, including some of my closest friends, mistake what I actually do. For more than twenty years now, I have been more of a consultant, occasionally a developer for translation workflow solutions and training or coaching. Yes, I translate a lot, though less in recent years as I prepare for a quiet retirement with my ducks and goats, but I have this bad habit as a former research scientist of turning almost every freakin' translation project into some kind of study, though my clients are usually spared the knowledge and the burden of results from these studies. Most of my time lately is spent training translators and project managers privately. So in any case, I am really, really chuffed, as my British friends would put it, to see the memoQ Ideas Portal, which is, I believe, the best venue so far for memoQ users of every kind to tell the makers what we really need.

So take your ideas and wishes for a better memoQ here: https://ideas.memoq.com/

And now I have to get off my ass and contribute, or I'm going to lose a bet and have to pick up a really, really big bar tab at the next memoQ Fest. So won't you join me? At the Portal, I mean. Well, in Budapest at the next memoQ Fest too, assuming we all manage to get our vaccinations and don't die of the next plague or get blown up by all those jihadis for other CAT tools out there....

We need better backups! Vote for this!!!

Yahoogroups is dead. Check out groups.io and the migrated memoQ peer support!

A few weeks ago I saw a notice that Yahoo is taking down its old groups facility, which, back in the day, was like a jazzier version of the old listserves. At the beginning of my career as a commercial translator, I found the translation-related groups there to be enormously helpful, and I met many colleagues who were mentors to me and remain friends to this day. Unfortunately, some years ago, Yahoo reorganized the interface of the groups feature so that I often could not figure out how to use it any more, so aside from occasionally peeking at mailed digests of the content in half a dozen groups, I haven't participated actively in many years.

So I really wasn't sad to learn that YahooGroups are about to be axed. However, the need for better organized sites of this kind has hardly gone away. Although for many organizations and interests, Facebook has come to dominate group communications, Facebook sucks like a Kremlin vacuum cleaner from Hell when it comes to managing content for user advice and Help. Even users who are not lazy find it difficult to search for solutions already posted, so one tends to see the same help requests every week, sometimes the same issue more than once in a day. The archives of a good listserve are usually much better sources of help.

So I was pleased to hear that the YahooGroup for memoQ peer-to-peer support had migrated to a new platform at https://groups.io/g/memoQ/. And I hope other good CAT tool support groups do the same (feel free to post any such links in the comments).

Even if Facebook were not the cesspit of fake news, political and social manipulation that threatens the stability of so many countries around the world as well as the physical safety of everyone (live streaming mass slaughter isn't my idea of fun on a Saturday night, but then I am a bit old-fashioned), it is unlikely that it will ever become a good platform for the kind of technical information sharing among professional peers that we need. YahooGroups met that need once, and I think that these new incarnations on Groups.io may do a better job with less (or no?) trashy ad spam.

If you are a memoQ user, I encourage you to join the new group if you were not already on the old YahooGroups platform. (If you were, you have probably already been migrated by the helpful moderators.) Contribute your expertise, and ask the questions that need asking and answering for all of us to move forward with the technical challenges of the tools we use.

RIP Yahoogroups :-(

No, the popular free Yahoogroups have not been eliminated. Yet.

However, the latest "improvements" introduced by the idiots at Yahoo responsible for such things may have killed the usefulness of this feature for many people.

Those who use or subscribe to these groups - which cover a range of subjects far beyond translation - will understand what I mean if they have occasion to use the web interface sometimes. The new web design introduced a few weeks ago is radically different and disorienting, and I must now resort to e-mail functions if I want to contribute to a discussion. Many others seem to have similar issues.

Note to designers and developers: if it ain't broke, maybe you should keep your hands off it. Something might look dated but still be far more serviceable than your "clever" new design ideas.

I see this all as part of a trend to undermine years of progress in human/computer interface design. In recent years, programmers have been moving close boxes on dialogs, perhaps to overcome well-trained user impulses to get rid of them before they are read. Often there is a commercial interest behind such a change. Or it might be pure, stupid ego. I am reminded of an arrogant SOB at a former employer of mine in Germany, a very intelligent software developer who had created an interesting document management module but decided one day that print functions belong under the Edit menu. WTF? He was completely deaf to all protests that the File menu was the standard, expected place for such things and felt that as a demigod he had the right to dictate to thousands of others that they must bow to his superior will.

This is not a useful way to work. We programmers are not gods, though at times I'm not sure thata ll of us are human. (Most are in the ways that count, fortunately.)

When I think of the great contributions these online groups have made to our translation profession, providing support communities for the software we use, for our discussions of language, the payment practices of clients and much more, I am very saddened to think that this might all be lost now because of the stupid redesign by Yahoo. But Yahoo is a troubled company and may be on the way out, so perhaps we need to think about ways of preserving these information archives if they are worth keeping and look to new fora for the future. Google+? Maybe. But despite all the enthusiasm of Guy Kawasaki and the interesting things I am discovering in that integrated platform, I do not yet see it as offering structured discussion groups in quite the same useful way. I hope I'm missing something obvious.

Apparently Yahoo is receiving many thousands of complaints, access to those with disabilities no longer work, and there are many new problems with technical features and spam. But why should that matter to demigods? "Neo", as the new mess is called, is here to stay according to Yahoo.

There are many discussions of the problem out there. Most I find depressing. Don't bother. 

Time to vote with our feet?

Resolve it with Kilgray Support

It's been some time now since Kilgray introduced a ticket system for its support issues. It seems to work well on the whole, and I do like being able to look at the ticket history when I am logged in to the system to read a response to a question or a bug report I've sent.

The main problem for me with Kilgray's support ticket system Resolve isn't Kilgray's problem. It's mine. Sometimes the responses sent by e-mail don't arrive in my inbox. I am sure this is something with my system, because e-mail correspondence with some clients and colleagues disappears down the same dark hole sometimes, even though messages before and after in a sequence will arrive. Don't tell me to look in my Spam folder, etc. - I know that drill well enough after decades of e-mail.

So sometimes I start to wonder about the status of a Kilgray support ticket. Or I get an automated e-mail from the system saying that because I have not responded to a request for more information for a zillion hours, the ticket will be closed. Or I want to look up an old ticket for information it contains, and I have deleted all the e-mails with links. Then I go directly to the Support system and log in.

As far as I can tell, there isn't a link to the support ticket system on the usual Kilgray web site (not yet). If there is, I can't find it. So I enter its address directly in my browser:

http://support.kilgray.com/

Some tickets can be submitted there without logging in to the system. Once you have logged in, all of your current and past support tickets will be visible, and you can read the information, re-open a ticket or rate the support you received.

Kilgray offers 101% Support & a free book in February!

During the month of February, Kilgray has been running a special promotion featuring 101% support (i.e. the usual above and beyond the call of duty assistance), which this time also includes a free copy of my memoQ 6 in Quick Steps guide.

If you already own a copy, you can share that special promotional gift with a friend in need as many others have done already with full-priced copies.

I would like to thank Kilgray and my readers for all the kind support of my methods research  and efforts to find better ways for all of us to work together with the often complex software intended to support our efforts. It has been a pleasure and an honor to assist so many of you in recent years.

This special promotion ends on Thursday; if you have recently renewed your support contract it will merely add another 12 months to your remaining term of free support and upgrades.

Clich HERE to extend your Kilgray memoQ Support and Upgrade contract and receive your free code to get the memoQ 6 in Quick Steps book at no cost.