Yes, we perform a daily backup of the database precisely at this time. It looks like the backup is indeed taking a few minutes to complete, and it may be blocking the website. When you say "do not pass", do you mean you are unable to add new sentences, while still able to browse the website?

Yeah, thank you Trang for letting me work again for Tatoeba. I’m very happy to be back. :-)

Last year, I worked at making it easier for new developers to join the project and start hacking, facilitating the setup of local development environments. While in the past, almost only Trang and I worked on the code, we have seen new people like Andreas, Danail, Yorwba, Aiji and others contributing more or less regularly. This really gives us hope that future developments on Tatoeba will be more smooth and diverse. Please join the fun if you’d like to help, anybody is welcome, including beginners.

Of course, there are still a zillion things to do. In the past, I’d organize my work mainly by going through our Github issues, but this time I would like work differently. I believe that while Github issues are relevant, they are too specific and they prevent us from seeing the forest for the trees. I have the feeling that a lot of our problems are rooted in some more general/core issues I’d like to tackle instead. So my plan is to first perform some (ideally a lot of) UX tests to better define and identify these issues. I’m better at programming than UX, but hey, we are all learning aren’t we.

Anyone is welcome to help in UX testing. You can send us your test reports to team@tatoeba.org or publish them on https://en.wiki.tatoeba.org/articles/show/ux-tests if the tested person is okay with that.

I’d also like to work on the following things, which may prove more or less connected to the problems UX testing will identify.

1. Tags are an incomprehensible mess I’d like to improve: https://tatoeba.org/fra/wall/sh...#message_33780

2. New members rarely stick around. While looking at the profiles, you can see a lot of people who joined the project at some point, contributed a few dozens of sentences, and then nothing. It is normal that people leave at some point in any collaborative project, but if we have more leavings than joinings, it indicates something’s wrong.

3. Tatoeba should better help members to connect one another, see this thread: https://tatoeba.org/fra/wall/sh...#message_32097

4. The community is too western-centred. As an open multilingual project, I think we should set an example for diversity. However, if you compare this list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...er_of_speakers with this one https://tatoeba.org/fra/stats/users_languages, you’ll see that languages like French and German are overrepresented, while languages like Mandarin, Hindi, Arabic or Bengali are underrepresented.

5. English takes too much space. I don’t know how to put it another way. On the Wall, despite the "all languages are equal" message, at the end of the day members almost always use English. It’s good that we have English as a bridge language, but it has drawbacks. I think it deters people who are not confident with English from becoming a part of the community. Also, overusing English prevents us from thinking in different ways, having new approaches. So I think Tatoeba should provide better tools and spaces to allow anyone to truly and fearlessly express in any language.

Today I performed a UX test on an old Tatoeba contributor. With his permission, I am publishing the contents of the tests on the wiki https://en.wiki.tatoeba.org/art...show/ux-test-2

I’d like to encourage anyone to perform similar tests, be it on new or regular users. It helps identifying UX problems and understanding people’s needs. You just need watch people using Tatoeba to do something. They have to voice out their thoughts so that you can understand what’s happening in their head.

I personally use a screencasting software + voice recorder or take notes while testing, and then write everything down as soon as I can while my memory is still fresh.

Thanks for letting us know, satokeigo. The search feature is back.

The attack looks finished now. So here is a follow-up.

It was an attack on the application level, sending a lot of forged http requests. The contents of the requests looked like randomly built from a set of real data: a combination of URLs, referers and cookies that looked valid individually, but did not make any sense put together. So after analyzing the traffic, I set up some countermeasures and the attack was contained, so you probably didn’t notice that it lasted for about two weeks. It peaked at 30-40 requests per seconds (or 1500 packets per second), which is rather moderate for a ddos, but apparently enough to partially disturb our service. Interestingly, dev.tatoeba.org and wiki.tatoeba.org were also targeted, but at an unnoticeable rate.

Note that it looks like the countermeasures partially blocked a few legitimate users connecting from China. Sorry about that! It should be okay now.

The meaning of this attack is still unclear. It happened at a time when most western people are on vacation. It was very limited in scale and not so hard to dodge. Also, the zombies were all located in China (which doesn’t necessarily mean the attacker is from China nor operating from China). It is worth noting that Tatoeba is not blocked by the GFW according to greatfire.org. Which makes me think that maybe…

* the attacker wants us to block all users from China
* the attacker wants us to think that the attack is related to China whereas it has nothing to do with it
* the attacker has limited resources (not competent, not rich, not state-sponsored)
* we are part of a bigger attack in which we are not the main target
* the attacker is testing our ability to respond to a ddos attack
* the attacker is just holding a grudge against us

Tatoeba is facing a DDoS attack. If you’re curious what a DDoS attack is, have a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...service_attack

We are working on it, but there is little we can do about it without blocking legitimate users. We’ll keep you updated.

Thanks for reporting the problem. Note that you can change your email address after registration.

The correct answer is "info@" and it does work when I try to register with it. Are you sure the error wasn’t about something else? Can you try to reproduce the problem on our testing server at https://dev.tatoeba.org/?

I wish we had better ways to categorize the corpus and characterize sentences. By this, I mean having more metadata on sentences, like formal/informal, region, grammar, theme… This is currently basically achieved by tags and lists, but they are still inadequate in many ways. We had various discussions about how to improve things, like here[1], but no clear consensus or decision came out yet.

I’d like to share my thoughts. So why good characterization and categorization is so important?

* Currently, the corpus is often presented as a giant flat list of sentences. Such giant list cannot (and should not) be used for browsing the corpus because it’s too much sentences at once. Chances are I’m gonna get tired after a few pages. Chances are I’m actually only interested in *some* of them.

* It allows to *explore* the corpus, to go into different "areas", so people can *discover* more sentences.

* It allows members to make their own sentences better known to those in need of them.

* It can serve as an incentive for more diversity, because it will show when a corpus consists of a majority of sentences of the same kind.

* If sentences of the same kind are displayed together, the corpus will look more organized so Tatoeba will be more attractive.

* It will put more focus on quality instead of quantity. Currently, I feel like Tatoeba is a lot about numbers. Number of sentences in a language, number of sentences belonging to a member, number of sentences having audio, number of contributions… All those numbers are potential incentives for producing low-quality sentences and competing for "who’s got the biggest". I wish we value more the "what" instead of the "how many".

I dream of a Tatoeba where I click some Browse link and I am presented with a palette of well-organized and inspiring metadata like categories, theme, grammar, etc., I feel like "wow, lots of interesting things in there" and it makes me want to see more.

[1] https://github.com/Tatoeba/tatoeba2/issues/785

> https://imgur.com/0FyBque

As far as I know, a Compose button alone in the corner is how Google Mail, Proton Mail and probably other major webmails do it. But I also think it’s not perfect; I remember it took me some time to figure out where the Compose button was on their interfaces. That said, after I got it, it became natural to me.

> https://imgur.com/hzhFlRc

While your alternative design looks prettier, it doesn’t make sense to me. The button has nothing to do with the folder title. Will the button show up from the trash folder too? Can I compose a trash message? ;-)

In my opinion, even if the lonely Compose button isn’t perfect, it is by far the less worse solution.

Thanks for trying to make this right. .o/

Thanks for working on this, Trang.

My comment is not something related to the new design, but the top-right menu "Private messages" is confusing me very much because it mixes two very different things: a button to write a new message and a list of folders. This makes it hard to understand that folders are folders, and the title "Private messages" doesn’t help. In addition, the link/button "New message" should be rephrased with a verb, like "Write a new message" or "Compose".

So how about moving the "New message" link/button out of the "Private messages" box and renaming "Private messages" with something like "Folders"?

De plus, la chose modifiée peut être un commentaire, mais aussi une phrase (et peut-être d’autres trucs ?). Je pense que c’est pour ça que le mot modifié avait été accordé au féminin. Il faudrait avoir des traductions différentes selon le contexte.

Search is back. Thanks for reporting the problem!

Sadly we do not provide support for recording from mobile phones. But I agree that it would be a great addition.

I think it should be possible to re-implement the functionality of the Shtooka recorder in Javascript using the Web Audio API. That would allow recording from the web browser of a mobile phone (or a computer). I tried to hack a proof of concept today: https://dev.tatoeba.org/tatorec/ This should allow you to record one sentence and download it as a WAV file. Please let me know if it works on your phone.

My bad, I forgot to re-enable reindexation /o\
Should be fine now.

I am not 100% sure about the why. The only thing I am sure is that the English index showed some errors when I checked it using the "indextool --check" command. So I recreated it.

When we moved from Manticore 2 to Manticore 3 [1] a few days ago, indexes were converted to a new format using a special tool [2]. That tool doesn’t look very stable yet because it caused some unexpected problems I had to work around at that time. So I suspect it also didn’t convert the English index correctly.

I remember "darn" eng→ita showed 4 results of which 2 were incorrect, and now it shows 4 results of which 4 are corrects. So I suspect the tool messed around with the list of sentences each keywords are associated to.

[1] https://github.com/Tatoeba/tatoeba2/issues/1929
[2] https://manticoresearch.com/201...-to-version-3/

Problem solved. Apparently English was the only language affected.

That’s very weird indeed. I am confident that this is caused by the recent update of the search engine. I’m working on it.

I’m glad to know that you got things working! :-)

I can of course make it so that the VM already has a the smb account in case anonymous login doesn’t work. The only thing I’m worried about is how long Windows will remember the credentials you entered. It can be annoying if you have to enter them over and over.

About the "exit" command (or Ctrl+D), I personally consider such information as out of the scope of the documentation of Imouto. It feels like explaining how to clean the dishes in a cake recipe. Instead, I’d rather put a link to some tutorial about how to use the command line.

I see, it looks like selecting a translation dramatically slows down the generation of the CSV file. I’ll try to optimize this.

That’s very good! We definitely need help on the front-end part. Tatoeba’s front-end has been running for a long time with simple jQuery code. More recently, we started using AngularJS and Material to give it a more modern look and feel. Our ultimate goal is to make the website responsive. Some parts have been rewritten using AngularJS, like the registration form, but other parts like the Wall are still running with legacy jQuery code.