Hello, new here, offer help
 

I am a new user on abandonia, but I've been visiting this site many times before.
First of all, hello everybody!

I saw a few threads asking for contribution and I would like to help.

http://www.abandonia.com/vbullet/showthread.php?t=18706
How can I post my review on games that require new reviews?
I can write a few longer ones for somebody to check them before submitting them on site. I read "here's how" thread for contributors and I see I need to get access to FTP first. Would be grateful to have it - do I need to sign on some list somewhere? I think I need some introduction first :unsure:

Furthermore, I am from Poland, so if help of translators is still needed, I can also help a little. I know English well, Polish is my first language - I can translate both ways if required. Please let me know if help is still needed and if yes - how to join translators group.

I wonder if some time or number of posts are required before active participation is possible.

I hope to have a lot of fun both using and creating content.
Best wishes!

hello bukimi, i am also new : )

and your english looks better than mine, and english is my mother language!

Thank you very much!

It's probably because learning foreign language often involves hours of boring grammar exercises and using long-forgotten words, which are not in use of native speakers anymore.

For example, I was taught "remuneration" is a word as good as "salary", which only made native speakers laugh :p

I also have some experience with translations and it requires paying attention to spelling, etc.
I hope that somebody will introduce me to ways I could contribute here.

Welcome aboard, bukimi!

It is nice to see you would like to help us running the site, I'd like to give you some information about how you can help.

First of all, if you would like to sign up to be an English to Polish translator, visit this thread, and post that you would like to be a part of the Polish translator team. You will be given access to the translator's forums shortly. You could alternatively write to Dave about the subject.

You can post your reviews in Community Reviews if the game has been reviewed. For new reviews, you will be given FTP Access shortly, along with instructions detailing how to use it. Maybe we'll even dig up a list of games needing reviews. :)

Actually you participate as soon as possible, no need to write hundreds of irrelevant posts, it's just everyone seems to be having a summer holiday, and we need some time to get the staff together.

Thank you for your fast reply.
I was wondering if you still keep this site alive, as I've seen you are developing another site on similar topic.

Do you know if the list of reviews needing rewriting I gave link to is up to date?
It would be a bad idea to write texts that already wait for publication somewhere.

Welcome aboard!

It is fresh, feel free to review the games that have useless texts, but there's another list that shows the games that are not on the site yet!

I can't see a thread for translators there.
Should I create a new one only for my sign-up to the translation team? I'm asking to avoid mess, as there are only reviews in that topic there at the moment.

I assume that if there are good screenshots already available in the review, it would be enough to write text only. Am I right?

Yes the screenshots are the same for every language. :) If the game needed more of them or they needed replacement because there were anything wrong with them, it would be separate from the translation.

I'll be damned if I know where's the thread. I'll pass your request along somehow. We used to have a recruitment office thread, and the "help us" page continues to say so, but it mustn't have worked out somehow and it's gone. :palm:

OK, please inform me about any progress in this matter.
I will not make a new thread to avoid messing up the forum.

What about writing new reviews in English, where text is too short, but there are enough screenshots?
Can I submit my review without any pictures?

Lastly, I can start writing some longer reviews right away - should I just post them in "Your reviews" thread? I don't to get my "replacement" reviews lost among reviews of new games.

Sure. :) We wouldn't know what to do with extra screenshots if the old ones were good.

Also, please note that if you want to replace a review that's in principle only a suggestion for us. If the review is really short or poor you can be quite confident; but you may want to ask us about every particular review to be sure. You can do that on a new personal thread you create on the Offers board.

"Your reviews" is primarily for reviews that don't go on the website, either because there are already reviews for that games, or because they're not about Abandonia games to begin with.

Our submission system is via FTP; I'm sending you a separate PM about it.

Of course I would like to have my reviews pre-read and checked if they are good enough before they got posted directly on site :)

Therefore, I should post them in "Offers" thread instead of using FTP or I should do both at the same time?
I want to start with reviews tagged in THIS THREAD. I can see that most of them are still very short.

I meant even before writing your review, you can ask us if the one on site is up for replacement or not. Checking it after it's submitted is a separate process, and there's never any problem here.

If you choose stub reviews from that thread it should be safe (unless they had been already replaced and the thread wasn't updated about it); but there may be a few more reviews that could use a replacement. What I meant is that this thread is sorely out of date.

The FTP is our legacy system, upload there anyway. You can post the reviews on your offers thread too if you want.

One more thing (last one, I hope): I can see there are reviews in different languages.
When I switch language to Polish, usually I can find the same review (length, text), which was only accurately translated.

Can I write both in English and in Polish? It should be easier than having to find somebody else to translate my review in English. Then, I think of putting different language versions in different files - is it a good idea?

PS. Text reviews should be in: .txt .doc .docx .pdf ?

Sure you can submit a translation for your own review, specially in your mother tongue. We'll be grateful. I'm fast-tracking your translator application here :P

Use RTF format (with Office or Wordpad) if you want to format some words; or plain text is always good of course.

Heh, fogrot about good old .rtf :lol:

One more thing, reviews in Polish seem to have national letters missing.
Instead of them, I can see "?" - I'm not familiar with coding issues, but it's not very readable that way. Will it be fixed anyhow?
Example here: http://www.abandonia.com/pl/games/98...ne+Ranger.html

What a disaster. :palm: I see there are a lot of them, we can't fix them one by one. Some are OK (example), but I don't know if they're even a minority. I'll se what can be done.

If it would need re-reading, re-writing and then re-uploading, I can help. :whistling:

Yet, I think it's more a matter of proper uploading text from file to site server.

In the current implementation of the website reviews are entered as text into an admin web form, not uploaded as separate files. We don't have access below that. A lot of reviews are from earlier versions of the website, and it's possible that the "upgrade" caused problems (it did elsewhere).

If you want to fix some one by one, if you give me a readable file or post on the forums, I guess I can make sure it isn't borked.

Oh, I can see I already have a "translator" badge. Still, I don't know where to start. Should I just check which reviews are missing in my language and upload them or there is some list of tasks to do somewhere?

PS. I sent you PM - credentials to FTP server you gave me don't work for me :no:

Welcome!

I'm sending you a detailed PM for the translation role :)

The password was old, I've just sent you the current one.

OK, I'll upload my first review tomorrow (I left it on my 2nd computer). I want to get some feedback on it before creating more of them.
Meanwhile, I started doing some translations.

On Friday I'm going to start my 9-days holidays, so I'll not post anything during that time.
I hope that I'll still have all permissions when I come back ;)

Of course you are still going to be a reviewer, it's not something we easily revoke, we have people who are inactive but still they won't get kicked out of the staff for not being here.

Sorry for the late reply, put welcome to the forum!

I see weekly news are not translated.
Is it the lack of translations or no technical possibility for translators to publish news on main page?

The news are independent for each language. It's up to each language team to decide what goes on their front page, if they can keep up translating the main website's news posts, if they also post independent from it when they have a new translation, etc.

You can ask in the Polish thread if there are other Polish translators who are active at the moment and you can coordinate with. If there aren't, of course you're free to take matters into your own hands. :)

Last post from 2010 :(

Main page of Abandonia looks as whole website is deserted when you switch to Polish language.
Even a few "fresh" news on main page could make this site more attractive to visitors from my country.

Is there any tutorial on how to add/translate news on main page?
Do I have to be granted special access to this option?
I think translating news would be better for me than adding something completely new, as in most cases I don't know any special news about "abandoned" games in Poland.

PS. Maybe if I add some invitation to help with translations, a few more helpful people will show up?

Please check again the tutorial for translators, point 8-9-10, it's all written there :)

Nope, you can do them already.

As you prefer, why not :)

Thanks for your help bukimi.

I'm always having problems with fonts when updating a game (fixing missing national letters). I copy correct text in a specified font, but sometimes I get different result and reviews have slightly different look than original ones.

Is there any way to implement automatic transition of fonts to the correct one?

PS. Is "Calibri size 11" the correct font for reviews?

Please compare:
CORRECT: http://www.abandonia.com/pl/games/95...r+Manager.html
INCORRECT: http://www.abandonia.com/pl/games/9583/1869.html

EDIT: By the way, I found out that many Polish translations are of poor quality :(

Some idioms are translated using exact words. In some, there are emoticons, even if there were none in the original review. Some are a block of text (paragraphs removed).
I'm fixing it, too. I don't do big changes, because they are not my translations, but grammar mistakes need fixing.

Have you tried the notepad trick? It should reset all the previous fonts and
once copy-pasted the system should use the default one.

Ok thanks, unfortunately it happens and non native speakers can't do much to solve it.

I opened fixed reviews on my home computer and all fonts seem identical now... Strange...

Do you see any difference in linked "incorrect" review now?

I don't know how it happened that after submitting a fix, font is different (even after reloading a page), but now it looks fine.

For grammar mistakes, there's no need to worry - almost all reviews need missing national letters fixing, so I have to read them all in the process ;)

This is a technical question and might be better addressed on the translators and updaters boards, because it's another bug that may cause problems down the road. But it's kind of hopeless to expect all translators to bend over backwards to go around this bug. The rich text editor in the website is a total piece of crap.

It's intended for things like boldface or italics (which are seldom used), but when pasting from programs like Word that can copy-paste rich text with format information, it copies all of it. This causes two problems.

First, some tags particular to the program the text it was copied from (for example Word) are put into the website along with the text. The good news is that they aren't HTML tags browsers just ignore them. Also you can select all and click on the "clean messy code" button on the website editor to remove them.

Secondly, font information is copied for every paragraph. This could be a problem because even if we formatted the reviews with the correct font (the one from the website style sheets that appears when the text has no further format), if later we wanted to change the website fonts we'd have to do it one review at a time, instead of just once in the style sheet. :whops:

You can see these tags if you block the editor's JavaScript in your browser, then the website falls back to a plain text box where you can enter any HTML code. :palm: For example this is the current review for Abandoned Places:

By the time I could take a look at the two reviews that you link they had the same font (Calibri/sans-serif 11pt), and I verified that looking at the tags. But today 1-0 Soccer Manager has no format tags--which is good. I'd be interested in knowing how you or whoever did it, if it wasn't by blocking the JavaScript editor.

Because of all this it's recommended to paste plain text only into the website editor. A sure way to do this as Dave says is to paste into the Notepad first, then copy from there pasting that into the website, instead of directly.

I found out that pasting a text fast enough in editor's box makes the editor ignore any formatting and then the review has no format tags (and has proper fonts). It seems that there is some time before browser uses the script ;) That would explain why some fixed reviews look OK.

Just as you mentioned, no formatting makes the editor use standard format of the site. I just have to remember to copy every review through notepad before submitting. I'll let you know if I have any further problems with that.

EDIT: There's something more wrong with Polish database. A lot of games have wrong genre associated with them.

Example: http://www.abandonia.com/pl/games/9802/Abuse.html
In Polish version it's a logic game without mentioning other keywords (Sci-fi, 3rd person, etc.).
Another one: http://www.abandonia.com/pl/games/96...ts+Boxing.html
(it says it's a board game, whereas it's clearly a sports game)

I doubt that translators would make such a mistake in almost all games. In most cases, game has "board game" as associated keywords.

Moreover, in edit menu, some genres are not translated or are from different languages.
For "game perspective" I can choose "3rd person", but also Polish "Tekstowe" (text game)
For "game theme" I can choose "Management", but also "Bojovka", which is from some foreign language I don't know, but certainly NOT Polish ;)

Was this problem already mentioned somewhere?

Another bug. :palm: A ton of games have wrong tags, and editing the main English node breaks them again:

http://www.abandonia.com/vbullet/showthread.php?t=28517

(Of course Abovo could resolve it, they just won't.)

For Polish translations it's not that bad as I go through every review and can fix these tags when fixing national letters. Other languages may have bigger problems. I wonder why tags have different connections and are not simply related to main English page...

Still, if somebody just clicks "edit" on English page and then doesn't save any changes, it still breaks the tags?

PS. Some other bug clears my "location" entry on my profile everyday, but it's not that important. I see some other users also have only comma as location, so are also affected.

PS2. By the way, can someone also see THIS POST to help me with one English sentence? Thanks in advance.

They key word here is: "BUG" :P The long story is terrible design and terrible implementation.

No. Accessing the edit form has no effect, only clicking on the "update game" button afterwards. Anyway only updaters can edit the main English page, I think.

I wasn't aware. Maybe it's a recent bug because of the forum update. You can report it on the feedback board, perhaps Horseman can do something.

A lot of people choose not to enter any location, actually it was originally (after the "upgrade") compulsory to enter one, and some people complained, so it was changed.