Are there any resources you’d like developed and/or hosted for free?

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leosmith
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Are there any resources you’d like developed and/or hosted for free?

Postby leosmith » Fri Aug 03, 2018 11:41 pm

First, let me make it clear that I’m not trying to “steal” members from this site. llorg continuing to thrive strengthens all other language learning sites. Long live llorg! Long live htlal, for that matter :D

I want to develop a site that has value, some unique stuff, and is yet another fun place for language learners to hang out. I want it to be 100% community run eventually, as I would rather just use the tools, and still have some say on what gets developed. I don’t like unnecessary changes or slow (no?) response to fixing bugs, and those were some of my motivations for creating it in the first place.

So to make it more unique, are there any resources you’d like developed? I’m mostly talking about transcripts and such that are legal to create and host. I love native material. Apps and such are more expensive to develop, so I’d probably have to charge for those.
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Re: Are there any resources you’d like developed and/or hosted for free?

Postby smallwhite » Sat Aug 04, 2018 12:07 am

Hosting LWT (Learning With Texts) like previously hosted on fluentin3months.com.

Your learning log.
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tommus
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Re: Are there any resources you’d like developed and/or hosted for free?

Postby tommus » Sat Aug 04, 2018 1:07 am

leosmith wrote:I want to develop a site that has value, some unique stuff, and is yet another fun place for language learners to hang out. I want it to be 100% community run eventually........ I’m mostly talking about transcripts and such that are legal to create and host. I love native material.

Our own Wikipedia with audio! A simplified plain-text version of selected (interesting) Wikipedia articles with matching audio. Perfectly legal. Just cite the Wikipedia source including date, and use the same Creative Commons licence.

Currently, there are quite a few Wikipedia articles with audio, but it is quite a process to try to find the historical version that was used to produce the audio. And very often, the audio is very old, or missing, from the articles we find to be the most interesting. Not a problem with our versions.

Have separate language sections. "Community run" by our LLorg members. Edit the text to just plain text. Probably no translations. Use pop-up dictionaries. No images. Our members provide native or near-native audio. We can do as little or as much as we want, or can manage to do. It is totally open-ended.There will always be interesting articles to add. We can cooperate.Target language learners can produce the plain text and hope (ask) that natives will add the audio.

This would be a very useful "text with perfectly-matching audio" resource for almost everyone here on LLorg. I am ready to start to help tomorrow.
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Re: Are there any resources you’d like developed and/or hosted for free?

Postby Jaleel10 » Sat Aug 04, 2018 2:43 am

Database (a strong word lol) of YouTube videos with accurate TL subtitles. I currently use https://www.captionpop.com to find them but it gets a bit hard because you have to know what you are looking for and then you have to hope the subtitles aren't machine generated haha.

Would be great if people create, let's say, categories section and we as a community add videos or channels to it that contain accurate subtitles.
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Re: Are there any resources you’d like developed and/or hosted for free?

Postby zenmonkey » Sat Aug 04, 2018 8:49 am

Why not work on improving this place?
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Re: Are there any resources you’d like developed and/or hosted for free?

Postby rdearman » Sat Aug 04, 2018 3:37 pm

zenmonkey wrote:Why not work on improving this place?

I have to agree with this statement. Basically we're hosting with AWS and we can fire up sites and databases without any issues to extend or expand. We can add links into the forum and cross link everywhere. There is a lot of suggestions which were put forward in the technical and improvement section and we really could use the help. Does seem a waste to split across multiple domains.
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Re: Are there any resources you’d like developed and/or hosted for free?

Postby leosmith » Sat Aug 04, 2018 4:47 pm

rdearman wrote:
zenmonkey wrote:Why not work on improving this place?

I have to agree with this statement. Basically we're hosting with AWS and we can fire up sites and databases without any issues to extend or expand. We can add links into the forum and cross link everywhere. There is a lot of suggestions which were put forward in the technical and improvement section and we really could use the help. Does seem a waste to split across multiple domains.

I think it's nice having additional places to go to hang out; I frequent several sites myself. That being said, how would you propose I help you? Is it a simple matter of donating capital and human resources?
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Re: Are there any resources you’d like developed and/or hosted for free?

Postby devilyoudont » Sat Aug 04, 2018 5:25 pm

I second hosting LWT.

Lingora has a feature where people can view the chatlog of chats that occurred between other people on the site. This feature is really intriguing to me, but the version on Lingora isn't practical. Any chat anyone might click on is just people saying "Hi" in English, and then never sending another message again. There should be a minimum amount of conversation that occurs before the site archives the chat, and both users should have to consent to the chat being archived, rather than it just getting archived automatically.

I personally do not tend to participate in learner chatrooms because I do not want to pick up mistakes from other learners. But, a feature that would encourage my participation would be if a chatroom had a correction feature similar to blogs on Lang8 or the moments section on Hellotalk. This would also really distinguish your chat section from services like HelloLingo. Corrections in chat could tie into a broader karma system that tallies corrections given in essays and in 1 on 1 chats as well. Such a karma system would also encourage native speaker participation in the chatrooms as well.

You should also develop a mobile app. I see that your mobile website works really well, but a lot of people in certain countries won't find it if its not in an app store.

Your site has a lot of features, and you should allow users to modify their settings about who they want to be contacted by, and what sections of the site they would like for people to be able to "see" that they are online. You may have users that only want to use the tutors and the essay section, but don't want random users to be able to initiate a chat with them as an example. Or you may have people who don't want the opposite sex to chat with them for whatever reason. Or you may have users who want to participate in all features, but don't want to use chat while they are writing an essay. Just some examples off the top of my head.

Sorry if this is a lot, but I thought stuff on your site looks pretty good and I wanted to give some ideas to distinguish it from other sites.

Edited to add:

A feature I've really wanted on sites that have correction tools in the past is a place where I can see all corrections that I have received on the site, regardless of if they came from 1-1 chats, essays, etc and choose corrections to export into Anki.

An export tool for a potential LWT-like tool to anki is also a must.
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leosmith
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Re: Are there any resources you’d like developed and/or hosted for free?

Postby leosmith » Sat Aug 04, 2018 6:53 pm

smallwhite wrote:Your learning log.

Absolutely. I'm super busy right now, but when the clouds clear a bit I'll start logging again. (Incidentally - B2 in both Korean and Tagalog in less than 2 years. Yay! :D )
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leosmith
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Re: Are there any resources you’d like developed and/or hosted for free?

Postby leosmith » Sat Aug 04, 2018 7:04 pm

smallwhite wrote:Hosting LWT (Learning With Texts) like previously hosted on fluentin3months.com.

devilyoudont wrote:I second hosting LWT.

Maybe you guys don't know this (I haven't advertised much), but I have a multi-language reading tool in beta right now. It works with many languages; the goal is to eventually support everything google translate supports. We are working out the bugs with the no-space-between-words languages right now (Thai, Mandarin, Japanese, Cantonese to be specific). This tool, along with the teacher tool, are meant to pay tools that keep the site in the black. The library is nearly empty. It will be free for a month or so, then I'd like to start changing $5/month for unlimited usage.

So initially I balked at the idea of hosting LWT. But now I'm thinking it would be a good idea, with some caveats. Do you think it would be reasonable to ask that it stay a tool that takes some computer know-how to set up and use? As long as there is an advantage to using LT for most people, I'd love to host it.
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