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

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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 7:15 pm

tommus wrote:Our own Wikipedia with audio!

This is a great idea, tommus. I actually didn't know it was legal to use wikipedia material like that. This might be a bit different from what you were thinking, but what if I were to give you a branch of our library, and you could populate it with articles and audio as you see fit? I could also give moderation authority to a team of your making. Access to the library would be free, of course.
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Re: Are there any resources you’d like developed and/or hosted for free?

Postby leosmith » Sat Aug 04, 2018 7:18 pm

Jaleel10 wrote: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.

It's a great idea, but I know nothing about hosting videos. Isn't it expensive? Maybe creating a list and keeping it updated would more feasible?
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Re: Are there any resources you’d like developed and/or hosted for free?

Postby leosmith » Sat Aug 04, 2018 7:24 pm

Hashimi wrote:I think all major languages need something like this: http://www.elllo.org/english/1201.htm

Yes - and all minor languages too! Some material exists, some is copywrited, and some will have to be created from scratch. Thanks for this example; it's definitely a goal to fill the library with such material.
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Re: Are there any resources you’d like developed and/or hosted for free?

Postby leosmith » Sat Aug 04, 2018 7:29 pm

devilyoudont wrote: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.

Wow, what a superb post! I see you're studying Japanese - would you be interested in beta testing our reading tool? That way we could have more convenient 3-way discussions with my technical team on site too. Please pm me if you're interested.
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Re: Are there any resources you’d like developed and/or hosted for free?

Postby Adrianslont » Sat Aug 04, 2018 8:53 pm

leosmith wrote:
Hashimi wrote:I think all major languages need something like this: http://www.elllo.org/english/1201.htm

Yes - and all minor languages too! Some material exists, some is copywrited, and some will have to be created from scratch. Thanks for this example; it's definitely a goal to fill the library with such material.

Here’s another example - lots of languages. I have used some of their Indonesian interviews. Mixed quality but plenty to work with, very helpful. Transcripts are gold.

http://langmedia.fivecolleges.edu/culturetalk-regions
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Re: Are there any resources you’d like developed and/or hosted for free?

Postby Jaleel10 » Sat Aug 04, 2018 9:36 pm

leosmith wrote:It's a great idea, but I know nothing about hosting videos. Isn't it expensive? Maybe creating a list and keeping it updated would more feasible?


Yeah, a list would be great!
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Re: Are there any resources you’d like developed and/or hosted for free?

Postby smallwhite » Sun Aug 05, 2018 12:55 am

leosmith wrote:
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.

I'd just like to be able to sample LWT every now and then.
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Re: Are there any resources you’d like developed and/or hosted for free?

Postby zenmonkey » Sun Aug 05, 2018 8:33 am

leosmith wrote:
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?


I like what you've done with your commercial site - honestly I hope it succeeds and I've thought about similar efforts.

However, I have to say, no, most people do not use multiple resources for the same thing. Very few people will post content on two forums. There is clearly space for multiple sites and offers in the language learning space and there are a whole bunch of tools that could be developed but personally I'm going to prioritise my focus on here.

I think that it has been interesting to see what motivates and what has succeeded in the management of on-line learning tools - the how-to-learn-any-language fiasco, the birth of this place and commercial sites all have varied and different motivations. I've seen a lot of 'hopeful willingness' here, some great work delivered too, but fundamentally, since no one is trying to earn a living off of this site, it will normally come as second fiddle to persons' monetary needs. Such is the life of volunteer projects.

emk, rdearman and the others involved in this site have done superlative work. In the absence of more capital or resources they can only do so much. So the answer to your questions is probably both and either.

I'll continue to donate time for projects and fixes, as time allows. The way emk has set up things, it is quite possible to propose code and improvement continuously to the site.
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Re: Are there any resources you’d like developed and/or hosted for free?

Postby zenmonkey » Sun Aug 05, 2018 9:18 am

smallwhite wrote:Hosting LWT (Learning With Texts) like previously hosted on fluentin3months.com.
devilyoudont wrote:I second hosting LWT.
smallwhite wrote:I'd just like to be able to sample LWT every now and then.
devilyoudont wrote:An export tool for a potential LWT-like tool to anki is also a must.


I have LWT running on my computer. First off, Anki export is built in already.
The current options I can think of for making it work are:

a) install it on your own device (requires setting up a web server, etc.) not too complicated but not turn-key.
b) integrate it to a wordpress site (the developer already did the integration effort), low effort to get it running on a site. The wordpress site needs to manage users but not too complicated.
c) integrate it to a non-wordpress site (like this one) with users / password management and writing the bridging functions. A bit more effort but these bridges are not too complicated to write or maintain.
d) set-up a wordpress site for the forum - integrate it there. There exists a very nice bridge between wordpress and phpbb. This could be used to manage all sorts of non-forum type content, articles, what-not. Technically easy, but requires some "what for" strategic thinking.

At this point in time, if you are interested in installing on your own computer (option a), I propose to walk you though it. Let me know here if that is of interest to you.

I'm willing to discuss c) and d) with the admins and see what we can come up with. ;)
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Re: Are there any resources you’d like developed and/or hosted for free?

Postby rdearman » Sun Aug 05, 2018 10:05 am

The problem with hosting LWT isn't technical so much as legal. Invariably someone will upload a copyrighted text and as the administrator/moderator/owner of the site you are then liable for the distribution of copyrighted materials. In other words pirating. This means you'll have to do a LOT of administration of the LWT texts which people are uploading, or have some kind of plagiarism checker built in which will scan uploads and reject copyrighted materials. Given the hassle it really isn't worth hosting, especially since it is easy enough for people to install themselves. I even made a docker instance of it so you didn't need to do anything other than install docker and then run the module. (I don't remember where it is located now but could probably find it if anyone really wants it)

Wordpress is also problematic, in fact the reason we were hacked previously was through the giant security holes in wordpress. It was the reason we were down for a week and had to rebuild everything on AWS were we are now. Which is why our static site is literally static with HTML. I even changed my personal blogging website to use HTML only build with emacs. Wordpress might be improved, but regardless it takes a lot of dedicated time and effort to make sure you aren't hacked. In fact EMK built this forum so that we could automatically wipe it out and restart directly from the code base in seconds. We were even thinking about setting up an automated script that wipes and rebuilds the site every couple of days.

On thing I would like to see, which I mentioned before is a swap shop where people could swap old language materials, DVD's, etc via post with each other.

The beauty of the setup which EMK has done here is that if someone did decide to create something like like the swap shop, it can be build completely independently and as long as it would run in a docker instance we could setup our system to pull the code, compile and host it. Might need some fiddling around if you wanted to access the forums DB for authentication, but wouldn't be to hard.
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