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Life as a spammer
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Yesterday I sent spam to 2300 people. To 800 of them, I sent it twice. Yes, I sent 3000 spam mails in a single day.
The reason behind this (if there’s ever justification behind spamming people!) was to notify our translators we are migrating our last development modules off the legendary and invaluable elvis server, which has served as the i18n host for Red Hat and Fedora for such a long, long time.
It’s hard being separated from the systems you love, but this old fella’s mojo was wearing off for some time now, substituted by fatigue and a clear need for retirement. It’s time to let the chap take some time off, let him just be, and start playing with the new kid on the block.
So, back to spam, spam, bacon and spam.
For those who missed it, here’s what the mail was:
Dear translators, You are receiving this email as one of the 2300+ people who have contributed translations to Fedora, and previously, Red Hat Linux. Thanks to your work, Fedora can reach out to millions more people around the world! Please continue reading, as we are changing some core bits that will affect your translation work. Today all translatable Fedora projects will be moved away from the traditional ‘i18n.redhat.com’ server, and over to Fedora servers. This move is part of our effort to grow our community and open up our processes. It will help us increase the number of Fedora languages and their quality, and also lower the barrier of entry for new translators. What does this mean for you? To continue contributing translations you’ll need to follow some steps to join the Fedora Localization Project. We’re a cool bunch of people, working in language teams, and translating everything that has to do with Fedora. All information you need to know to continue working on Fedora translations can be found at: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/L10N/FedoraModulesMove If you have any questions about any step of the migration process, don’t hesitate to drop by IRC on #fedora-l10n on the Freenode network, or send an email to fedora-trans-list@redhat.com, and someone will jump right in to help you out. We’re sorry that we can’t move everyone automatically to the new system, but we are dedicated to helping each and every translator who has any difficulty with the process. As of tomorrow, support for translations via the older system will be dropped, and you’ll no longer need to send translations there. Our efforts will focus on improving the new architecture, constantly adding more projects for translation, creating new translation teams, and making it easier for you to contribute translations. So, thanks for your work, for bearing with us on this long email, and for continuing contributing to Fedora. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/L10N/FedoraModulesMove Dimitris Glezos Fedora Localization engineer
Being a spammer is no easy job, I tell you. It involves a variety of skills, including experience around technology, and an aptitude for psychology and sociology. Good spammers are gurus, hackers, like those who put a police car on top of a University building without no one noticing or them getting caught. The manage to avoid all the cops and make it to the user’s attention (in our case, their inbox).
I’m happy this whole story is now over. From now on, we’ve got a proper mailing list to discuss things, each language team has its own, and we can use the account system to send emails to people belonging in a group. Also, from now on, all moved modules are accepting translations through Transifex, no matter what the target VCS of their move was.
Ahh, the joy of good, well-integrated tools.
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in the night, Τρίτη 19 Φεβρουαρίου 2008
[ Fedora, Humor ] |
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Well done! While we are talking about numbers, I am not familiar with Transifex[1] but I am interested in statistics and visualization. So I am wondering if currently Transifex provides any “numbers” about its usage.
[1] Translations/localization is not my thing and also, you gave presentations about it all over the world but not for PLUG — shame on you :P
Yet you forgot to include usuals spam statements : « Enlarge my i18n », « Make your localization bigger », « String size does really matter ».