What users say versus what they mean
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@Polygeekery said in What users say versus what they mean:
They don't read the email beyond the subject line, see a link, click it, then complain it is in the wrong language.
Every, single, time.Do your emails contain a lot of 15 minute Youtube videos too?
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@Polygeekery You have clients that know how to READ? #checkyourprivilege
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@Mingan Apparently not
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@loopback0 said in What users say versus what they mean:
Do your emails contain a lot of 15 minute Youtube videos too?
Not usually.
Also, @Gaska alt detected.
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@Polygeekery said in What users say versus what they mean:
Also, @Gaska alt detected.
Impossible. I can usually understand @loopback0
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@Polygeekery said in What users say versus what they mean:
Also, @Gaska alt detected.
Paging Dr Lubar to the Ban Department...
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@loopback0 we should be fine. It appears to be the word "eunuch" that sets him off.
Shit. See you guys in a few days.
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@Polygeekery said in What users say versus what they mean:
See you guys in a few days.
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@dkf said in What users say versus what they mean:
“I don't know; it's all Greek to me” which is definitely going to trigger someone to go on a pendantry crusade
Just for that, I'm not going to tell you (again?) about my "It's all Greek to me" t-shirt.
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@HardwareGeek said in What users say versus what they mean:
@dkf said in What users say versus what they mean:
“I don't know; it's all Greek to me” which is definitely going to trigger someone to go on a pendantry crusade
Just for that, I'm not going to tell you (again?) about my "It's all Greek to me" t-shirt.
Is it at least an “Ιτ,ς αλλ Γρεεκ τω μη” one?
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@Bulb said in What users say versus what they mean:
@HardwareGeek said in What users say versus what they mean:
@dkf said in What users say versus what they mean:
“I don't know; it's all Greek to me” which is definitely going to trigger someone to go on a pendantry crusade
Just for that, I'm not going to tell you (again?) about my "It's all Greek to me" t-shirt.
Is it at least an “Ιτ,ς αλλ
Γρεεκελληνικά τω μη” one?FTFMLKOG
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@kazitor said in What users say versus what they mean:
@Bulb said in What users say versus what they mean:
@HardwareGeek said in What users say versus what they mean:
@dkf said in What users say versus what they mean:
“I don't know; it's all Greek to me” which is definitely going to trigger someone to go on a pendantry crusade
Just for that, I'm not going to tell you (again?) about my "It's all Greek to me" t-shirt.
Is it at least an “Ιτ,ς αλλ
Γρεεκελληνικά τω μη” one?FTFMLKOG
I prefer “Είναι όλα ελληνικά για μένα.”
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@dkf But that requires an extensive (or at least basic) knowledge of Greek.
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@kazitor Or a translation program…
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@anonymous234 Robertsspaceindustries.com (Star citizen) also got login name different from public profile name. Initially it wasn't that way but once the site upgrade away from wordpress was done it got reworked that way.
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@masterX244179 Welcome back!
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@levicki said in What users say versus what they mean:
What is the point of such a message?
To cause unnecessary worry.
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@levicki said in What users say versus what they mean:
I once had a manager who said "I don't read past the first two lines of email. If the important part of what you wanted to say is not there then that's your problem". I hate to admit it, but he was right.
Rate me for how important what I wanted to say was!
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@levicki said in What users say versus what they mean:
What is the point of such a message?
From my experience I could say one problem preventing more informative messages might be localization. Insertion of parameters
{0}
,{1}
or{$firstname}
{$lastname}
in prebaked strings works more or less tolerable across Germanic languages or others belonging to the same branch (if the translation service and QA is any good and provide feedback on how we could provide better parameters), but often falls down otherwise, lest the information they look to convey sounds rather moronic. And moronic is considered more unprofessional than avoiding parameterized messages altogether. I don't necessarily agree that it is - I also think that providing helpful information is more important -, but the problem doesn't go away.
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in What users say versus what they mean:
Insertion of parameters {0}, {1} or {$firstname} {$lastname} in prebaked strings
The former is a complete disaster as it locks down the sentence structure too. As you can imagine that is something that can differ between languages, leading to Yodaesque translations.
For example, "An error had occurred while copying the file" would have to be structured as "While copying a file, an error had occurred" in Czech in order to sound natural.
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@Deadfast A language that won't accept {1} coming before {0} inside the format string is .
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@Zecc I was actually thinking https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/io/c/fprintf, so indeed.
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@Deadfast C/C++? That's different.
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@Deadfast An example on that very page:
<?php $format = 'The %2$s contains %1$d monkeys'; echo sprintf($format, $num, $location); ?>
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in What users say versus what they mean:
Insertion of parameters {0}, {1} or {$firstname} {$lastname} in prebaked strings works more or less tolerable across Germanic languages
Are you replacing that placeholder by a singular or plural word? Masculine of feminine? Does it start with a vowel? If it is a number, is it 0, 1, 2, 3-20, more than 20, or a fraction in probably a half dozen potentially different buckets?
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@kazitor said in What users say versus what they mean:
@Deadfast An example on that very page:
<?php $format = 'The %2$s contains %1$d monkeys'; echo sprintf($format, $num, $location); ?>
Even plain C (at least in glibc) allows that, although it does not allow omitting placeholders since it can't skip arguments it doesn't know the type of.
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@Polygeekery said in What users say versus what they mean:
@hungrier said in What users say versus what they mean:
@pie_flavor I've read enough Clients From Hell and TFTS stories with clients complaining about the text being all wrong and "in Latin or something"
Bingo.
They don't read the email beyond the subject line, see a link, click it, then complain it is in the wrong language.
Every, single, time.
Simple solution: make the text "this is not final text, for layout purposes only" instead of lorem ipsum
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@PleegWat said in What users say versus what they mean:
@kazitor said in What users say versus what they mean:
@Deadfast An example on that very page:
<?php $format = 'The %2$s contains %1$d monkeys'; echo sprintf($format, $num, $location); ?>
Even plain C (at least in glibc) allows that, although it does not allow omitting placeholders since it can't skip arguments it doesn't know the type of.
I wasn't actually familiar with that. I turns it's a non-standard extension. Looks like MSVC has something similar, available via a bunch of functions that have names indistinguishable from a cat walking across a keyboard.
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@levicki said in What users say versus what they mean:
If people are not reading your emails then you are doing it wrong. Be more punctual, use
lessfewer and simpler words.To use your advice: No! You're wrong!
If the email says "this is placeholder text for layout, ignore the text" and they reply with "herp derp, what's that Latin in there?" then they're the ones .
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@PleegWat said in What users say versus what they mean:
@Applied-Mediocrity said in What users say versus what they mean:
Insertion of parameters {0}, {1} or {$firstname} {$lastname} in prebaked strings works more or less tolerable across Germanic languages
Are you replacing that placeholder by a singular or plural word? Masculine of feminine? Does it start with a vowel? If it is a number, is it 0, 1, 2, 3-20, more than 20, or a fraction in probably a half dozen potentially different buckets?
One of our first programming assignments at uni was to write a C program that would convert a supplied number to its textual form, i.e. 389 => "three hundred eighty nine." If I didn't enjoy a challenge I'd be pretty pissed that the Erasmus students got to do it in English while we had to do it in Czech:
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@Deadfast said in What users say versus what they mean:
@Zecc I was actually thinking https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/io/c/fprintf, so indeed.
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@Jaloopa said in What users say versus what they mean:
@Polygeekery said in What users say versus what they mean:
@hungrier said in What users say versus what they mean:
@pie_flavor I've read enough Clients From Hell and TFTS stories with clients complaining about the text being all wrong and "in Latin or something"
Bingo.
They don't read the email beyond the subject line, see a link, click it, then complain it is in the wrong language.
Every, single, time.
Simple solution: make the text "this is not final text, for layout purposes only" instead of lorem ipsum
The downside is, the people complaining about the language - who are complaining mostly to be seen complaining a.k.a. giving input, not because they think there's anything wrong with the product - would switch to complaining about things that would actually disrupt the layout of the page. It's better to stick to Latin.
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@Deadfast said in What users say versus what they mean:
@PleegWat said in What users say versus what they mean:
@Applied-Mediocrity said in What users say versus what they mean:
Insertion of parameters {0}, {1} or {$firstname} {$lastname} in prebaked strings works more or less tolerable across Germanic languages
Are you replacing that placeholder by a singular or plural word? Masculine of feminine? Does it start with a vowel? If it is a number, is it 0, 1, 2, 3-20, more than 20, or a fraction in probably a half dozen potentially different buckets?
One of our first programming assignments at uni was to write a C program that would convert a supplied number to its textual form, i.e. 389 => "three hundred eighty nine." If I didn't enjoy a challenge I'd be pretty pissed that the Erasmus students got to do it in English while we had to do it in Czech:
Why? Wouldn't neuter nominative be enough?
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@Gąska Using the proper declensions is essential to ensuring your application's text does not read as if it was written by a kindergartener.
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@PleegWat yeah, but ensuring your application's text does not read as if it was written by a kindergartener usually isn't required for college assignment. Also, depending on what exactly the program was doing, neuter nominative might be enough even for that (for example - if the program only converted numbers to text and did literally nothing else, which often how college assignments work, it would certainly be enough).
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@DogsB said in What users say versus what they mean:
I wish that sentence ended with "when the moon is full and I've mistaken the floor polish for cheap scotch again"
You (or @boomzilla) would be forgiven for confusing the Polish with White Russian (or Byelorusian or whatever they call it), but Scotch should be out after a few words.
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@Gąska said in What users say versus what they mean:
@Jaloopa said in What users say versus what they mean:
@Polygeekery said in What users say versus what they mean:
@hungrier said in What users say versus what they mean:
@pie_flavor I've read enough Clients From Hell and TFTS stories with clients complaining about the text being all wrong and "in Latin or something"
Bingo.
They don't read the email beyond the subject line, see a link, click it, then complain it is in the wrong language.
Every, single, time.
Simple solution: make the text "this is not final text, for layout purposes only" instead of lorem ipsum
The downside is, the people complaining about the language - who are complaining mostly to be seen complaining a.k.a. giving input, not because they think there's anything wrong with the product - would switch to complaining about things that would actually disrupt the layout of the page. It's better to stick to Latin.
This started as a piece of corporate lore at Interplay Entertainment. It was well known that producers (a game industry position roughly equivalent to project manager) had to make a change to everything that was done. The assumption was that subconsciously they felt that if they didn't, they weren't adding value.
The artist working on the queen animations for Battle Chess was aware of this tendency, and came up with an innovative solution. He did the animations for the queen the way that he felt would be best, with one addition: he gave the queen a pet duck. He animated this duck through all of the queen's animations, had it flapping around the corners. He also took great care to make sure that it never overlapped the "actual" animation.
Eventually, it came time for the producer to review the animation set for the queen. The producer sat down and watched all of the animations. When they were done, he turned to the artist and said, "That looks great. Just one thing: get rid of the duck."
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@PJH that. I read about it before but couldn't remember the name for the phenomenon.
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See also:
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@PJH not so long ago at my work, we were actually about to do exactly that - create a separate deployment branch to implement the ridiculous change that one of our managers has requested. The only thing that stopped us was that the manager has forgotten about this request.
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@levicki said in What users say versus what they mean:
@Applied-Mediocrity said in What users say versus what they mean:
From my experience I could say one problem preventing more informative messages might be
localizationlazyness.FTFY
It's spelled "laziness".
@levicki said in What users say versus what they mean:
What is "placeholder"? Why use big words?
@levicki said in What users say versus what they mean:
What is "layout"? More buzzwords?
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@Gąska said in What users say versus what they mean:
@Deadfast said in What users say versus what they mean:
@PleegWat said in What users say versus what they mean:
@Applied-Mediocrity said in What users say versus what they mean:
Insertion of parameters {0}, {1} or {$firstname} {$lastname} in prebaked strings works more or less tolerable across Germanic languages
Are you replacing that placeholder by a singular or plural word? Masculine of feminine? Does it start with a vowel? If it is a number, is it 0, 1, 2, 3-20, more than 20, or a fraction in probably a half dozen potentially different buckets?
One of our first programming assignments at uni was to write a C program that would convert a supplied number to its textual form, i.e. 389 => "three hundred eighty nine." If I didn't enjoy a challenge I'd be pretty pissed that the Erasmus students got to do it in English while we had to do it in Czech:
Why? Wouldn't neuter nominative be enough?
The unit (hundred, thousand) has to change depending on the preceding number: https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Czech_Language/Cardinal_Numbers
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@Gąska You missed the best one:
@levicki said in What users say versus what they mean:What is "this" you are speaking about?
It's called the singular proximal demonstrative and, uh, there's literally no English alternative.
(English demonstratives are quite limited though – you should see the system of the Yup'ik Eskimos)
@levicki said in What users say versus what they mean:
Just use human language and say "please ignore the presentation text for now" and be done with it.
"presentation" is a bigger word than "placeholder"…
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@Deadfast ah, right. But honestly, it's just half dozen more ifs. Nothing really troublesome.
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@Gąska said in What users say versus what they mean:
@Deadfast ah, right. But honestly, it's just half dozen more ifs. Nothing really troublesome.
Compared to zero in English. I also seem to recall there was one edge case that affected the whole output.
I didn't mind the task at all, I just found it funny how poorly it translated to English.
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@levicki said in What users say versus what they mean:
Just use human language and say "please ignore the presentation text for now" and be done with it.
- "human" ? Are you speciest or something?
- "say"? Now you're appropriating talkie, huh?
- ""presentation"" ""text""? Why use big words? I don't do this jarred-gen stuff!
- "for now"? When should this magic time happen?
- "be done with it" So you're telling me you assume this will never come up again ever, eh? I see.
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@levicki said in What users say versus what they mean:
@kazitor said in What users say versus what they mean:
"presentation" is a bigger word than "placeholder"…
But it is supposedly what they ordered to be made for them. They didn't ask you to create a placeholder.
No. Read again.
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@levicki said in What users say versus what they mean:
I once had a manager who said "I don't read past the first two lines of email. If the important part of what you wanted to say is not there then that's your problem". I hate to admit it, but he was right.
Most people don't even read that much. As I said earlier I have started and ended emails with the most important parts and they still aren't read. The only additional thing we could have done would have been to embed some Geocities type of audio file saying that the text was just a placeholder, and I have my doubts as to the efficacy of even that.
People are fucking retards.
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