launchpad-reviewers team mailing list archive

["Jeroen T. Vermeulen" <jtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Discussed this on IRC and IRL with Steve and Huw.

The functionality is there to get some random scatter on where translators go.  We still want that.  Some translations are naturally easier to get to than others, which leads to duplication of effort.  For example, if many translators end up on the same translation page on the same day, they could produce a hundred suggestions for the same string — and review may become the bottleneck.  There's much more use to spreading the effort out randomly, even if it guides people to lower-priority work.  This is also why we can't do a lot of caching here.

>From a UI perspective, filling out the list of translations-you-should-work-on with random suggestions is confusing.  It's very hard to avoid making nonsensical suggestions, but also necessary because the suggestions are unsolicited.  And coincidentally, that difficulty also drives up the cost of the query.

So what we suggest is to stop filling out the list with random suggestions, but add a “take me to a random project where I can help” link.  It doesn't need to contain a precomputed link (it could link to a view that produces a temporary redirect) and the “slot-machine” presentation makes it a lot more acceptable to suggest projects that the user has already worked on, for example.

This may simplify the search.  For example, the random suggestion could now:

 - be a bit more limited in which permissions models a project must have, to simplify the privileges check;

 - ignore the risk of suggesting a project the user is currently active in;

 - skip the complex multi-level aggregation logic for grouping POFiles.

Each as appropriate, of course.  One caveat is that the list of suggested work items may now be empty, but the link would still have to be there.


Jeroen
-- 
https://code.launchpad.net/~stevenk/launchpad/remove-suggested-translations/+merge/131820
Your team Launchpad code reviewers is requested to review the proposed merge of lp:~stevenk/launchpad/remove-suggested-translations into lp:launchpad.