Hey all.

I know you've seen a lot of chatter recently about the Reddit API changes and the recent announcements that Sync, Apollo, RIF, and many more third party apps will be shutting down at the end of the month. This has some pretty widespread changes that Reddit didn't anticipate, and somewhat unexpectedly, we're very much in the eye of the storm.

Our friends at r/blind have been thrust into the spotlight because this nuclear option that Reddit has chosen effectively removes all the accessibility-related tools that they use to interact with Reddit, and we have 21 days from my writing this to plan for it. While Reddit has given us some concessions, it's not enough.

As such, r/TranscribersOfReddit, r/ToR_Meta, and r/DescriptionPlease will be joining the blackout in solidarity with r/blind on the 12th through the 14th of this month. This is the first time we have ever participated in a protest on Reddit; we pride ourselves on staying out of the fray and just focusing on what we do best: accessibility. But what we do best is one of the things that Reddit does worst, and while Reddit is focusing on bringing up their accessibility features, I have heard through the grapevine that they do not expect to have their mobile apps up to par until October at the earliest. Note that they are cutting off access at the end of the month. This is not only unconscionable -- it is unethical.

I personally have been in multiple calls with Reddit leadership over the past weeks, including a two-hour call yesterday with Reddit's CEO Steve Huffman, and they do not plan on backing down or changing course. This is just the way it's going to be.

If this is just the way it's going to be, we will join the crowd and make add our voice to the uproar.

If they're going to take away the voice of r/blind, we will lend them ours.

Hey, everybody! Itsthejoker from the Grafeas Admin and Developer teams here to chat about the absolutely wild stuff you've probably heard about recently about third-party apps going away.

The explosion

If you haven't seen it, take a second and get caught up -- pick your favorite site here:

• The Verge
• arstechnica
• 9to5mac
• techcrunch
• AndroidAuthority
• engadget
• Forbes
• AOL (even they got in on this)

...and a whole lot more. Here's the tl;dr:

Reddit is changing the way that third party applications and bots interact with the site, and for some of us (not all of us), they're charging a lot of money. The "some of us" included above are all the developers of third-party mobile apps. If you use a mobile app that's not the official one, like Sync for Android, Apollo, RIF, or anything else, it will likely die on July 1st.

If you're looking at this and thinking "okay, so what? I use the official app and it's fine," the important part here is the missing functionality in the official app on the moderation side. Modding a subreddit, especially a larger one, is essentially impossible on the official app. The vast majority of folks who are mods use third party apps to help them out, and this move forcibly strips that ability away. As mods, we already lost our biggest spam-fighting tool last month when Reddit cut off Pushshift without warning and with no way to replace it, which is the biggest single reason you've seen a lot more spam comments across the site recently.

Okay, enough about modding, how does this affect ToR?

These changes also include how our bots, u/transcribersofreddit, u/transcribot, u/tor_archivist, and more all interact with the site. To date we've done pretty well on keeping within the rules of what's acceptable, but some of our bots are very busy. At one point, u/transcribersofreddit AND u/transcribot were both in the top 10 non-spam accounts across Reddit in terms of comment and post activity. That is a lot of posting. It's so much posting that it's hard to quantify, but over the years we've been very, very active. This poses a problem as we approach the coming month.

We've gotten several questions so far asking how this affects us, and the short answer is honestly, we don't know yet. We have begun laying the groundwork for identifying if we are impacted and by how much; there is a possibility that we are impacted by the new rules, though we may not be impacted yet given that some of the rules are being introduced on a sliding scale. Fun fact: the biggest problem that actually stands in our way is that Reddit has pledged to start enforcing rate limits, but the system's own understanding of how much you've used is frequently wrong. For example, if you host your app in a shared space or on the cloud, Reddit frequently aggregates all the requests from your IP address into one block, which leads to getting responses that say "hmmm you've used 50,000 requests in the last 60 seconds" when you only sent one.

What about this new Developer Platform thing I've heard about?

As a part of this, Reddit is rolling out a new system that they hope to essentially replace 'traditional' bots as we know them. However, this system has the following issues:

It's in beta

There is no proper release date available yet for when the Developer Platform will be open to all. As Reddit slowly cuts off access to the API, they are driving developers (us) towards a platform that isn't even open yet. There's also no guarantee that what we want to do is even possible, which leads me to the next point:

It's extremely limited compared to what we have now

When looking at the API, the way we get all of the information we need, we have access to a fairly large amount of information. The Developer Platform, while it has its uses, is not designed with large and busy bots in mind. It's much better suited for entry-level 'learning to code' style bots that we see frequently pop up on the site. Issues from data usage limits, data storage limits (500kb! Our database in Blossom is over 1.4GB), connecting to services outside reddit (which we have gotten special permissions for, I'll give them that), and more plague the development experience at the time of this writing.

It only works on New Reddit (and the official mobile apps, kinda)

We suggest that folks who do a lot of writing with ToR use Old Reddit specifically because the experience of working with markdown is so much better when writing out long comments (especially when paired with RES, the Reddit Enhancement Suite). If we were to move functionality onto the Developer Platform, we would be locking out a measurable portion of our volunteers.

It only works on bots written in TypeScript, which we don't use

Here's the kicker, the really big problem. All of our bots are written in Python -- battle-hardened code that we've been tweaking and growing for six years. In order to move to the Developer Platform, we would have to rewrite everything from scratch and completely start over. The same designs and paradigms won't work on the new system, so we would have to re-architect a large portion of our work, and that's with translating everything from Python to TypeScript.

So what's the plan?

I don't mean to sound dire, I promise. Right now, things are not looking good for every community with more than 10k members, and this includes us. Over the next month, we will:

• identify exactly how we are affected
• identify mitigation methods if necessary
• figure out how this affects the long-term plan, if at all
• keep you all up to date as we go

This is not a problem that is unique to us; it's a threat to the entire Reddit ecosystem and it's perpetuated by Reddit itself. Buckle up, because things are going to get bumpy.

Closing thoughts

I was lucky enough to be one of the first 10 developers granted access to the new Developer Platform system. I've watched it grow and I've helped guide its growth when I could. Even with having this incredible level of access, some things are still catching us completely unaware; the most recent change to the API requirements is a prime example, especially since we were told to our faces (literally, over Zoom) that this was not going to happen.

We're committed to keeping ToR running as long as we can and we have done so much for the broader Reddit experience. I really can't wait to share what we've been working on under the hood, so to speak, but for now we have more pressing things to attend to. I know that there's not a lot of hard data in this post, but that's because I don't have a lot of hard data to share right now. Hopefully we'll have some happier things to talk about next month.

If you use a third-party mobile app and want to let Reddit know that you want change, check out the Open Letter that we've signed here.

To all of you out there doing your transcription thing: we see you and we appreciate you. A lot. We'll keep forging ahead as best we can, and only time can tell what comes next.

Thanks for everything you do. Catch you next month.

Total Volunteers: 5,929

Total Transcriptions: 276,253

New here? FAQ | Discord | Twitter | Last month's meta

Want to help keep the servers running? Patreon | Individual donations | New: Support us and look cool whilst you're doing it! Merch now available!

Need more memes? Go check out our sister sub /r/ToR_Meta! A hub for discussion, memes and all things ToR!

Have you seen our map of volunteers? | Add your city (anonymous)

As always, please share any interesting posts you've transcribed, comments you've received or testimonials you've had below! We love hearing from you :)

Hi all, NHGW now only requires Reddit Usernames and Subreddit Names to be redacted, as well as normal IRL things like addresses and licence plates.

Their full rules are available here under rule 8 - https://www.reddit.com/r/nothowgirlswork/about/rules

Please keep this in mind when transcribing, if you find a post that breaks the rules please report it on both ToR and the partner sub!

Happy May! It's your old pal /u/CaptCoe at the reins of this meta post, for the first time since... <checks profile> ...June 2019, I guess! (Although I also wrote this stunning April Fools 2019 meta post, which I remain inexplicably proud of) Hopefully I can help catch you up on the latest happenings of the last month. I did my taxes! How about you? 👀

Polandball for All!

First and foremost, as some of you may have seen (in this very subreddit, no less!) an utterly massive transcription project was recently completed! What project, I hear some of you asking? A world map, in the iconic Polandball art style, circa the year 1812.

Our very own /u/andrewsjakkko02, with the /r/polandball users /u/magicalgirldittochan, /u/dark_domiino, & /u/Gamudomate (AKA /u/Gamudo-TOR) as well as the transcribing team of /u/_Diabetes, /u/JustAGlibGlob, /u/JellyPUMPS, /u/EliannaRys, and /u/SammyzABanana all banded together in a downright mythical display of dedication and transcription prowess to create one of the finest (and longest) transcriptions I've seen since the start of this project. I encourage you all to visit the post that talks about the process, found here, and go take a read of the 31 (!) part, 290,000-character (!!!) transcription, found here.

Gentlemen, a short view back to the past...

This fantastic group project got me in a nostalgic mood, thinking back to some of the epic, Lord of the Rings: Special Extended Edition-esque transcriptions we've seen accomplished in the past. Take a look back through the history books!

1. Don't get deja vu, it's another Polandball map, a 3-parter filled with some impressive image description, from /u/andrewsjakkko02!

2. This 14-parter from /u/knightttime, about a rather...shall we say...inefficent method of ranking scores.

3. And third, but definitely not least, is one of the longest transcriptions I'm personally aware of, by /u/Vinccool96, who transcribed this Tarrasque of an image from the /r/DnDGreentext subreddit. It is in 47 PARTS. This one has some personal bias on my part, because before there even was a /r/TranscribersOfReddit, this greentext was one of the longest transcriptions I've ever done, a 12-parter. I, however, stopped after the first two columns of text. This mad lad transcribed the whole kit and caboodle.

What's your longest transcription? Maybe it'll be your next one! Do you know of a longest transcription than these? Post it in the comments below, so we can marvel at the endurance!

In Conclusion...

Hey, this was fun, I can see why the other mods have been working hard on these things! I'll have to do it again sometime! Thanks for dropping by, and check out our latest stats below! We're almost to 6k/300k! We'll see you all in June! Happy transcribing!

Total Volunteers: 5,916

Total Transcriptions: 275,349

New here? FAQ | Discord | Twitter | Last month's meta

Want to help keep the servers running? Patreon | Individual donations | New: Support us and look cool whilst you're doing it! Merch now available!

Need more memes? Go check out our sister sub /r/ToR_Meta! A hub for discussion, memes and all things ToR!

Have you seen our map of volunteers? | Add your city (anonymous)

As always, please share any interesting posts you've transcribed, comments you've received or testimonials you've had below! We love hearing from you :)

Hello Transcribers!

I'm thrilled to announce that we have just concluded our biggest collaborative transcribing project yet, that resulted in a 31-comment long transcription (~290k characters). This effort has taken our community on the hook for 9 months, alongside the community of r/polandball, one of our partenered subreddits!

For this, we must thank two great friends, u/magicalgirldittochan and u/dark_domiino, who advocated for us and allowed a team of transcribers to join the creation process of the map, inside the polandball community. These two exceptional people have been the heart and soul of the project, while always making sure that we would feel welcome in their community, and as such they deserve the highest praise from everyone of us. Being able to join the creation process allowed us to make one of our most detailed works ever, thanks to a constant feedback from the artists involved in the creation of the map, as well as having it ready right with the map itself for maximum visibility and use!

This is a great victory for accessibility, and a sign of what our community is able to do when it's given the chance, working together.

The transcription was written by a group of 6 brave transcribers, me included, so please make a round of applauses for u/_Diabetes, u/JustAGlibGlob, u/JellyPUMPS, u/EliannaRys, u/SammyzABanana. Alongside, we've also had received the help of one of the artists, u/Gamudomate (AKA u/Gamudo-TOR), who decided to join our team while being busy drawing for the map, and transcribe some of the remaining sections.

I had the honour of coordinating this project, as well as setting up the relations with our hosts at polandball (a task made easier by the presence of ditto and domii), and I will never be thankful enough to everyone included, artists and transcribers, for allowing this to be and creating the wonderful working environment we managed to work in.

Well that's all from us, don't forget to take a look at the 1812 Polandball World Map and the transcription (starting here)!

Happy transcribing you all, and see you soon for the Monthly Meta!

No April Fool's here -- in a stroke of ill-timed brilliance, April 1st is the anniversary of ToR! (Mostly, it's that we forgot to check the calendar and were very excited to announce this to the world.) Today's post has a message from me and the results of the MARCH TRANSCRIBING MADNESS!

Happy Anniversary!

Six years ago, we set out on an adventure to type a little more, make things better for folks, and have a bit of fun on the way. On day one, at the beginning, we started with two people... and by the end of the day we had thirty folks signed up. Today, we are here with 5900 of you, coming together with the express purpose of making the internet a better place to be.

By the end of the first day, we had about a hundred transcriptions completed. Today, almost 275,000 transcriptions have winged their way across the internet. That's 275,000 pieces of text that unlock laughter, tears, longing, dry chuckles, breaking news, and silly memes. Millions of words that describe flowers, cats, dreams, stories, and heartbreak. Throughout the years, I've looked in awe at all the amazing things we've done together, because a lot of people say they want to make a difference, that they want to change the world.

You're here. Together, we're changing the world. You are making a difference.

When we got our first chat with some local nonprofit leaders, I thought that was the top, the best it could get.

When I was on a podcast to talk about our work, I thought that was the top, the best it could get.

When we got our first paying job doing subtitle work, I thought that was the top, the best it could get.

When we got featured in WIRED, I thought that was the top, the best it could get.

Today I look at all we've built together and I know that there's so much more that we can do. Just so you know, I am incredibly excited to do it with you all!

About six months ago, we also celebrated the 5th anniversary of Grafeas, the 501(c)3 nonprofit that we formed to oversee and pay for r/TranscribersOfReddit! This is an incredibly important anniversary because even though the numbers are vague, pretty much everyone agrees that fewer than 50% of all orgs make it to the 5 year mark. We're still here. We're still writing.

Thanks to all of you for your help. Thanks for your time. Thanks for your imagination.

Thanks for being you.

I couldn't ask for better folks to change the world with.

Here's to another year! 🥂

MARCH TRANSCRIBING MADNESS RESULTS!

We've come to the end of our March Transcribing Madness competition, and the results are in.

The winner is... BrandNewSentence with 35 transcriptions in the past week and 87 overall! Congratulations to our new champion subreddit!

The runner up, NonPoliticalTwitter, put up a strong fight with 32 transcriptions last week and 78 overall. You can check out the full bracket here: https://brackethq.com/b/njodb/

Collectively, we transcribed 860 posts from 60 subreddits over the past 4 weeks. That's a lot of posts made more accessible! Thank you all for participating in this year's March Transcribing Madness!

Total volunteers: 5,896

Total transcriptions: 274,427

New here? FAQ | Discord | Twitter | Last month's meta

Want to help keep the servers running? Patreon | Individual donations | New: Support us and look cool whilst you're doing it! Merch now available!

Need more memes? Go check out our sister sub /r/ToR_Meta! A hub for discussion, memes and all things ToR!

Have you seen our map of volunteers? | Add your city (anonymous)

As always, please share any interesting posts you've transcribed, comments you've received or testimonials you've had below! We love hearing from you :)

Happy March!

As you have hopefully seen in our Discord, we added /u/andrewsjakkko02 as a new mod! He's also been around here if you've been transcribing. He'll be joining us on the QA team!

The QA team goes through transcriptions that people do and we check up on it to make sure everything is following our standards. If you're new or haven't transcribed a while, you may see us more as we want to make sure everything is going well for you! If you're interested in helping out here or any other team, we always have mod applications open. Feel free to ask questions below or in discord about what we do!

We are excited to announce a new transcribing event for the month of March! Dust off your keyboards and stretch your fingers, because we are playing March Transcribing Madness!

We've set up a bracket and we're pitting subreddit against subreddit to determine who is the most popular partner for once and for all.

Here is how to participate: 1. Transcribe for your favorite subreddits over the next four weeks. 2. That's it!

Each week, we will tally up the number of transcriptions per subreddit, and the subreddit with the most transcriptions will advance to the next round. You can follow along with the bracket above, and we'll give updates in Discord throughout the week.

Schedule: * Round One: March 2-8 * Round Two: March 9-15 * Round Three: March 16-22 * Round Four: March 24-29

Go forth and transcribe for victory!

Total volunteers: 5,878

Total transcriptions: 273,266

New here? FAQ | Discord | Twitter | [Last month's meta]( https://www.reddit.com/r/ToR_Meta/comments/113zedq/february_monthly_meta_mod_qa/

Want to help keep the servers running? Patreon | Individual donations | New: Support us and look cool whilst you're doing it! Merch now available!

Need more memes? Go check out our sister sub /r/ToR_Meta! A hub for discussion, memes and all things ToR!

Have you seen our map of volunteers? | Add your city (anonymous)

As always, please share any interesting posts you've transcribed, comments you've received or testimonials you've had below! We love hearing from you :)

Hey all,

We're experiencing some technical difficulties with our bot infrastructure and have set r/TranscribersOfReddit to private until we can resolve these issues.

We'll let you know when we're back online in the comments. Thank you for your patience!

Hey everyone!

It's still February, so technically we aren't late with this monthly meta post.

Back on January 22nd, we did our second Mod Q&A live in Discord! It was a lot of fun, both to have so many people in a call again and to answer all the questions you had.

We covered everything from how r/TranscribersOfReddit came to be, to why we needed to create the non-profit organization GrafeasGroup, to important discussions like whether pineapples are acceptable on pizza.

If you couldn't make it live to the Q&A, worry not! The full transcript of the event will be available in the comments.

We also had a lot of fun with the after party in the regular voice chat and we hope to do it again soon! GarticPhone truly brings out the artist in all of us.

See you next month!

Total volunteers: 5,871

Total transcriptions: 273,266

New here? FAQ | Discord | Twitter | Last month's meta

Want to help keep the servers running? Patreon | Individual donations | New: Support us and look cool whilst you're doing it! Merch now available!

Need more memes? Go check out our sister sub /r/ToR_Meta! A hub for discussion, memes and all things ToR!

Have you seen our map of volunteers? | Add your city (anonymous)

As always, please share any interesting posts you've transcribed, comments you've received or testimonials you've had below! We love hearing from you :)

Happy transcribing, all!

I want to transcribe a post that consists of a screenshot of a news article and was wondering which format to use. Thanks!

Happy New Year and welcome to 2023! We are so grateful to be spending another year with you all, and we are excited to see what the new year brings for us and our community. As a quick recap, in 2022 we celebrated our fifth anniversary, took a look behind the scenes at our Dev process, and remembered how the Powerpuff Girls relate to the history of ToR - among many other things!

Thank you from the bottom of our hearts to everyone who participated in the annual December Survey. We received 33 responses, and we are excited to review all of the helpful feedback that you left us.

While we’re reviewing the feedback sections of the survey, here are some fun aggregated data to share with everyone!

Who took the survey?

• We had a surprisingly even split of flair ranks in this year’s responses. We received responses from every flair rank between Initiate and Diamond. The most common ranks were Initiate and Teal (18% each).

• 18% of respondents are frequent transcribers, clocking once a day or once a week. 24% are regular transcribers, earning a gamma every two weeks to one month.

How do volunteers like to engage with us?

• Our community really likes to transcribe screenshots of social media and very short text posts (less than 100 words) - each of those responses were selected by 75% of respondents. Text messages are also popular, preferred by two thirds of respondents.

• For the second year in a row, CuratedTumblr was our community’s favorite subreddit to transcribe! 27% of respondents gave it the crown. In second place was ProgrammerHumor (2020’s most popular partner) with 13% of the vote.

• An overwhelming majority, 88%, of respondents use our Discord. Out of our Discord using respondents, over half have participated in community events such as Clear the Queue.

• We received a wide variety of responses about what makes our transcribers feel the most rewarded, but once again the resounding first place was positive comments from non-transcribers. Go check out the #testimonials channel of our Discord for some good feelings!

The Fun Stuff:

• halailah’s favorite jokes this year:

What’s yellow and cannot swim? An excavator. And why can it not swim? Because it only has one arm!

Why did the volunteer cross the road? To get to the other scribe!

Why did the fungi move out? It didn’t have mushroom!

• We have once again definitely solved a critical food debate: 62% of you agreed that a “flan” is a custard dessert with a caramel sauce.

• Our community identifies pretty evenly with all of our wonderful bots, but 27% of respondents said that if they were a ToR bot, they would be transcribot: “You’re here to help and be enthusiastic! Accuracy of help not guaranteed!” We love you, buddy!

• One dilemma we did not solve was what color corresponds to each school subject. Our respondents agree that science is green and history is yellow, but votes were equally split between math and English (or your corresponding literature/grammar class) and red and blue. Sound off in the comments to defend your pick!

Once again, thank you to everyone who participated in the survey - we appreciate every single one of you!

Finally, don’t forget to head over to our 2022 Best Of competition and nominate your fellow community members for some awards!

—

New here? FAQ | Discord | Twitter | Last month’s meta was the survey - here is November’s

Want to help keep the servers running? Patreon | Individual donations | New: Support us and look cool whilst you're doing it! Merch now available!

Need more memes? Go check out our new sister sub /r/ToR_Meta! A hub for discussion, memes and all things ToR!

Have you seen our map of volunteers? | Add your city (anonymous)

As always, please share any interesting posts you've transcribed, comments you've received or testimonials you've had below! We love hearing from you :)

Happy transcribing, all!

New to transcribing and couldn’t get the footer to work properly, it would work for the first few words but then show all the symbols in between the letters and not do the font it should be. Was told it was because I’m on mobile, is there any way to fix it?

I built an app powered by open-source Whisper AI to allow myself to transcribe content with a user interface that I liked, and also paid for a nice GPU server, but I have a lot of excess computing power so I've put it up online for free for people to use. Hope it can be of use to you!

https://freesubtitles.ai

And the code that powers it is at https://github.com/mayeaux/generate-subtitles

Cheers!

It’s the most wonderful time of the year - the time when you all get to tell us how we’re doing!

That’s right, it’s time for our annual December survey. The survey takes five-ten minutes and is absolutely crucial to help us improve the volunteer experience. Take the survey here, or read our Q&A below first!

Who should take the survey? YOU, as long as you are a transcriber - whether you have done one transcription or ten thousand!

Why should I take it? The survey is the most direct way you can give us feedback on how we’re doing. Every year, we implement changes to the subreddit and Discord based on what volunteers tell us in December.

What is the survey like? There is an introduction reiterating some of this information, and then three sections. Page Two of the survey solicits feedback and opinions about specific aspects of our subreddit and Discord. This is the most important page - if you only answer Page Two and skip the other two sections, that is exponentially more helpful than not completing the survey at all. Page Three contains questions about the preferences and activities of our volunteers. Page Four has some extra questions just for fun!

Are you getting any of my personal information? No. The survey is 100% anonymous and we don’t ask any personal questions.

How long is it really? The survey should take anywhere from approximately five minutes (if you just answer Page Two) to ten minutes (if you thoroughly answer all three sections). Please answer thoughtfully, but this won’t take up much of your time.

When should I take the survey? Right now! Or any time before the evening of December 31, 2022.

Hey, what’s that link again? Here you go!

Here are some aggregated results of last year’s survey for a trip down memory lane. Some of the questions have changed this year.

New here? FAQ | Discord | Twitter | Last month's meta

Want to help keep the servers running? Patreon | Individual donations | Support us and look cool whilst you're doing it! Merch now available!

Need more memes? Go check out our sister sub /r/ToR_Meta! A hub for discussion, memes and all things ToR!

Have you seen our map of volunteers? | Add your city (anonymous)

As always, please share any interesting posts you've transcribed, comments you've received or testimonials you've had below! We love hearing from you :)

Happy transcribing, all!

Not for a specific reason, I was just curious lol

Hi gang,

QA here with the monthly meta update!

Today we want to talk to you about Personal information rules. These can be confusing and they are one of the only rules on ToR that can get you banned, so it's incredibly important that you follow them.

• Always check the rules of the sub

Even if you think you know what the rules are, they may have changed. Check them before transcribing. Also, always make sure to check new reddit. Old Reddit and New don't talk to each other so a lot of subs have stopped updating old reddit. Always make sure you check the rules of the sub in New Reddit to make sure you have the most up-to-date ruleset.

• If a PI rule is ambiguous, always err on the side of caution

If a sub rule says "No info", assume it means everything unless otherwise stated.

• Don't transcribe a PI rule breaking post at all.

If a post breaks the PI rule, do NOT transcribe it. Even if you leave out the usernames, it still breaks the rules.

• Report the post

Please report the ToR queue post to us and report the parent post to the partnered sub.

• Join our Discord! We have a bot that can tell you the rules of any of our partner subs.

In #bot-commands, Buttercup can bring up PI rules of any given sub. Check the pin in the channel for more info.

Many subs have a zero tolerance policy on PI and you risk being banned both on the partner site and on ToR. Be careful!

Total volunteers: 5,777

Total transcriptions: 266,519

New here? FAQ | Discord | Twitter | Last month's meta

Want to help keep the servers running? Patreon | Individual donations | New: Support us and look cool whilst you're doing it! Merch now available!

Need more memes? Go check out our sister sub /r/ToR_Meta! A hub for discussion, memes and all things ToR!

Have you seen our map of volunteers? | Add your city (anonymous)

As always, please share any interesting posts you've transcribed, comments you've received or testimonials you've had below! We love hearing from you :)

Happy transcribing, all!

What's that? Another new sub incoming? Please welcome r/ChronicIllness to our partner list.

This is an open forum about people's experiences with chronic illness, with a variety of personal images, memes, and social media posts in need of transcriptions. You'll start seeing these posts appear in the queue soon!

Some PI rules to watch out for...

Please follow Reddit sitewide rules (no full real names, addresses, phone numbers, etc). In addition, the ChronicIllness mod team has asked transcribers to avoid posts containing slurs on their sub. Rather than transcribe these, please report them as you would other rule violations.

As always, please be respectful in their space. Happy transcribing!

Hi y'all! We've added not one but two new subs to our queue today! Please welcome r/CapitalismSux and r/PoliticsPeopleTwitter to our partner list.

CapitalismSux has a variety of post types, from social media to memes to videos. PoliticsPeopleTwitter is entirely screenshots of Tweets. You'll start seeing these posts appear in the queue soon!

Some PI rules to watch out for...

• CapitalismSux does not allow usernames of any kind, in addition to PI banned sitewide (home addresses, phone numbers, etc)

• PoliticsPeopleTwitter follows Reddit sitewide rules (no addresses, phone numbers, etc)

As always, please be respectful in these new partners' spaces. Happy transcribing!

Hi, all! Itsthejoker here.

As we covered in last month's Monthly Meta, half the bots are named after the subreddit and half the bots are named after The Powerpuff Girls, which is an... odd... naming scheme. I got asked in modchat how that started and some more context around it, and we decided to spin that story and bit of interesting history into its only meta post!

In the Beginning, There Was Bubbles

r/TranscribersOfReddit was launched on April 1st, 2017 (I know, I know. In our defense, we were very excited and forgot to look at the date) and as we quickly grew, we realized that we needed help and we needed help badly -- the automated kind.

So I started working on a bot that would live in modchat, able to help us with whatever we needed and something that could be extended in the future. (For those interested in the tech side of things, we originally started by building on the errbot platform before eventually building a brand new system from scratch that better fit our needs.) As we built, we needed a name for the new bot; a few different names got thrown around, but we eventually settled on Bubbles.

At the time, I was rewatching some of the cartoons I grew up with (Johnny Bravo, Dexter's Laboratory, Ed, Edd, & Eddy, Sailor Moon, etc.) and was on a Powerpuff Girls binge when we got to the naming part. One of the first pieces of functionality that we wrote was something to test message parsing, so when the bot saw a message like "what?" it would repeat back the original message... just louder. (Spoiler alert: this still happens and it's hilarious.) Real (modified for readability) example from modchat:

mod1: so the message is screwed up. it has a 'you’re' in the middle
mod2: wat
Bubbles: @mod2 SO THE MESSAGE IS SCREWED UP. IT HAS A 'YOU€™RE' IN THE MIDDLE
mod2: I had no idea you could capitalize that

Since we now have a bot that yells at people and I was watching Powerpuff Girls at the time, "Bubbles" seemed like a great characterization because as a character, she really wants to be helpful and is sometimes hilariously annoying. A good fit!

The Rise and Fall of Mojo Jojo and ToR_App

At the beginning of every project, there are many decisions you must make about exactly which shortcuts to take, complete with the pros and cons of each shortcut. If we don't expect that many people to join, then there's no point in putting in a very large and robust system when a small one will do.

One of these decisions was a misstep that was related to deployment and server management; a large system called Mojo Jojo (continuing the PPG theme) was born to handle deploying the bots, but we retired it relatively quickly after it became evident that only one person could operate it reliably, which kind of defeated the purpose. Poor Mojo Jojo.

Even though we launched in April of 2017, we quickly realized we were growing too fast for the decisions we (read: I) made from a tech perspective. The system that I built was already struggling with the workload, so in November of 2017 I began working on a new system called ToR_App. The idea here was rely less on information from Reddit (which was and is prone to errors) and maintain our own data stores that we could rely on. We wanted it to do a lot of other things too, but the project was shelved in 2018 to focus on more important things at the time. I bring it up for a reason, though -- the bones of ToR_App would live again to become...

A New Day Will Blossom

When it was obvious that we could not continue on our current path without a massive overhaul of the system, we decided to really focus on building something that would do exactly what we needed. Since we already had a metaphorical skeleton of what we wanted, two of us sat down in a late night diner with a laptop and sketched out exactly what the new solution should look like and what it should do. Realizing those sketches would take quite some time; work began on the new central system in November of 2019 and would take until June 2021 to become operational. As we got close to finishing it, we realized that we had the same problem as with Bubbles: it was mostly built and we didn't have a good name picked out.

Looking at the project, we quickly drew some parallels:

• the new system is the "leader" of the architecture
• the keeper of all the data
• pink is a great color for it

Really, there was only one choice, and Blossom was brought to life. As the leader of the trio, it just made sense.

Now, of course, we have a bit of a theme, but the theme isn't complete.

Donations!

As we didn't have an immediate need for another system, a tiny script that we had been using to keep track of donations got a rebrand to fit better with the scheme, the Mayor) now appeared occasionally to announce a donation. (If you're curious, that is now handled by Blossom.) Another small addition!

Kicking Butt with Buttercup

Mid-way through 2020, one of the devs noted that dealing with Discord was kind of a pain, but we didn't have a good customizable way to deal with some of the more complex processes we have. They immediately began work on a bot for this purpose, but this time we were prepared: it was a great time to bring Buttercup into the fold. After many months of prototyping and dealing with Discord shenanigans, Buttercup came online and has become a well-loved and often-seen presence on our Discord.

Conclusion

As we continue to grow, I'm sure that we'll eventually need to add more services to fulfill needs that we don't yet have. And when that day comes... we'll see who joins us next 😉 I hope you've enjoyed this dive into a bit of our weirder history -- if you have any questions, feel free to ask!

Total volunteers: 5,757

Total transcriptions: 265,514

New here? FAQ | Discord | Twitter | Last month's meta

Want to help keep the servers running? Patreon | Individual donations | New: Support us and look cool whilst you're doing it! Merch now available!

Need more memes? Go check out our sister sub /r/ToR_Meta! A hub for discussion, memes and all things ToR!

Have you seen our map of volunteers? | Add your city (anonymous)

As always, please share any interesting posts you've transcribed, comments you've received or testimonials you've had below! We love hearing from you :)

Happy transcribing, all!

What should we do when an image we are transliterating has an emoji in it?

For example, let's suppose an image says "Thank you!! ❤️❤️❤️". Would we put the three emojis as ❤️❤️❤️ in the transliteration, or something like (heart emoji) (heart emoji) (heart emoji)?

Hey everyone, it's hard to believe, but yet another month has passed already!

For this monthly meta, we'll take a look about all the bots we have and what they do.

TL;DR

• u/transcribersofreddit: Handles claim and done commands on Reddit, checks the formatting of transcriptions
• Buttercup: Generates pretty stats for Discord
• Blossom: Stores all the data, hosts our website, handles transcription reviews and coordinates all our other bots
• Bubbles: Internal bot for the Mod Slack, sends us reminders and checks for rule changes in the partner subs
• u/ToR_archivist: Keeps the queue tidy and sends completed transcriptions to r/ToR_Archive
• u/transcribot: Posts OCR transcriptions to Reddit

Just like the Powerpuff Girls, the bots need to be strong and independent :D

The Details

Let's first start with the ones you're already familiar with: u/transcribersofreddit and Buttercup.

u/transcribersofreddit

As you know, u/transcribersofreddit is our trusty Reddit bot. It has two main jobs: First, it needs to populate our post queue, checking the 90+ subreddits that we are partnered with and determining if any new submissions came in that match our filters. If yes, they are added to our subreddit, flaired, and ready to be transcribed! The second job is to handle the Reddit interaction with volunteers. The bot periodically checks its inbox to watch for new comments that you posted in a reply to it. Based on the comment text, it determines what to do. For example, if the text is "claim", the bot will try to claim the post for you. If it cannot determine what to do, for example when a confused Redditor posts a regular comment as a response to the original submission, it will send us a ping to our Mod Slack to take further action.

If it detects a "done" command, u/transcribersofreddit also has the job of finding your transcription on the partner post. To do that, it will search through all comments on the post that have you as author and that contain the link to our FAQ (which is included in the transcription footer). If this is the case, the transcription's formatting is checked automatically for common mistakes, before it is approved and the gamma awarded.

Buttercup

Buttercup is another bot you may already know: she handles all the Discord interaction and is mainly responsible for generating some interesting statistics that we can have fun with. Here we can use Discord's slash command system, so we don't have to check for typos and invalid commands manually. The data we need is aggregated and processed with the pandas library, the graphs generated with matplotlib.

Blossom

However, u/transcribersofreddit and Buttercup would not work at all if it wasn't for Blossom. She is the heart of our services and stores all the data that we need: Over 600,000 posts that made it into our queue, whether they were claimed or completed and by whom, the transcriptions you made and when you made them and who is volunteering with us. Blossom will decide whether you are allowed to claim another post and is the source of all data that we display with Buttercup. But that's not everything: She also hosts our website and handles our transcription check system, where the Quality Assurance team manually reviews a sample of transcriptions.

This works like the claim/done system that you are familiar with: If Blossom decides that a transcription should be reviewed, an interactive message is sent to Slack. A moderator can then click a button on the message to claim the check and then reviews the transcription. Then they can click other buttons to approve it or to request changes from the volunteer.

Bubbles

This brings us to Bubbles, our mod-internal Slack bot. She mostly sends periodic reminders, such as checking back on those transcriptions that needed some improvements to mark them as fixed or to give further feedback to the user. She also helps us to create the stats for Clear the Queue events and notifies us whenever a rule in one of our partner subreddits changes.

u/ToR_archivist

Next up, we have u/ToR_archivist. This bot handles some lower priority periodic tasks, such as archiving completed posts to r/ToR_Archive, keeping the queue clean from old posts and helps us to remove submissions that were deleted on the partner subs.

u/transcribot

Finally, we have our trusty u/transcribot, who is posting the automatic transcriptions done via ocr.space. They might not be perfect, but certainly useful for long text posts!

We hope you enjoyed this little overview of the bots we use, if you're interested in learning more, they are all open source on GitHub!

Happy transcribing and see you next time!

The Dev Team

Total volunteers: 5,740

Total transcriptions: 264,006

New here? FAQ | Discord | Twitter | Last month's meta

Want to help keep the servers running? Patreon | Individual donations | New: Support us and look cool whilst you're doing it! Merch now available!

Need more memes? Go check out our sister sub /r/ToR_Meta! A hub for discussion, memes and all things ToR!

Have you seen our map of volunteers? | Add your city (anonymous)

As always, please share any interesting posts you've transcribed, comments you've received or testimonials you've had below! We love hearing from you :)

Happy transcribing, all!

Hi all, aaaaaaacccccccce no longer allow any usernames unless it belongs to the Reddit OP.

Their full rules are available here under rule 11

Please keep this in mind when transcribing, if you find a post that breaks the rules please report it on both ToR and the partner sub!

Hey everyone! Just a friendly reminder regarding reporting posts! 🙂

We only look for PI (Personal Information) rule-breaking posts. So if it breaks PI on the partner subreddit, please report it as such.

If it breaks other rules (sentence needs to be in title/not relevant/anything not PI) then please just transcribe it and don't worry about it

If a post has been deleted on the partner sub due to any rule, please report it as "removed/deleted on partner sub" and not as "rule-breaking". This will just make it easier on our end.

Thanks again and thanks for what you do!