Problems joining the Japanese translation group on l.d.o

Setting up group membership policies is entirely up to the maintainers of the team. The teams start off as open to join without approval, but then team members decide how they proceed. They can set it to use a tighter model to for example, get new members agree to some standards or know some intricate details before contributing.

The maintainers do not receive notifications of the requests, so they might not have noticed. You can try to use the personal contact form of the team lead to call attention to your requests. This issue queue is again not frequented by team leads (unless they have specific problems :).

Please close this issue once this is worked out.

I tried to join twice after not receiving any response from the first attempt. Unfortunately unlike every other group on localize.drupal.org, they've decided to keep a very restricted approach and don't want to add anyone to the group. Hopefully they'll see it is a lot more beneficial to open their group up.

Thank you Gábor for taking the time on your probably busy schedule to reply to my questions.

>They can set it to use a tighter model to for example, get new members agree to some standards or know some intricate details before contributing.

I see your point. I hope such a document/guideline will eventually be available for reference.

I've taken your advice and directly contacted Takafumi to try to know if and how I could join the team.

They can set it to use a tighter model to for example, get new members agree to some standards or know some intricate details before contributing.

I see your point. I hope such a document/guideline will eventually be available for reference.

Well, it is entirely up to the Japanese team, every team can set their own rules and guidelines of joining, translations, suggestions, etc.

Please close this issue when successfully joining the team.

Well, it is entirely up to the Japanese team, every team can set their own rules and guidelines of joining, translations, suggestions, etc.

Yes, that's what I meant... I hope that the Japanese team will provide such a guideline in the future, not the l.d.o team... sorry for the confusion.

As for joining the team, it seems that the "Japanese translation team has some problems" (a crude translation from my exchange with the maintainer) to solve before opening up membership. When those issues are solved, hopefully, memberships will be available.

Fixed as much as we could.

I haven't been granted access yet.
I would add that none of the members of groups.drupal.org/japan has been granted access... (I've asked 3 other members)

Please keep this issue open until we can find a way to solve this.

Thank you.

Another thread also covers this issue:

http://groups.drupal.org/node/21499#comment-107972

I don't think it should be easy to block someone completely from contributing. In the CVS based system anyone can post a patch, and it's up to the maintainers to decide if it's good enough to be committed. I think it should be similar on l.d.o: If people want to contribute, they should be allowed to post suggestions. So, I suggest that only one subscription option for groups is available: "Open - membership requests are accepted immediately"

This isn't available in unmodified OG now, but I found #450842: Can the "Membership requests" option be set to open by default?.

In extreme cases of sabotage, like someone submitting lots of rubbish suggestions, blocking should be an option, but someone doing that could/should be banned from d.o altogether.

this is not the first time I hear about this issue
recently another d.o user opened similar issue (same webmasters' queue) which was blocked probably for the manner (even though I found no rude manner in it, just a kind of accusation which might be true)

I vote +1 to this issue

some kind of policy should be rethought

use case:
- I speak the language XY of a forgotten country
- I find my way to become team leader of the XY translation
- I don't want any other member messing around
- I don't like others suggestions
- I have the one and only truth
- where did GNU go?

I believe this attitude might happen even into Drupal's community (I have seen it before)
I don't say nothing about Japanese translation, I don't know nothing about that particular issue

I recall the previous (blocked) issue quoting a discourage phrase in Japanese, stating that Drupal's community won't know what it says if an English translation wasn't present

I think a policy about that can fix this problem:
- team leader should be enforced to publish the guideline/requirements for joining the group in English
- if team leader doesn't show collaborative enough then the group should be "open"
- or other team member can request become team leader
- a "join request" should be attended withing X weeks
- a positive or negative reply should be delivered to the applicant
- the applicant can appeal to d.o webmasters

The above is just an example, I'm not saying it should be that way.
But some mechanism should exists to avoid this kind of unpleasant incidents

similar to what projects have:
- "Is this module maintained?"
- "Requesting to become co-maintainer..." for 14 days
- etc

When I first came to Drupal I wanted to contrib to the Spanish translation,
(I won't complain about the Spanish translation's team leader)
but I couldn't make any contribution that year

being very frustrated I tried to reach the team leader
finally, I opened an issue on July 19, 2008 #284844: Can't figure out how to contribute the Spanish Translation 6.x

I e-mailed one of the administrators and there was no answer...
Now seeing the project's issues I see them all active since one year ago!!
[...]
I would like to contribute (this year preferably).

I got the FIRST reply on May 10, 2009
almost a year delay

Looks like this was all figured out in #284844: Can't figure out how to contribute the Spanish Translation 6.x already, so no reason to follow up from here, right? (I'm wondering why did you post this comment here then?).

@#12 yes, it was figured out; I (currently) have no complains about it

why bring it here?
there are some users complaining about a kind of translation "monopolization", requesting an alternative to sort a way in, and I'm supporting their arguments.

lets make it clearer, there are several reasons for a "translation team leader" or "maintainer" to disregard a project for a (long) while
the issue I mentioned is a clear example of a "lack of interest" rather than a "bad will"
the attention was focused on 5.x translation meanwhile 6.x translation was pretty much unusable and cooperative requests being ignored
- a translation bug leaving more than a year
- a join request unanswered almost a year
those are poor community qualities

if there are users complaining about "something wrong" going on with Japanese translation
please, believe it might be actually happening

PS: now I'll withdraw from this thread before being mistaken with kind of troll

@arhak: I think localize.drupal.org helps solving these problems by not requiring CVS accounts, so the approval process there is skipped. Also, there is no reason to ask to be added to the core translation team, since you can just join groups, which are accepted by default. The reason we set up groups to accept every joining user by default is so that only those group leaders who consciously choose to limit their group will. Those cases can go wrong, if the maintainer grows careless. Even in that case, letting people work out their disputes is usually better then kicking previously active people out right away. From here I can either let them figure it out or kick the maintainer, I do not have much of a selection of tools.

@#14 I'm aware of all you said, and localize.drupal.org has been a huge step forward, precisely

From here I can either let them figure it out or kick the maintainer, I do not have much of a selection of tools.

I vote against "kicking" any current maintainer (as most of Drupal community probably will), as you said, in many cases they were "previously active people"; as I mentioned they might be even "currently active" but disregarding project's issues, collaborative requests, bugs, etc

Then my suggestion is: to establish a contact and encourage that maintainer to respond those requests
to ensure that he/she is aware of what's going on

and why not, to ask him/her to leave a visible comment about it (with English translation included)

@arhak: I have to say thank you arhak for voicing your opinion here and I would say I agree completely with you on the issue. I apologize for not looking up my own thread for a while (work got the best out of me) but I'm very glad to see some people outside of our community acknowledging the problem.

@Gábor: I fully understand your argument, but I do not understand why you do not see a problem in someone blocking everyone from joining the group (based on their affiliation -groups.drupal.org/japan or their not being native speaker) If a group that is free to be joined becomes impossible to join because of some personal agenda of one person or two I believe this is to be considered an issue... this is where what you're saying feels contradicting; free to join, but free for the maintainer to block access.

I also vote against kicking the maintainer since localize.drupal.org is built to let the maintainer either accept or refuse suggestions, but I do not agree on letting the maintainer freely choose to not accept any contributions from people they didn't select... this becomes elitist at best. I understand the motive behind letting the maintainer decide to block access to avoid having too big of a team to manage, but in the Japanese translation case it is quite the opposite.

If there's no other way to open the group other then to remove the maintainer rights of the maintainer, I vote for it to be done. But I believe that before this has to be considered, any of the propositions made by arhak might be good to consider.

Please also consider this thread as another reason this is quite an issue in our (although small) community http://groups.drupal.org/node/39974

Sorry to continue to argue on this but

From here I can either let them figure it out or kick the maintainer, I do not have much of a selection of tools

I see that this doesn't give much alternatives...

I have exchanged a few email with the maintainer up to a point where, after being told the group would be only for Japanese, then it would be opened to those who passed his test (based on what I do not know) and after refusing his test was told I could either accept his refusal or go take a hike...

I wonder what is left for me to figure out... other members have asked him to have a talk over a coffee (or tea here) and were also turned down.

My point is, if people could be accepted we could make a point by contributing. Then the maintainer could prove he's doing his role by accepting to maintain the contributions or it would be time for considering to make place for a more community involved maintainer.

are there any numbers available of how many people already tried to get into this translation group? If too many were banned the project is suffering from a lack of contributors. 18000 strings to translate is quite a number. If they are only 2 translators they publish their own translation without having them checked and reviewed by someone else. hmm. Shouldn't be done that way.

@snicers : My personal account is:

- directly confirmed 6 people (4 Japanese and 2 non-Japanese including me)
- There was a mass attempt to join at the end of our monthly meetup about 2 months ago. I do not know the exact number of people who attempted but in total, with the previous confirmed people, that would exceed 10 and possibly reach closer to 15-20.

Additional note: No reasons or any email were sent to confirm we were refused and for what reason. Reasons were given only if the maintainer was contacted directly.

it might help a lot if those 6 "directly confirmed people" stop by and drop a "+1" on this thread

Myself included. +1

Took three attempts to join the group to get a response from the group maintainer about why it was rejected.

+1 for me too. My attempt to join the group was refused.

+1 for me too, I was told no b/c I am not Japanese. http://groups.drupal.org/node/39974

+1 for me too, I was told no b/c I am not Japanese.

Did he also ask you if your parents, your wife, or your grandparents were Japanese?
Frankly, I don't think the nationality can influence the knowledge of a language. I don't think that he can keep off from the localization group who is not Japanese. Doesn't count if somebody know Japanese language?

This is the exact quote. Sorry, our team accepts only native Japanese speaker.

I have marked #661164: Japanese group maintainer refusing access. Holding up other module translations as duplicate of this report.

@Dokuro: What I meant with I don't think that he can keep off […] is that he doesn't have any rights to do that.

I am changing the title to avoid other people open a different issue just because they don't understand the topic of this report.

@Kiamlaluno,

Yeah, its kind of a shock, but it's not too shocking after living in Japan. You get turned down for many things here because you are not Japanese.

The real issue that I see now is, what do people do? We develop sites, use modules like ubercart, translate them, and then we have no way to give them back to the community. I am sitting on Ubercart 2.0 translations, that I can't submit.

I am sure someone else has translations too, and we are all over lapping our work when we could just come together and submit them.

I have looked at the module that submits them, but I guess you can only do one submission at a time. One submission is well, I don't think I need to elaborate on that.

Hope something can happen.

Shaun

Yeah, its kind of a shock, but it's not too shocking after living in Japan. You get turned down for many things here because you are not Japanese.

I could argue that l.d.o is not Japan land, and then those Japanese rules are not valid; that is OT, anyway.

I think that who manages the localization group on l.d.o is not providing an objective, and valid reason to reject people who is trying to join the localization group.
In this case, I think that something should be done; it is not admissible such behavior.

Cross referencing #663264: Delete Japanese language from l.d.o.