Inside LabourStart

Several people have complained that they were unable to fill in our campaigns on their mobile phones.  We were not able to reproduce the problem, but as it kept coming up, we have to assume that certain phones under certain circumstances will have an issue.  As a result, there’s now a fairly prominent link on the English campaigns to a page that according to 3 people who tested it, does work.  All the campaigns in other languages use that same page, so no one should have issues other than English speakers, and it was fewer than 10 people reporting the problem.

A comrade at a British trade union pointed out that you can no longer see how many supporters we had for a campaign that’s been closed.  This has now been fixed — see, for example, our recent Gaza campaign.  If there’s no campaign total, there’s a link to click on to generate one, as needed.

Finally, I’ve long wanted to create a proper system for our volunteer translators to submit their campaign translations.  Some of them — a minority — go directly into our system and add campaigns.  But most still send on campaigns by email, often as attached Word documents.  Some of the translators continue to translate too much — including bits of the interface that are already translated.  Some try to embed photos or change fonts, when this is already part of the built-in interface.  It’s not clear to some of the translators what’s optional (e.g., the default message to the target).  And sometimes the translations come through and it’s not clear to me what’s what (especially in non-Latin character sets).  That’s why I’ve introduced this.  (Feel free to have a look, but do NOT submit a translation.)