Comment by geuis
18 hours ago
It's a really interesting project. But boy do they make it hard to participate.
* Article doesn't provide a direct link to the topic mission
* Signup is pretty easy. Well organized and even gently requires you to have two forms of 2FA.
* Sign up complete. Go back to the primary page and try to find the mission. A little buried but not too deep.
* Notice I'm not signed in. Ok, let's do that. Now I'm back on the main page and navigate back. Find the first document and open it. Really interesting to scan through the doc and to read. People back then generally had really nice handwriting.
* Ok, what next, how do I transcribe? ... ? Oh it says I'm not logged in again. Fine, click the link and...
* I'm logged in and directed back to the main page, again.
Look, this is an interesting project and I'd love to spend my spare cycles to help out. But they really need to clean up this process.
Volunteers shouldn't have to jump through kinda poorly designed interfaces to help out.
The social post embedded in the page links directly to this page with all the instructions. Once I created an account and signed in I just selected a state in the original tab and was right there and could start translating.
Do you perhaps have uBlock Origin enabled or some other limitation on Javascript/cookies that might be messing with your login status?
The direct link to the mission that was in the social post. https://www.archives.gov/citizen-archivist/missions/revoluti...
I had the exact same experience when I tried to contribute last week. I had to jump between multiple sessions and browsers and eventually managed to log in after about 30 minutes of trying. There is no indication of what is going right or wrong. Once you're in the UI changes very little as well so it's quite easy to miss that you've managed to log in.
Once I was logged in I spent another 45 minutes trying to find a document to transcribe. Every single one I found or was given from a challenge had either already been transcribed or was a typewritten document or manifest that the OCR had already done an OK job with. I reviewed a few documents for accuracy, closed the browser, and never went back.
It's a shame it's so hard to use. I really was hoping for something I could pop open for 15-30 minutes a day as a break from work and contribute to instead of doing a crossword or watching a video.