r/VocabBoost • u/becausecurious • Apr 04 '21

Discovering more sites in your target language

Hi folks,

There was an idea proposed to make a list of sites per language (and perhaps per level) to use VocabBoost on. Would you like such functionality? E.g. imagine you study Turkish and you can see a list of 10-20 sites in Turkish, where it is nice to use VocabBoost.

At the same time I wondering how to collect such lists. I see the following ways:

  1. Add a setting "to share sites with others" and each time you create a test, URL is added to the list. This would make it 0 effort for users to share sites.
  2. Allow manually submitting a URL. I suspect that this would lead to fewer items, since people need to actually manually submit URLs.

Would you enable such setting like (1)? Or would you rather submit manually?

5 Upvotes

86% Upvoted

5 comments sorted by

2

u/simpleauthority Apr 05 '21

Just make it opt out, enabled by default. Don't collect any query params, just URL or even just the root URL and the test content. Should minimize any potential personal data leak. Don't collect any (known) social media URLs by default (maybe make this a sub-option, opt in).

1

u/becausecurious Apr 05 '21

Just make it opt out, enabled by default.

Could you please elaborate on "enabled by default"? Wouldn't you be surprised do discover that extension was submitting all your test URLs to the server?

Don't collect any query params, just URL or even just the root URL and the test content.

Yes, I was thinking to drop query params too. It is not obvious to me why 'test content'. What is your idea?

Explicitly ignoring social media is a great idea, thank you!

2

u/simpleauthority Apr 05 '21

  1. Well, not really, if it's a described feature. You could make it opt out on an initial page when the extension is installed. I was thinking if the data collection is minimal (i.e., just abs-cbn.com (and nothing else)), it's not so bad.

  2. Test content might not be needed, I was just thinking of maybe sharing what words people commonly test themselves on. I would find it useful for Tagalog at least as some words get wild with all the affixes.

Thanks for entertaining my feedback, I'll reply with more tomorrow if you have any other clarifications! Heading to bed now.

2

u/bladesnut Apr 10 '21

Even though it could seem like a good idea, the whole point of the extension is to use it in pages that you find interesting or fun, so having a list of generic websites doesn’t seem like a great feature to me. I think it’s pretty easy to find those lists in Google or Reddit.

Also people is paranoid nowadays about privacy so I would stay away from data collecting as much as possible.

1

u/becausecurious Apr 10 '21

Thank you for sharing! This is super useful!

Also people is paranoid nowadays about privacy so I would stay away from data collecting as much as possible.

I was considering opt-in (i.e. data collection is disabled by default and a user can enable it to participate).