I finally have read through the topic and we have given it some thought.
TL;DR summary
There is some merit to what is being pointed out here. However, we consider the current approach to already be a balanced one. The translation topic has been useful to the community throughout the years (with no issues that we know of) and the proposed alternatives would essentially negate that going forward, or have other problems of their own. Hence, we are not going to change the Community Guidelines and the translation topic will not be removed, but we are making some small changes to it.
Now for the slightly longer answer.
In over a decade that the translation topic existed, we received no complaints about a postcard posted on it. Granted, a decade is a pretty long time and we handle dozens of issues every day, so don’t ask us to swear on that — we forget things, like everyone. But to the best of my knowledge, there was never an issue on the translation topic with a particular postcard that would put in question the existence of the topic itself (which, btw, predates the existence of the Community Guidelines in Postcrossing). It’s important to state this upfront because the way this subject has been framed — and the magnitude of the discussion — make it look like it’s a much bigger issue than it actually is in practice. I’ll come back to this at the end.
It also needs to be clarified that the translation topic is not “run by Postcrossing”. Took me a bit to understand where this was coming from. We started the translation topic on this forum because we tried to make sure that useful or interesting threads from the old forum would continue on this one too. The translation topic was one of them, which on the old forum had been started by someone else, and could just as well have been another person to start the corresponding one here too, hadn’t we gotten to it first. What is relevant is that, yes, we are aware of it — but Postcrossing doesn’t run it nor is the Forum team necessarily helping there to translate things: it’s the community that does it. The topic is moderated like other topics on the forum and the forum team acts whenever they spot something wrong, a post is flagged or otherwise brought to their attention by the community itself.
Changing gears: privacy is important, but is also a loaded term and that sometimes causes some confusion. The context where it is used can change what it means. By the definition of a postcard, it travels naked (without envelope), so not exactly the place to write something that was meant to be very private and for exclusively the receiver to see. In Postcrossing, most postcards carry friendly greetings to random strangers; it’s not unheard of that mail-carriers read — and even comment on — the postcard messages when they deliver them to postcrossers, and there’s even reports of staff at the post office counter sometimes reading the postcards in front of the customer (albeit that is really awkward to say the least, /cc @missmelbourne). Then, the mail sorting equipment of at least some postal operators photographs (and stores) all the mail they process (for various reasons, not judging as that’s not the point here) and postcards, with their messages, obviously go into that too. Then, once delivered, postcards are often shared with family, friends, co-workers, other postcrossers at meetups, collectors, etc — all without an explicit consent from the sender. Sometimes postcards are offered, sold or even inherited by people who may or may not know about Postcrossing. All of this should be expected when we mail a message written on a piece of cardboard, specially to someone across the world that we don’t know much about.
What may not be expected is that the message ends up being published on the internet for an indefinite period of time for the world to see — which is why we have the request on the Community Guidelines to not do that, even if, realistically, Postcrossing has very limited control over that outside of the project.
The point I’m trying to make here however is that privacy can be a gradient as it very much depends on the context. And the expectation that a greeting sent to a stranger will always be kept absolutely private in all scenarios is not well calibrated, even if some privacy is requested. In sum, the privacy of a message on a postcard is not the same as privacy that a business must have on personal data they keep. There’s expectations of privacy on both, but they are not the same.
Moreover, a postcard sent to a stranger, written on a script, language or manner that the receiver won’t understand, should in general have less expectations that the message will be seen only by eyes of the receiver. In this scenario, they are unlikely to understand it and thus it will need to be shared, at the very least with an online/machine translator, but possibly with other people too. This is an important point that has lead us to allow this topic on the forum for over a decade now. Yes, there’s some assumptions in this argument, but we consider them to be reasonable ones and that they cover the vast majority of the scenarios. That, along with the fact that we make sure that the text to be translated is automatically removed from the topic not long after makes this a reasonable approach in our view. It is not correct to compare these short lived posts of a postcard text for the sole purpose of getting translation help from other postcrossers, with the different scenario where someone could be systematically and indiscriminately publishing both image&written sides of all postcards they received, for the world to see for an indefinite amount of time (think personal blogs, social networks, etc).
It should be said also that an approach where everything needs consent, regardless of context, can lead to paralysis or unreasonable complexity. For example, for many years Postcrossing helps find Postcard IDs that are unreadable or missing. For that, we receive the information about what is written on the postcard (as that often helps identify the sender). Does anyone expect we request consent from all the senders of postcards the person is expecting, to be able to read what they wrote, and only then try to determine the Postcard ID? Would that be more correct? Maybe, but also quite confusing and impractical. Are we going to update the Community Guidelines to include a reference that we do this? No.
Having said all this, there are some relevant points brought up by this discussion. It is true that when posting a postcard on the translation topic, names or Postcard IDs could be posted too which may somewhat identify the sender, and that is not necessary for the purpose of translating the message.
Moreover, it’s been pointed out that someone could use the translation topic as an excuse to post the written side of postcards elsewhere. Personally I find that to be a very unlikely justification someone will use and it is something we have never seen in 16 years, but it could happen.
So, we are making some small changes on the first post of the translation topic:
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We are now requesting that any posted image hides any element that may trivially help identify the sender, such as their name or a Postcard ID. This does not aim to make it impossible to determine the sender, but should minimize the possibility of identification for most cases. The message/text, of course, will still be visible (temporarily) as that is what needs to be translated, but for most scenarios it will essentially be anonymous.
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We are adding text to make it clear that the topic is only for the purpose of helping translating text that otherwise wouldn’t be understood by the receiver, but that the Community Guidelines still apply otherwise, both on other parts of the forum and as well as outside of it. This is only making more clear what has already been the case so there are no practical changes for the topic.
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Lastly, we are now suggesting to consider tools like Google Translate, DeepL and Yandex Translate as possible alternatives for doing the task. It may sound obvious to some, but many don’t remember they can do that and all it may take is a nudge.
The translation topic has already been updated with these changes. Now, to wrap up.
Our approach regarding the translation topic has been and continues to be a pragmatic one, with what we think is a balanced approach. Considering that postcards travel naked, are primarily friendly greetings sent to strangers, that the posted messages are written by senders who likely expect that the message will need to be shared in one way or another for the receiver to understand it, that the text to translate is automatically removed not long after, and that it has been very useful throughout the years… we find this to be acceptable compromise to allow the translation topic on the forum. We think the additional tweaks we just did further justify the existence of the topic and we won’t be making any further updates. We may, at some point in the future, move the topic into a category that requires login to see it — this is currently not possible without some restructuring on the forum that we won’t be doing now, and we also don’t think it is crucial, nor urgent, for all the reasons above.
Having spent quite a few hours to go over this discussion, and to reply to it, I must say I’m not a happy camper.
Being a tiny and always overwhelmed team, time is something we constantly lack and we can’t allow ourselves to be pulled into lengthy discussions or else nothing gets done. There are not enough hours in our days, or hands in our team. In our view, the turmoil created here is not in proportion to the issue being brought up and I will not be engaging further into this discussion as it already took an unreasonable amount of time from us. I’m reopening this topic so it can wrap up, but I’m setting it to automatically close in a week.
I’m all for the community discussing issues that Postcrossing has and working collaboratively in finding solutions – in a friendly and respectful way. We can’t possibly implement everything that is suggested, but we always try to take suggestions into account. But it’s a bit disappointing that from all the much more important issues affecting both Postcrossing and many postcrossers on a daily basis, that this one had such a disproportional amount of energy and commitment put into — specially being something that we never had a real issue about and has been useful for many years now.
In particular, the unusual way this has been done has been quite disconcerting to say the least. The discussion was done as if it was a court argumentation, except the arguments have been curated together by the most fervent defender of one of the sides, an approach that is hardly free of bias. This angered quite a few people on the process due to how their opinion was being received. This unusual process lead to a heated discussion not just about the suggestion itself, but about the way it was being discussed… This is not the friendly environment we want to promote here, nor is it a good system for how suggestions for Postcrossing should be discussed. We hope to not see more of this needless conflict over a suggestion.
In the end of the day, we all want the best for Postcrossing. I hope going forward all this passion and energy is steered mainly towards finding solutions to problems that are affecting many members and, specially, that that it is done in a different format that doesn’t cause the level of animosity we saw here.
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