

Startup Envolve is Facebook Chat for Online Communities - mayop100
http://mashable.com/2010/12/20/envolve/

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Groxx
Been using this on Lacuna Expanse, and there's one heavily-repeated gripe:

We hate the translation. Previously, it always had translation on by default;
now, it inserts a link into _every_ chat message from a person with a
different region, to translate on demand.

Store cookies. Or something. Just let us turn it off completely and remember
the setting, _please_. I'm debating writing another browser extension just to
strip that feature, because of the PITA it has been. The rare usefulness
nowhere near outweighs the endless, though trivial, battles.

\---

That aside, it has been handy to have, and works quite slickly. Scroll-back
through several hours of history works well. And what can I say: it's a chat
tool. It works. It doesn't do much else, and I don't want it to. Good job!

~~~
jamest
Thanks for the feedback. Appreciated. We'll look into this ASAP

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Groxx
It's definitely a neat feature, and when someone _does_ use their region's
language it does a halfway decent job of translating. We just encounter _far_
too many false translations when it's on, as most people there just type in
English, and the link being repeated every time is just added noise in the
window.

All in all I really do like it. Especially being able to pop chats out into
other windows. That, and the scroll-back, make it absolutely one of the better
ones I've used, and nearly everything it does has been useful at one time or
another. It gets used _heavily_ , and there hasn't been one word of setting up
a different system (eg, IRC) that I've ever seen. The translator's behavior is
just a burr on an otherwise good finish :)

edit: a thought; maybe you could come up with a language detector, to ditch
false positives (by default; having an override is nice, and I liked the
click-to-toggle)? Certain letter combinations don't appear in some languages,
some accented characters, that sort of thing. Or have you looked at Google's
language detecting API? No clue how they respond to volume.

------
jamest
Here's a feedback thread if you have thoughts:

<http://envolve.com/s?pm3>

~~~
instakill
Well done for finally making Mashable James.

