Amara.org Support Center

Amara developers enabled  all users to sync/connect their YouTube account to Amara last December, then promoted this possibility heavily since the beginning of February: with a blog post , on Google+  and with a banner added to all Amara pages.

Several deletion requests made since February  show that sometimes people have activated this syncing without fully realizing its implications. So if you have activated this syncing but are unhappy with it, you can undo it by following the procedure described in Revoke third-party access to your account information  (Google Help):

"If you've allowed a third-party website to access one or more of your Google products, and now you want to disable that access, please use the Revoke Access feature:

1. Sign in on the Google Accounts homepage.
2. Click Security on the left-hand side of the page.
3. Scroll down to the Connected applications and sites section and click the Manage access button.
4. Click Revoke Access next to the service you want to disconnect from your account."

I haven't tried this "Revoke access" procedure myself, because I didn't activate that syncing to start with, but a friend who has done so confirmed that it works.

Could Amara please add this info:

• in the message that pops up when one tries to do the syncing from the promotion banner
  
• in users' Account  page, under "Enable Amara crowd subtitles on your personal YouTube channel (beta)"
• in the Syncing to YouTube  how-to of Amara's help?

Thank you in advance.

 Yikes! Sorry, I don't know. But you might wish to follow the  How to remove "Help us caption and translate this video on Amara.org" spam message  discussion, started Feb 23, 2013, in the YouTube section of the Google Product Forums: maybe someone will suggest a solution.

"spam message" in the  title of that discussion is inaccurate, true: the addition of this message is clearly mentioned in the pop-up triggered by clicking the link for syncing Amara subs to YouTube videos: see attached screen capture. Hence, going ahead with the syncing means accepting this addition. And hence, this is not spam.

However,  there are now "About 7,720,000 results" for a search of "Help us caption and translate this video on Amara.org" in Google, most of them videos, with this sentence replacing the author's own description in  these search engine results and in the part before "see more" of the video itself.  And while the popup does mention this addition, it does not say that it will have that effect. 

When I started mentioning my misgivings about this syncing possibility in this forum on December 24, the same search gave "about 3,180 results"; by January 11, it gave "about 819,000 results".  How many in a month's time?

Therefore, even if this addition is not spam, it is an important issue, and both Amara and Google should work on solving it.  When YouTube automatically adds stuff to video descriptions - whether the info about remixing because you chose the YouTube Creative Commons license, or the info about how to buy copyrighted music you've used - that stuff does not replace the first part of the description.

So Google might know how to at least push down this  "Help us caption and translate this video on Amara.org" addition in the lower, secondary part of the description. And Google is co-responsible for the present situation, because it accepted to implement the Amara app, both when Amara - then Universal Subtitles - only sold it to its paying enterprise customers, with the possibility to moderate what goes on YouTube, and when it generalized it to all users, but without this moderation possibility.

 

Not that I know of, Mira, sorry: no one from the Amara staff has responded to any thread on this forum for a month now.

 

Ine, when you write "I do see on my account the following button:..." do you mean on your Amara account?

If yes, then the message triggered by the button is most clumsy in the best of hypotheses.

Ignore that button: you can stop the syncing from the Google/Youtube end, as explained by Google in Revoke third-party access to your account information . Moreover that explanation is available in ca 40 languages via the drop list at the bottom: I hope your language is in this list.

However, even if you do that, you'll still have to remove Amara message from your Youtube videos. But at least it will not come back.

Can I ask you a favor? Could you attach a screen capture of that message caused by the button in a reply here, please? I don't have that button in my account because I didn't do the syncing, but the message is important evidence of Amara's messiness in this YouTube syncing.

Thank you in advance

Claude

 

Belated thanks, Ryan.

When I started this topic 2 years ago, I was going by what I could read so I hadn't synced my YouTube and Amara accounts, and I still haven't. This makes your hands-on indications very precious.

Claude