I'm a Jr. sysadmin at a medium sized software company. Whenever I document workflows for our users, I have two colleagues of mine who have no connection to IT work through them and add the small gotchas they asked me to the docs.

It saved me a whole bunch of headaches for when other users get enrolled in these workflows.

I've been doing some cal/QC functions recently after years not touching it. Since I last did it I've forgotten some of the knowledge that is just assumed. The answers to my questions are documented, but not in a places that is accessible from the production side and has lived as community knowledge in production. I've been making a list and updating the documents to fill in some gaps.

Unfortunately some of the production people aren't comfortable enough pushing for changes in the documentation so some of my job now is to ask what they've noted and get it added.

I think that Ads on Google are different in regards to licensing and targeting. A company might target "Users in Europe" for example.

I'm Canadian and I switched from an ISP headquartered in Ontario to one headquarterd in Quebec (Teksavvy to Bell because of a bulk agreement my building got) and now half my youtube ads are in french, despite me living in Ontario.

Don't care either way, but it does make you think...

That's a targeting limitation.

I don't know OTOH whether "target audience's spoken language" is one of the signals an advertiser can key into in targeting an ad (at a glance, it looks like it might be). But (a) advertisers don't always have that signal and (b) advertisers themselves aren't always savvy enough to set it (how many American advertisers targeting Iowa actually tag their ads as "in English?"), so you'll end up with region targeting as a proxy for language targeting.

In your case, it's probably that the ad engine doesn't have enough info on you so it's falling back to geotargeting and hoping for the best (are you running with JavaScript disabled? Clearing cookies frequently? Avoiding logins? If so, these are all things known to decrease ad signal quality).

That's the point. Youtube/Google knows who I am and I'm logged in - my preferences are all set to english and my searches, videos watched, etc are all 99% english, with the rest being with english subtitles.. I'm not talking about banner ads on random websites.

They literally have first class data.

Good point. Another hypothesis is that individual advertisers aren't using that data.

Back in the day, I had a front-row-seat to this process and I observed how often advertisers simply misconfigure a campaign and under-target it. If you don't set a targeting preference for a given indicator, the default can be to target everyone regardless of what that indicator says about them.

It might be the case that advertisers are saying they want to target you anyway (or failing to say one way or the other) even though they should have enough signal to know it's a wasted impression.

Yeah, that makes sense as well. The french ads come to me in waves and I can see lazy advertisers just "targeting quebec" or "all french regions" for the french runs.

Also seems to tie together with the last bullets on these minutes: https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/Board/Policies/20230607-Minut...

I had figured it was not exactly technical burnout in running Mediawiki installs but regulatory burnout in following Euro GDPR/cookie banner/bullshit-of-the-now requirements. Some of them are easy but the rest phase in once you reach a certain scale of users (which it sounds like they probably have).

It clearly says technical burnout. Why do you have to blame GDPR? If anything it was the best thing to happen to the open internet

Yeah, speaking as a European tech lead; GDPR was a pain in the butt a few years ago when it was introduced - and all client websites had to be retroactively fitted with cookie systems, routines had to be implemented, stuff had to be learned, etc.

Once sites are planned with it in mind from the get go it's really no big deal, and huge for the end user.

For a wiki farm like Miraheze, GDPR/CCPA/etc compliance is fairly easy. MediaWiki collects fairly little personal data about users, and there are well-defined methods for the site operator to export or delete that data if a user requests that they do so.

Besides, that all kicked in years ago. It's not a new concern.

Cookies were regulated by the ePrivacy directive back in 2009. The case raised above is about someone who had access to see the users' IP address. Handling training and authorisations for people with access to personal data is an ongoing job, not something you do once and forget.

font-smooth: never Should be working on Firefox.

caniuse says it only works on macOS