Q: Does FTP retain a copy of the images and/or final transcription?
A: That's up to you. When you project is done you can export it in a large variety of ways. You can make it "read only" in FromThePage so folks could still find and read it (Google indexes our pages well). Or you can delete the entire project. We are not a preservation platform, but we will retain your undeleted projects as read-only even after your subscription is complete.
Q: If we choose to, can they filter the people who do our transcriptions? So we could promote it to just the local, or more widespread Jewish community, rather than the world of transcribers. I know that they can filter who they promote it to, but can it be restricted if we felt it was appropriate?
A: You can make your project private, and then have folks you know of or spread the word to create FromThePage accounts and you give those folks access to the project by looking up their accounts by email.
We understand the concern about vandals or attackers; we host material for the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and for a number of race & reconciliation projects at universities and state archives. While we have seen spammers try to post ads to our site, we haven't had any malicious content.
That being said, we take a number of steps to counter bad actors:
- Every time a page is saved, we save a version of that page and who contributed that version. That makes it easy to track down who contributed what, and we can revert to earlier versions (via an email to support) if needed.
- We scan all contributions for certain patterns and mark them as potential spam. One of our teammates reviews all those for problems.
- If we find problems we can "expunge" that user. Expunging deletes their accounts and all of their contributions
- We have a feature for blocking specific users from your collections. (That's more of a "this person is ignoring all my contact attempts to course correct their mistakes" sort of feature, though.)