Q: In the Collaborators tab, how is the time shown under “Time on this collection” calculated, and how accurate is it?
A: Time tracking is estimated based on user activity within a collection. Here’s how it works:
- Each time a user clicks on a screen within a collection, we log that event and treat it as active work on the collection.
- Because typing in the transcription editor does not produce a click that our server can see, we record that activity and send pseudo clicks to our server every minute so that that activity is tracked as well.
- For multiple contiguous clicks within a tolerance (currently a generous 90 minutes), we assume that the user is working on the collection during the duration, even if that may include time away from the transcription screen.
These activity signals are aggregated nightly for each user and collection.
While this approach provides a reasonable estimate, it is not exact. The system is designed to avoid under-reporting time, which means totals may be slightly generous. Conversely, work completed outside of FromThePage (for example, transcribing in external software and pasting the text later) may not be fully captured.