I recently had a request from our customer United Nations Human Rights Office (OHCHR). They said “We need a word-count function. After creating a task, the number of the words in the post can appear next to the title. We currently copy and paste the content to MS Word to get the word-count, which is not efficient”. A request was so specific – I knew we will never add this to Freedcamp but I wanted to help.

My immediate reaction was to suggest to use good translation agency, where professionals can easily add a plugin which counts letters and words but it turned out that:

1. Their translators often work both online and offline. If a proofreader edits a translation, she/he needs to be online all the time. For that reason, they prefer to upload a Word attachment with track-changes to a Freedcamp’s task.
2. They can’t add status to Wiki. So it’s difficult to track the progress.
3. It’s a bit confusing to have both Tasks and Wiki tabs in a workspace as they can’t remove Tasks while keeping Wiki. For that reason, they chose to keep Tasks.

You may wonder why do they need words count? It is needed for measuring the workload for each translator. They needed a practical way to add the word-count directly next to a title in the task where task description is actual text to translate and Word attachments contain its translation.

As a last resort I tried to see if we can solve it with a browser plugins. Luckily Chrome web store have at least 3 to select from and it worked for OHCHR removing friction and making it available right in Freedcamp.

After solving this problem it was relatively easy for us to provide a solution for those seeking auto-numbering feature for tasks in Freedcamp.