I decided to run through the VRTS release generator myself as a test drive before emailing the rights holder who'd donated some photos that I'd uploaded on their behalf. However, in the "provide the filenames separated by pipes" part, it got tripped up by a filename where I foolishly left an ampersand in it. It will basically stop and say "No file named " (part of filename before the ampersand). Now, as a technically savvy user, I tried HTML-encoding the Ampersand with "%26" and it worked, but I kinda doubt that yon average photo-donator will necessarily know how to do this. Is it worth including some better documentation on that error, or spotting weird characters that might need to be escaped and including some helpful note so that others can debug this themselves? e.g. "If the file you're trying to release has a character in [list], go to the page for that image and copy what's in the URL for the special character."
Yeah. I am test-driving the generator myself, before I email the rights holder. In general, we can't expect rights holders to be savvy about Wikipedia/Wikimedia. I want to send the holder a step by step instruction on what they can expect to be asked by the generator, and how they can answer each question.
I think the generator needs to prominently show a link to a "What's the process" page, where all steps are shown in a guide, with possibly screenshots. This allows a rights holder to understand what they are about to be asked to do, BEFORE they answer anything.
I am afraid that without this, may holders will quit midway in the process.
Also, without that guide with screenshots, I don't know to what extend I can simulate the process by answering questions myself. I don't want to unintentionally "finish" the process, and send a fake consent response as if I were the rights holder. I imagine this will ask for your email address at the end? Or does it? I don't know, and I am afraid to click on "Continue" past the "I agree to terms above" checkbox.
