There is an increasing amount of topics around SFOS in peoples native languages. Given that we are a small community and info/solutions to problems might help alot of people do you think keeping the forums english only might be better?
I kind of lean on the english only side.
Discuss.
I lean on the side of allowing local language channels, as long as it is limited to one thread per language. Possibly group them in a common category. Rules should be also more relaxed there. I don’t think we lose much in the English main forum over it, but enable some local interaction otherwise not found that much on the forum.
While I understand the idea to use the same language over the entire forum, having non-English topics - which, as far as I know, is only a single topic per language - makes it easier to expand the community to people who are not quite comfortable with English or for other reasons prefer another language without requiring them to use translation tools of varying quality.
I can see the cultures are very different in the current language specific threads. In the Swedish speaking thread we got an outburst of political characterisations due to the discussion of nation flag or not for a language spoken in more than one country. This will be harder to keep to policies when local perspectives can spur discussions. The newbie perspective was chosen. And discussion about duplicity and wiki.
Certain users complain when people post in other languages, even if they include an English translation in their posts.
My opinion is 90% of the time, non-english speakers have to run what the rest of us are saying through a translator. What is the harm if 10% of the time, we have to return the favour?
No, why? Are we not allowed to discuss stuff in our own language? It’s not like we’re all barging in random topics and confusing everyone by replying in our mother tongues.
So far every language has its own topic and that’s it. If you really need to know everything going on in, just use a translator. It’s disgusting that you’d take away those threads just because you can’t understand them.
That is not acceptable behaviour. I recommend flagging especially the offending and off topic posts.
The forum should be open, inviting and safe space. Strong opinion is not an excuse to breach that.
While I’d really prefer everything staying in English here, I think allowing only one thread per language is not really feasible or useful.
The only real solution is to have non-English subcategories on the forum, so people have a chance of discussing several topics in separate threads.
There is also the issue of moderation. Iff non-English subcategories were introduced, I think there should be at least two users with mod permission who speak the respective languages.
Indeed. The current way of a single thread is a good start to guage interest for a language, but it doesn’t take a whole lot of activity before it becomes too restrictive. The Italian-speaking community already has its own completely separate website/forum at jollacommunity.it, but for many languages (particularly the Nordics, where English fluency is rather common), a completely separate community may be a bit overkill for the actual traffic it would receive until SailfishOS grows quite a lot more common.
And yes, moderators are needed.
This was recently discussed here: Only English threads? - #8 by rhampf
I still think subfora would be a beautiful thing. Also I’m afraid this forum will eventually split into two or more if the rules are too rigid.
So this thread is a duplicate and can be closed or integrated?
It is a recurring theme that whatever is suggested here, they are met with hostility and nay-saying instead of letting people discuss whatever they had in mind. That swedish thread was no exception, which started as a cheerful discussion and turned into “do we need this - no I don’t need this so others should’t have it either”. Why is it so difficult to just let people have a chat and present whatever they had on their mind freely?
I would guess EGO is the answer.
The community of Mixxx, a free and open source software for Live DJing, does it very well in their own forum IMHO (which is also powered by Discourse).
The people there gently nudge everyone towards using English, while still giving them a meaningful answer to their question …
… but at the same time they are not afraid to also pull out the ban hammer when needed:
We can learn a lot from them.
I think it’s better to have single-language topics (or multi-language if they’re mutually intelligible) where newcomers who don’t know English or don’t know it well enough can ask their questions in their mother tongue, than to have them post LLM-generated walls of translation where you have to figure out what their problem even is (or where the machine makes everyone sound combative). I’m sure 99% of all questions that would end up in the language-topics would be simple stuff that’s already answered in English elsewhere, and the other 1% would be things that aren’t relevant to people who don’t speak the language and just general chitchat.
i don’t exactly know how discourse works - but if there was some kind of translation addon, that could be useful: allow native language threads but have the option of everyone following it by providing English translations
The community is not that small to assume that 1-2-10 language specific topics would hurt participation overall.
Also I really doubt that anyone would gate-keep knowledge in these topics, or that there’s anyone ONLY participating and reading these topics.
If anything I love the idea because you can connect with users you can actually meet without leaving your country or city in some cases.
So my take is if you want to talk about sfos in your native language, well, power to you!
If the rest want to follow, translation tools exist.
And are better than ever, so the “moderation not able to read a flagged post” is also invalid nowadays.
That. I agree.
Some language threads, each language one thread I believe will not hurt.
Of course some details the global “staff” might miss (or via translation tool) but I also belive those mothertonguer will not discuss behind closed doors but let us other know about their findings (at least if believe so).
But I would not like having dedicated sub boards with dedicated sections and lots of topics in non-English.
Personally I would like a “other languages” category and people starting their threads in there, even if several. More active communities might have technical or newbie threads.
This forum started as “technical” (design, bug reports…) but in this time, the JP2601 is in the hands of many new non-English speakers, and we now need to take into accounts the needs of many non-anglophone newcomers. The ability to make questions in their own language is important to new users, whether these are simple newbie questions, or trying figure out if a behaviour is a bug or a feature. Of course this also requires active community members to filter out, or even to sometimes translate and promote a post into a proper bug report in English.