Create category "international" with sub category "german"

To be honest I am not familar with discourse and so I do not know about sub categories.

To make it trivial please add a german one.

Thank you.

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do you think there are so many developers who can’t speak english? I think most of the people who want to be part of this community are able to communicate in english, more or less. Using german language in discourse will expel all people from german topics who can not speak german. So maybe a english speaking member could have a great idea about a topic. If it is in german he would never reply to that topic because he is not able to understand the initial post.

Note that this forum targets also end-users as well :slight_smile:

@jospoortvliet What do you think about subcategories in other languages? I personally feel that it kinda leads to duplicated information and also is frustrating if only a few people are active in these forums. Also while I know we can suppress categories from the homepage (we don’t want to show German posts or so showing up in “Latest”) I don’t know about the digest mails…

Thoughts?

mh ok I didn’t know that. So for end-users I think subcategories could be a relief. But development related topics should be posted in english imho.

See old forums. The german community is big. Compared to other non-english ones.
Please keep in mind that some people read english, but hesitate to write their topics in english.

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I know the german community is big (I’m a part of it :P) but if you post development related stuff in other languages like german, no one else than german people can understand it. Even if you use google translate to post your concern, the english part of the community could roughly understand what you mean, but not if it is written in german.

I think that as a rule of thumb it might be a good idea to set up separate end-user language forums if a certain amount of users ask for it. Empty language forums simply look depressing, but if there’s demand, it makes sense to have them (esp. for translators).

I imagine the process could be:

  1. open a topic in “International” subforum with topic “Please open subforum for $language”
  2. once/if that topic gains e.g. 6 votes/likes, admins open up a new subforum
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Developer topics and general topics should be written in English only. National languages only for support topics, imho.

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There is a great demand for it. A number of users don’t feel comfortable to write in English and prefer their native language. This will lead to duplicate questions and answers. If you don’t create a specific area, they will post in their native language anyway.

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Personally I dont really like the idea. English isn’t my native language either, but I’ve seen a lot of projects that failed because the community was dominated by certain language and posting in English at some point was not even appreciated or simply ignored. I think even help desk for end users should be done in English because otherwise it creates chaos. After all its 2016.

I think it doesn’t make sense at the present stage of development to offer other languages. If somebody write in bad English, we will not condemn him for that. :relieved:

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Forums at ownCloud had 100.000 posts in more than 4 years. 3% of all posts are non english. 2% are german.

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Ok. I checked back on the technical part:

  • It is possible to create subcategories as we for example have in the “HowTo” categories
  • Disabling posts in a category from appearing in the “Top” section is possible
  • Disabling posts in a category from appearing in the “Latest” section is possible
  • Disabling posts in a category from appearing in the digest mail is possible

That means people who speak German would have to go to something like help.nextcloud.com/c/german and can post their stuff there. It will however not globally appear for anyone as I don’t want to have non-english stuff displayed to all others.

Subscribing to the categories is also possible. That way users can get informed of new topics there.

Does this sound acceptable, @tflidd @rakekniven?

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Sounds good. It should be possible to navigate there from the mainpage (as it is the case for the HowTo-category). Other nationalities might want to follow.

Done, the subcategory can be found at https://help.nextcloud.com/c/international/deutsch

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Main discussions should remain in English-only so people can understand and chip in, maybe support questions can be in the own language.

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I have clarified in the board description of the category that only end-user questions should be asked there.

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Should we move questions asked in german directly into the subcategory if this is not already done by the user :grin: #modquestion

Yes. Absolutely. Just move the topic and send a private message to the user explaining that the topic has been moved.

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maybe we can automate the sending the information. while moving the post the mod marks a checkbox and the message is sent. this could reduce the effort for our mods.