How to treat non-English topics

Continuing the discussion from Closed Poll: Multilingual Forum Runoff Poll:

Following this vote, new topics, which are not in English, should have the language indicated in the following form:

#:de: Topic Title

Discourse brings flags as emojis. Here is a selection:

  • German :de: = :de:
  • English :gb: = :gb:
  • Spanish :es: = :es:
  • French :fr: = :fr:
  • Italian :it: = :it:

Additionally, please tag your post with a flag.

Edit by @Stefan: 03.11.2015 & 18.04.2017
[1]: List of ISO 639 language codes - Wikipedia

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I agree, I’d simply put the language tag before the topic title like “[IT] Problemi con il touchscreen” (translated: Touschscreen problems) in order to being able to distinguish the language even for long strings topic descriptions :slight_smile:

That was an option in the original poll, but was outvoted.

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Sorry, didn’t notice that option! :smile:
Bye!

I was mistaken, actually the option was:

There was no option about putting the language tag before the topic title.

The option in the runoff poll was the following:

So my proposition with the ISO-Codes was also not identical to the initial vote option.
Other forums (I think of xda-devs especially) put the language tags before the topic title, don’t they? So, to stick to the convention, I think we should also do it like this, what do you think, @DjDas, @paulakreuzer, @Chris_R?

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Well, I think a normal rule for tidiness is to put tags before a description string (I think for example at mailing lists subjects, or even this forum notifications emails’ subjects, like the one I just received: [Fairphone Forum] [Meta] How to treat non-English topics)
I think also your idea of using country codes could be also useful in order to have the descriptions as short as possible and doesn’t go too far away from both poll choices, so for me no problems at all with both choices :smile:
Thank you for asking :smile:

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Yeah I also think the tags should come before the title.

PS: Finally something we can agree on! :wink:

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Well I do agree with you in many way of thinking, don’t you agree? :stuck_out_tongue:

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Sure :smiley:

I just meant that you, Stefan and me all had different ideas about how to handle this in the beginning.

Ok so is it enough if us three agree on this or do we have to do another Poll?
Democracy can be really tiresome some times! :wink:

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I’m not a moderator but a simple user so I think my point of view is at the same level of all the other users :smile:
Being moderators you should think if this choice could ease the moderation work, and to keep topics and sections tidy and clean (I think so :slight_smile: )
So if all the moderators agree on this, the decision is took! :smile:
Bye!

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I also think this minor decision lies in the hands of the moderators (plus you @DjDas, since you were the only one to reply to this topic ;)).

If any other user has objections, they can still start a new discussion about this and we will see where this leads us. For now I think language tags following ISO 639-1 before the topic title are the best decision.

PS: I will wait for @Chris_R’s opinion until I change the first post.

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Two things:

  • What about topics that contain more than one language? E.g the Austrian Fairphoners thread! Should it be tagged [EN/DE], like @humorkritik allready did here a long time ago?

  • One reason to do all this is so you can search for topics in your language. Searching [NL], [FR] and [ES] works fine, but [IT] delivers no results. (Although I allready tagged: [IT] Fairphone in Italiano. Strange right?

A late edit about the second point:
The reason why I can’t find topics tagged as italian is obviously that the “word” “it” is excluded in the search function because it’s a much to common word like “and” “but” and “you”…
[NL], [DE] and so on can be found, but only if you add the "[…]"s (because 2 letter words are excluded too), but other topics with words that contain those two letters (like device) are found too.

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  1. The Austrian Fairphoners thread can be tagged [DE]-only because its content is not relevant for non-Austrians. I think the title should stay in English, just like a news feed. People who don’t know German can at least read the most important info (the headline).

  2. I don’t think that people will search for tags, but for problems. The tags are just an indication to not click the topic, if you don’t know the language.

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Well considering I continue to suffer the strange behavior of new posts not showing in my “new” and “unread” views, I assume there is only one post in Italian language and I didn’t rename it with tags, because I was waiting for the poll results, so I think [IT] search should give you no results yet; I’ll try to find Italian language posts in my (little) spare time in order to comply with the new tagging standard :smile:
For multi-language thread I’d maintain the @humorkritik tagging, but with multiple brackets like [EN][DE] in order to let the search engine find the language tag but let users know there are posts in both languages :smile:

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I agree with you all, putting the tag at the beginning is probably easier for people to notice

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Topic titles support emojis now. Should we use country flags instead of tags? :gb: :es: :de:

Cc @Chris_R @paulakreuzer

PS: Example can be seen here:

Edit: Apparently this doesn’t work for onebox

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