Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
As some of you realized, non English forums have now been added. I'm going to try to detect browser language and link to these from the site pages as appropriate.
If you speak one of these non English languages, please help these new members transition into our TAS community.
Help these members understand TASing, and how to submit videos to our site. Or how to submit WIPs. Perhaps offer to clarify feedback to them, or explain TASing terms which isn't covered by your standard English courses in school.
Edit:
Once this gets ironed out a bit more, it'd be nice if we can create a multilingual message to stick in our news.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Interesting idea. How are we deciding which languages deserve to get their own boards? It's a bit hard to gauge sometimes; how can we know that e.g. a Portuguese board would be wanted if no Portuguese people are here to ask for it? The Japanese board is obvious, and I suppose there's the 88MPH podcasts to justify the French board...
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
I checked site logs to see which countries most frequently visited us, and guestimated from there.
If we see some subforum is not being used, it's not a big deal to remove it. Nor to add another if the demand becomes apparent.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Ah, good thinking. That makes sense.
I hope the subforums do get used. If nothing else, they should be good training for those of us who are somewhat bilingual and want to be more fluent in whatever language we're lacking.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
I can help on the Spanish forum as is my native language. I already posted there btw.
I think it would be easier, at least for me, if someone can provide a text to translate rather than post what one thinks is ok. As since it would not be in English, not many could catch there's something misleading or similar...
I posted a message in the Portuguese forum saying how it should be used. I tried to remain as faithful as possible to Nach's message.
The non English forums are a great idea, I think they'll be used often.
I guess I was thinking ahead and that the idea would be to eventually have the main page translated in several languages, like Wikipedia (for mentioning a page)...
I suppose that, as you mention, not everyone writes with good grammar, so you should expect the same in these new sub-forums. But if you're the one that is going to be helping the newcomers, you should be writing the best you can, otherwise you could confuse them. (It would be like a blind man leading another blind man)
Is there going to be a plan on which subjects should have a topic? (Like to make a sticky with a FAQ) Or just randomly create topics with subjects one thinks should be mentioned?
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
For the time being, I think the communities should move to assist with requests, we'll think of which topics need an outreach program down the line.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11492
Location: Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg
It's not a secret who would hold Russian branch.
But since russians are VERY little interested in TASing (know it from discussing it on different our forums & sites), I really don't know if there's need to add RU forum.
moozooh, what do you think?
If one is created, I can make a little PR on our forums to encourage people to post XD
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
Joined: 6/25/2007
Posts: 732
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
That's weird, since Russians in the Worms Armageddon community seem to be the group most interested in our mission records (unassisted and tool-assisted) (KINOMAN, Mr.Bad, and ChuCha are all Russians; tool-assist version is private, but they've all asked for it multiple times; held back by development). I'm fairly certain that there would be tons of Russians interested in TASing if it was more accessible to them language-wise. Worms Armageddon had waves upon waves of new Russian players after cyrillic was implemented in the game, as can be seen by these country statistics.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
Can each of you who is expert in your language write how to say "<language> forum" in your language? I'm going to use it for a link on the site. Thanks.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
I don't think it's warranted. On my memory, TASVideos forums have had an impressive total of twelve native Russian speakers registered (+1 IRC-only dude), of which only four had used the forum for more than 10 posts and were good enough at English to not require any further assistance: AnS, Lazy_Zefiris (where has he gone, anyway? I guess the military got him :o), you, and myself. See, the big goal is to become a part of the community, but to do that you need to be able to post in English. We already have Russian forums of our own (like Emu-Russia), so simply relocating some of the Russian-language discussion here achieves very little aside from maybe somebody other than AnS being able to shed some firsthand experience on important issues like rules and submission process. He has always been the main advocate of TASing on Russian emulation-related resources. I, on the other hand, visit them about once a year, but am way more active here.
AnS has actually done a good body of work explaining and popularizing the concept of TASing on certain Russian emulation and ROM-hacking resources, but most Russians even remotely interested are traditionally reluctant to blend into foreign communities without forming at least some kind of a diaspora that would let them feel comfortable. It's the same with SDA. Those who were willing to become a part of the community have done so never having used the Russian boards which has close to zero traffic anyway. This is considering the fact that there's way more interaction involved between an author willing to submit a run and the site's staff due to the specifics of their submission process, so naturally there should have been higher activity. I've had more activity in my inbox from some Russian guys whom I had to relay relevant information to on behalf of Mike.
Anyway, in case you create something I can write an announcement post anytime. No big deal. The proper name would then be Русскоязычный форум.
Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11492
Location: Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg
moozooh
AnS' articles were almost unachievable via random googling, only my WikiPedia article gathered all links to them. So I can hardly say he was really popularising TAS. He just geve SOME info in SOME good articles. but the main concept of TASing stayed almost unnoticed.
But having the actual Russian branch we can give some explanations of HOW TO TAS, submit & encode. It was my desire as you know.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
Joined: 3/2/2010
Posts: 2178
Location: A little to the left of nowhere (Sweden)
For Swedish forum: "Svenskt forum"
Though honestly I don't see the point of actually having a Swedish forum, everyone younger than 50 is already pretty good at English, after 50 it's a bit more varying but those who want to know English usually does.