Should other languages than English be allowed on the Discourse forum?

@ejgallego and @Lys: you now have moderator permissions, including the power to create new categories. Please use it to create the Chinese and Spanish categories (possibly with an announcement sub-category like I did it for French). If you need help, as an admin I can actually impersonate you to create these categories. Creating them from my own account is not good because then it looks like I am the author of the welcome post of the category.

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Great, thanks @Zimmi48, Iā€™ll take care of the Spanish category.

Iā€™ve tried to create a new category but failed. The top-right ā€œNew Categoryā€ button does not respond to clicks. @ejgallego have you tried on your side?

While I couldnā€™t find why this button doesnā€™t work for you (probably a bug that we should report to Discourse), I realized that, as an admin, I can change the name of the poster of a given post, so I recreated a Coq äø­ę–‡ category (and an Announcements sub-category, to rename if you can) and I attributed the description posts to you (to edit to put an actual welcome message in Chinese, try to keep the first paragraph short because this is what we be shown on the main page).

@ejgallego Let me know if you experience the same problem as @Lys, in which case weā€™ll take the same road.

Yup, same bug here, thanks!

Could you also change the min topic title length in site settings? 15 characters is too verbose for Chinese. 6 might be appropriate. Weā€™ll see over time.

Done.

Changed. That being said, we could probably turn off this requirement entirely: there is also a ā€œminimum title entropyā€ setting (that is set to 10 by default and says that non-English characters count for more) that we could rely exclusively on.

Donā€™t forget to update the description post in the announcement sub-category too.

Thanks @Zimmi48 ā€¦

@ejgallego Donā€™t forget about editing the title of the Announcements sub-category and its description.

@ejgallego Another minor remark, the first paragraph is what is shown on the main page as the description of categories. For now, it is ā€œHola a todosā€. I donā€™t know if it was intentional.

I did not understand very well where that announcement post is shown, will edit it.

Thatā€™s unfortunate, it was not; Iā€™ll try to tweak it, thanks.

@Zimmi48 I could help with moderating the Russian section (ā€œCoq Š½Š° руссŠŗŠ¾Š¼ā€).

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Great! And @yforster volunteered as well to moderate the German section. Iā€™ve made the both of you moderators and Iā€™ve created the categories. Iā€™ll let you edit the descriptions.

@anton-trunov Can I ask you in addition to try to see if you can create an announcement sub-category by yourself? The button for creating a new category is on the main page. If you manage to, then you can make it a sub-category by selecting a parent category. @ejgallego and @lys did not manage to but I had made them moderators before activating the moderator permission to create categories, so that could be the source of the bugā€¦

It is quite surprising that thereā€™s still not a Japanese language forum here. I had the impression that there is a fairly large Coq user community in Japan. Maybe we should try harder to reach out to the Japanese-speaking Coq user community (for example, people from Proof Cafe will be interested).

That said, I really appreciate the Chinese-speaking Coq user communityā€™s initiative. I have not been in touch with this community, but I definitely should, and this Discourse forum is a great platform to organize regional Coq events/meetups/etc. Thanks to everyone in this thread for proposing this magnificent multi-language idea!

As a translator Iā€™m quite ambitious of interlanguage communication between Chinese and Japanese community, for better translation of Coq-related concepts, among many other benefits.

I also hope to bridge different varieties of Chinese e.g. between Guoyu and Putonghua, in case some Taiwanese users are also interested. (Probably worth a topic in Coq äø­ę–‡ channel.)

Agreed. I donā€™t know if there are simplified/traditional transformation ē®€ē¹č½¬ę¢ plugins, but I suppose if users need it, there are browser plugins for this. I donā€™t know how large is the Taiwanese user community, but thatā€™s certainly worth reaching out to.

That said, we do have a lot to learn from the Japanese language Software Foundations translation team :smiley:

@Zimmi48 Hi, I tried adding a new category on the main page, but it does not do anything for me (it seems that I can create a new topic), I tried Safari and Chrome, logging out and logging back in. Nothing works. Could you do create the subcategory please? ā€œŠžŠ±ŃŠŃŠ²Š»ŠµŠ½Šøяā€ stands for announcements.

Done. Thanks for trying!

Yes, I am definitely hoping that weā€™ll get a Japanese-speaking section here, but this initiative may have gone largely unnoticed to the Japanese users of Coq since the Discourse forum has only been advertised on Coq-Club so far, and the multi-language initiative has only been discussed within it.

I think it is time to put prominent links to the Discourse forum on the Coq website now (we have enough content), and to resend an announcement to Coq-Club about the multi-lingual aspect. I also encourage everyone to advertise the forum in every place that could allow reaching more people.

Mostly for my own curiosity, could the title and/or description of the language-specific categories also say, in English, what the language of discussion is? So far I (think I) can guess this, but I think itā€™d be nice to be able to actually read which languages we have represented here.

@RalfJ What about doing this list in the welcome message? Iā€™m afraid adding this information to the name of the category would only makes things uglier for a not so critical use caseā€¦