Just checked troubleshooting subforum, and can't get the feeling that EOF overreacts if someone is not speaking English.

IMHO, his posts were not very helpful nor friendly.

Rescently I was in situation that I had to ask question in French, and I used internet transletor device and asked. Just after couple posts, there was someone who was able to help me in other language then French, and that was very helpful.

So, question is: Do we like to keep this forum friendly as possible and world-wide, or we are supporting only English speaking users/guests?

I support EOF in his view.

EOF has to judge wether a post is correct (doesn't ask for warez for example).
If he can not read it, then he is in his right to close/remove the post IMHO.

Although EOF might have brought it a bit more polite.

People who speak their native language are being a bit rude and arrogant in assuming they will be understood.

If asking and answering questions in a native language then less people benefit from the thread.

Data,
EOF helps a lot, but that does not means that others can't help. Sometimes you have people asking simple questions, and because of communication problem, we can't help them.

But when someone else is able to translate, like in this case, then I don't see point in EOF reaction.

In my opinion it is unprofessional, unfriendly and unhelpful - oposit from what Abandonia stands for.

Reading his reacion I feel like he is having a bad day...

Well, I am a little upset about people resurecting almost 1 year old topics back. Especially when it's about the language issue, which already been (you guessed it) resolved almost one year ago.

Thing is, it's not something we can work around. Data gave you a very good reason, and we can't just go over it. English is the world language, and so it is used here on this board. If someone is to use another language, then everything will turn into a big mess in no time.

You already know that I like to keep the Troubleshooting forum clean and efficient. Those kind of issue would only bring problems and trouble to the Troubleshooting forum.

Some people may call me strict, I don't really care. Fact is, they are probably right but that's what I want and I think the custom rules I created reflect that. Those rules may not be polite, they may not be "user friendly"... But it's not the goal of the Troubleshooting forum either. Helping people running their old games is, and I think that function is more adequately done without spam or useless conversations plaguing a thread for two others. Having the need to have a translator every two post telling me what the other people already said is, at least for me, pretty much spam which can be easily avoided by setting up a strong rule at the start. Imagine if for every thread in this board, someone would need to translate what another user just said? The threads would probably easily double or triple what they are already.

I been pretty lenient lately, there is some threads that I kept going while I felt I could have closed or warned them. But about the thread you are refering about, it's not something I have to ask myself if it's a good or a bad thing to close it or to ask the users to speak english. It's almost automatic.

First of all, I was under impression that thread was closed because of language. Apparantly that was not the reason. Sorry for that.

Now, what about closing treads in Troubleshooting forum because they got bumped/resurected? Do we really need to see 100 posts with the same question, as bumping old ones would get that tread closed?

Why then at the end of the week you don't close all treads one week or longer opened to avoid problems like this?

In my opinion, using of old treads, instead of creating the new one is what makes troubleshooting area clean. Not closing treads.

Did you read my custom rules? I think they are pretty straightforward and well explained by themselves and whenever I use them I link to the refering page. If you want more informations about this I'll be happy to continue this conversation.

I close them so the offending user actually do it get the hint. If they don't, which never happened yet (and it's a good thing), I would need to personally warn the offending user then get other measures if he/she persist in doing so. I have no trouble asking for other admins for help, and spammers and troublemakers in the Troubleshooting forum been banned in the past. I administrate some forums myself (like for example the UD forum of The Abandoned), I know how easy it is to close access to the forum to a user.

[quote]Why then at the end of the week you don't close all treads one week or longer opened to avoid problems like this?[quote]
What I do here is free of charge. I don't get paid, I have absolutly no reward, I do it both for the sake of Abandonware (and this lovely site) and because I like to do it. However, this doesn't mean that I just like to get an overload of work I don't really need. If you were to pay me to do it, I'd be more than glad to do whatever you wish. Since it is not the case, I like to keep my amount of work here to a minimum if it is possible. Tracking and closing every threads which are older than one week of innactivity would be quite a unneeded workload.

My idea of clean threads is a thread which, if possible, the problem get resolved in one page. If we were to institute a new rule which force the users to always post in the same thread, we would end up with threads with incredible amount of pages like you can already see in many places on this board. Best instance of this is the Ufo: Ennemy unknown thread which is near the 150 pages if I'm not mistaken. Having threads so big would definitly lead to some users not wanting to read thru all the pages, and asking the same problems all over again indefinitly, increasing the thread lenght even more.

Having such threads is already not my idea of a clean thread, but what about those who actually help the users? Would they be more likely to always visit the same thread over and over, or would they skip it once in a while thinking they already solved the problem? I think the second case would happen at times, and this again go against the idea of having the problem resolved in the fastest amount of time than possible.

I made it clear when I took over the Troubleshooting section that I wanted one thread per user per problem to keep everything clean and simple. So far it always worked perfectly this way, and the only problem I may think about this system is that one day there will be too much activity on that subforum and that more threads will be created in one day than one page can hold. At that time we'll look into the problem and we might just do as you suggest, but for the moment there is really no reason to take that step.


Edit: someone have an idea of why my quotes are not working? :blink:

That's strange with quotes...

OK, I will try to avoid posting in troubleshooting as I can't agree with those rules.

Thanks for explanation.

Well, that's your choice. However I am pretty clueless on how you could not manage to follow those rules. Only posting normally in a civilised manner will prevent you from breaking them. :blink:

I just dislike when posts are being closed for no-good-reason in my opinion.

But, as you are moderator, I will not go against your rules and do only option that I have.

Again, thanks for explaining this to me.

And this is a perfect oportunity for me to once again raise another question:

-what about forum support for non-english languages?
-the main site is translated into many languages (with new ones on the way) so it's only understandable that non-english speaking visitors try writing in their own language. The review they can read in their language is actually decieving if they can't ask for help in it as well!