Merge Chinese discourse into this site

Meta Discussion
#1

We currently have a Chinese discourse for Julia with the following reasons:

  • non English speakers can directly enter the discourse without reading any English with discourse.juliacn.com
  • The server is local in mainland China, with a domain name registering (as the law requires)
  • A local server might be faster for users (unfortunately due to some tech issue, this one is not really fast as well)

However, it would better to discuss things in one place if possible.

As discussed in slack with @viralbshah and @staticfloat , it will be possible to import old Chinese topics to this site technically. An initial plan is:

  • sync the contents first in this site (which will direct people to this site)
  • start solving and testing how to work around against GFW (the Great Fire Wall).

Any other comments?

#2

I think it would be great to have a common discourse for everyone, with support for other languages.

Can we have confirmation from users in mainland China that they can access discourse.julialang.org ok (lag may be acceptable as long as it works).

1 Like
#3

Does discourse provide any sort of language features (e.g. filter by language, auto-translation), or would they all just appear in the one page?

#4

Is there any concern about the site not accessible from China at times due to the strict censorship aka. the great firewall of China?

#5

This site is not blocked yet.

The policy looks vague, generally all website should register in an institute there with a person or a company and should have a local server. But now, some sites are blocked some are not. Generally, we will need a local server not only for better speed but also to be more legal.

But maybe it’s just because we are not large enough now…

But different area has different policy, I’m not sure if this site is accessible in Xinjiang and Tibet at the moment.

#6

The main site, julialang.org was blocked/slow due to use of some google services years ago in my mind. (it’s good now)

Github.com was also blocked once, since it is not registered (but I think it is because some people use gh-pages, issues and repos for political topics). I think the registration will at least keep your site be accessible stably.

Another concern is that how do we provide more native experience in Chinese? The topics and tags are all in English on this site, but discourse.juliacn.com (almost) everything is Chinese.

#7

Perhaps this is only relevant for those who speak both Chinese and English? For the rest of us, I guess posts in a language we do not understand would just be a distraction.

Mixed-language topics would be especially vexing, as one would have no way to tell if someone has contributed a solution without speaking both languages.

4 Likes
#8

Mixed-language topics would be especially vexing, as one would have no way to tell if someone has contributed a solution without speaking both languages.

+1 for this, an auto-redirecting would be sufficient.

#9

Also relevant are the community guidelines, stewards and moderators who may not understand the foreign language enough to moderate. So it will be a platform associated with the public image of Julia and Julia Computing without much knowledge of what’s going on in the foreign language posts, unless new moderators are added to cover all supported languages.

1 Like
#10

Please no. The presumption of internet sites guessing preferred language/locality and redirecting there is annoying to no end (if I wanted Swedish google I would have connected to google.se). While this ship has sailed in general, there is no need to replicate this annoyance.

The only thing that makes sense to share between languages is login infrastructure, i.e. accounts.

1 Like
#11

What constitutes an action that requires government censorship in China?

Seems like it would be discouraging if the merge happened and then a random off-topic thread got it banned?

1 Like
#12

Ideally Discourse should allow user to specify preferred languages and filter posts accordingly. Also have a translate button for showing the post in the user’s home language.

#13

Also, can’t we just have different discourse Categories for different languages?

#14

See Spanish language community for related discussions and https://meta.discourse.org/t/make-a-multi-language-forum/18501