Balkan language forum

by **benga** on Tue May 15, 2012 1:49 pm

Name says it all, there are:

188 players from Serbia
101 players from Croatia
32 players from Slovenia
17 players from Macedonia
12 players from Bosnia and Herzegovina
6 players from Montenegro

and we deserve to have our own language forum.

How this will benefit the site and/or other comments:
Let us talk trash in our own language and finally give qwert a chance to call CC his home

(just browsed, Italy has 155 and has its own forum)

Thank you!

by **agentcom** on Tue May 15, 2012 7:11 pm

benga wrote:Name says it all, there are:
188 players from Serbia
101 players from Croatia
32 players from Slovenia
17 players from Macedonia
12 players from Bosnia and Herzegovina
6 players from Montenegro

and we deserve to have our own language forum.

How this will benefit the site and/or other comments:
Let us talk trash in our own language and finally give qwert a chance to call CC his home

(just browsed, Italy has 155 and has its own forum)

Thank you!

If your stats are right, this seems fair. Is this something that has to go through the Suggestions Forum? I would think some sort of Forum Mod would have the power to do this. But without knowing the answer to that, I suppose this is probably the best place for it. Good luck.

by **TheForgivenOne** on Wed May 16, 2012 10:19 am

It would be an Admin that would have to do it. And out of all those users, how many are actual posters?

by **DiM** on Wed May 16, 2012 10:26 am

i'm opposed to this suggestion.
past experience has taught us that international forums aren't really long-lasting. some people get excited and post at first then everything slowly dies.
some of the international forums have less posts in the last year than what i've written today.

by **Qwert** on Wed May 16, 2012 11:12 am

DiM wrote:i'm opposed to this suggestion.
past experience has taught us that international forums aren't really long-lasting. some people get excited and post at first then everything slowly dies.
some of the international forums have less posts in the last year than what i've written today.

Well if you look on that way,then moderators need to shot down all international forums( you have 10 forums), because they are not have so much visitors(finish forum have only 18 topic and 80-90 post).
I realy dont know what requirements need to open international forum, but i dont have nothing against this.
Name of forum are not quite correct,because >Balkan LAnguage Forum< exclude Romanian,Bulgarian,Greeks, Albanian.
Maybe need to call >Former Yugoslavia language Forum< because we all talk with very very similar language ,and understand perfectly.

by **agentcom** on Wed May 16, 2012 12:25 pm

DiM wrote:i'm opposed to this suggestion.
past experience has taught us that international forums aren't really long-lasting. some people get excited and post at first then everything slowly dies.
some of the international forums have less posts in the last year than what i've written today.

I doubt there's much of a resource cost to keeping these forums up though. And it may make a new user feel welcome. Also, you don't know how many people watch those fora for new posts. If I was a native spanish speaker, I might first head over there to ask a general question rather than try to post in broken english in the main forum.

So I think there should be a relatively low threshold for approval of this type of idea. The threshold should be lower than that for the creation of other fora because language can be an ABSOLUTE barrier to communication. Thus, you can't just tell them: "You do not deserve a separate forum because you have too few users that would be interested. Instead, feel free to post topics in the General Discussion or Off-topic areas of this site." This "solution" depends on enough fluency to be able to navigate to those topics. Anyway, I think that the evidence that is presented almost meets that threshold. The key element that is missing right now is this:

TheForgivenOne wrote:It would be an Admin that would have to do it. And out of all those users, how many are actual posters?

I think that the OP should ask some of those users to come over here and express their interest in opening this thread. But once we see that a handful of users would support it, it should be implemented. It may grow over time, it may die.

As a sidenote to DiM's concern, I would be curious what would happen if the mods headed to a language forum that was inactive and posted a topic "Does anyone mind closing this forum?" Then post something like the Tourney Mods post: "This forum has had little or no activity in the past month/year. We are trying to guage interest in the foreign language fora. If there is insufficient interest in maintaining this forum, it will be closed. Please let us know if you actively post or follow this forum." If there's little or no response, perhaps it should be shut down.

But shutting down unused fora is a separate question from opening a new one. And on that issue, I say that if they (the OP and others) can show the interest, then let them create it.

by **DiM** on Wed May 16, 2012 3:52 pm

those forums unnecessarily extend the main forum page.
if there was a way to hide/collapse all those forums i wouldn't mind having one for each and every language. but as it is now, they're pretty much useless.

your idea with the mod intervention is a good one. if 1 week passes with nobody posting a mod steps in and asks what's going on. if 1 more week passes and still nobody posts, then the forum is archived and removed.
8 of the 10 international forums have no posts in the last month. one of them doesn't even have posts this year.
some of those forums are 5 years old and in 5 years they had less posts than i've written in the last month. and i'm nowhere near as active as i used to be.

by **agentcom** on Wed May 16, 2012 4:24 pm

DiM wrote:those forums unnecessarily extend the main forum page.
if there was a way to hide/collapse all those forums i wouldn't mind having one for each and every language. but as it is now, they're pretty much useless.

your idea with the mod intervention is a good one. if 1 week passes with nobody posting a mod steps in and asks what's going on. if 1 more week passes and still nobody posts, then the forum is archived and removed.
8 of the 10 international forums have no posts in the last month. one of them doesn't even have posts this year.
some of those forums are 5 years old and in 5 years they had less posts than i've written in the last month. and i'm nowhere near as active as i used to be.

Good points all. I agree that there should be a way to hide/remove these.

However, given that there is not, and given the comparative evidence presented (about which languages have them) and provided that the OP can find some supporters who would use this forum, I am still in favor of this suggestion.

That is not to say that I wouldn't be in favor of another suggestion (by you perhaps?) to hide/remove them. I know this stance might sound weird, but I think we should deal with this suggestion on its merits given the current paradigm, rather than use this suggestion as a way to backdoor in a limit on the language fora.

So, basically I agree with you to some extent, but would rather deal with that issue elsewhere.