h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

So if there is a demand (subject to a vote)

It looks like we need to -
Appoint a volunteer editor(s) to oversee their chosen language thread.

Give them the responsibility to censor and doubtful posts, even if they refer them.

Be able to suspend the thread if they can't maintain the editorship for what ever reason, if they can't be subbed.

Then this thing will work as it will be maintained by those passionate enough to support the forum.

>> The downside of a 'french language' site would be if it got around that there was an English company, providing a service specifically for France, without adequate moderation, and it became _the_ place for French students to libel French politicians etc. <<

I would go with the option to have the French volunteers run a sunsidiary hosted with a provider in France and sort out their own legal foibles. "We" - as in "the original UK-based h2g2c2" - can offer technical support and guidance but the liability is theirs. This construct is used in many multinational companies, so why not follow their example?

Could I be of any help when it comes to English/Italian?

Sounds like the first voulteer (see its not going to be that hard)

Well done Vittorio Pleased to meet you by the way

If we get threads in Italian you could certainly help just by keeping your eyes open for any violations of the house rules etc

Whatever house that may be.

>> Whatever house that may be.
Currently I'd say Heartbreak Hotel.

Dutch referee/mod/sub-italic for hire here.

Thats 2 its all starting to come together Polyglot Plaza is comeing together

German and French should be a breeze

I'm liking what I've read of this thread.

Yeah, me too.

Hi Dmitri Gheorgheni whats the Ogam on the PS say I cant find a translation that makes sense. I get O G B A M A L F A E O

I don't know, Bob. I can't read it, either. I just pulled it out of the picture library. Now, runes I could give you a good guess on, but ogham's out of my area of expertise...

O G B A M A L F A E O

ogam alfa eo is then my best translation

I'd like to see scripts other than Latin enabled. Can't do cyrillic atm (hang on, just check &#1081;&#1094;&#1091;&#1082;&#1077;&#1085;&#1075;&#1096;&#1075;&#1096;&#1097;&#1093;&#1079;&#1092;&#1099;&#1074;&#1087;&#1088;&#1086;&#1088;&#1083;&#1083 which apart from anything else, annoyed me when I wanted to add a couple of words to an entry, just to help people navigate the Moscow underground. Plus if we are going to throw open the floor to other languages, then we ought to make it possible for them all, really.

Yup. The funny characters there should have been cyrillic. Not enabled.

I'm not sure how complicated it is to add Cyrillic, Greek, and etc, but this would be cool, if possible.

There might be a problem adding ALL of them, though. For one thing, I am pretty sure we would be incapable of moderating Chinese, Korean, Tamil, or Hindi - though Hindi might be possible, since we have Researchers from India. How about Arabic and Farsi, both of which I am unable to even transliterate?

I am equally sure the Cherokee syllabary would be beyond our capability.

Eventually, though?

And, y'know, philosophically?

I don't know. We'd have to ask someone technical. I know I can't read some scripts, and I can't print right-to-left, but I don't know how complicated that is.

> I am equally sure the Cherokee syllabary would be beyond our capability.

I don't see why. The most sensible character encoding to switch to would be UTF-8, which is a Unicode encoding which includes Chinese, Hangul, Cyrillic, and Cherokee, among many others.

TRiG.