“View latest topics” in my language?

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1

Hello,

The forum’s “View latest topics” feature is essentially unusable for me as most of the titles are in languages I don’t understand. Is there some way I can “View latest topics in $myLanguage”, or perhaps auto-translate all the titles?

Example of what I’m seeing (unfortunately I only speak English):

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(The URL being: OpenStreetMap Community Forum)

Cheers

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I’m afraid its not just you. While Discourse is better than most forums in that regard, transparent translations are still just a dream.

Unfortunately, no translation of thread title, see Translation of thread title - but do go on the links mentioned there and add your like for support of that feature, so maybe Discourse will add it someday.

I’m afraid the best you could do is either:

  • clicking on posts one by one and translating each one (disadvantage is additional waste of your time, as not only extra clicks, but also you’d have to read at least the start of article instead of just its title)
  • muting categories that are likely to have vast majority posts in non-english (e.g. Deutschland, Nederland, Polska…) (with disadvantage that you’ll miss occasional English post, but even more, that you’ll miss all the interesting discussion which are happening in language that happens NOT to be English)
  • using some external translator website, like you would for any other site that doesn’t have translation (disadvantage: popular ones are evil, and you’ll still have to cycle through languages)
  • give up on “View latest topics”, follow weeklyOSM instead and hope interesting topics will be mentioned there, so you can then jump in those that interest you too. (this is what I do most of the time, although I do sometimes ending up doing the first bullet point)
  • use “Unread” instead of “View latest topics”, and add watching/tracking in your preferences (see e.g. Mute Communities subcategories by default? - #2 by nukeador)
  • or you can learn several other popular additional languages, and the problem goes away (disadvantage: might take some time; but it might end up being useful even outside of OSM :smile:)
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3

I suggest muting categories for languages you don’t speak. This will hide them from the aggregate views (Latest, New, etc). Have a look at this topic for more discussion on this issue:

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4

Thank you both for the info. I’ll try muting the high-traffic non-English communities for now, and hopefully Discourse’s support for multiple languages will improve in the future :slight_smile:

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Right now all languages of the known world and some more is mashed together in this Discourse instance. It means that using any browsing technique (top, new, latest, etc) result 90% of the threads in a foreign language. While it’s encouraging that people think I could learn them all it needs a bit more time than I have handy to browse the topics here and now.

Is there any way to see only English posts (or, to generalise, to see posts in a given language)?

Apart from manually clicking through categories (and not all languages have categories), obviously.

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Sadly, I believe the only solution to (mostly) achieve this is still to mute the categories of local communities which typically communicate in languages you do not understand. You can do so in your preferences in the “tracking” tab.

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That is basically equivalent to “discourse cannot do that”. :slightly_frowning_face:

Could work if it was possible to select “active” categories, I guess, instead of permanently muting everything else. Well, muting seems to be the best current hack around, I’ll try it anyway. :man_shrugging:

Thanks!

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Recent discussion on the topic:

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I muted “Communities” category altogether, and hope that it only contains foreign communities and not ones like HOT… :roll_eyes:

Maybe there ought to be a “Non-English threads” category, or tag to be muted.

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If it ain’t possible, certainly a feature request to rather select the communities you want to see than to not see. Sort of a prime selector of first want to see all (default) and than unselect those you don’t or the inverse, select a general no and then pick the once you want, which would be about 6-7. Unselecting dozens is ‘involved’.

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(I have muted Community categories since, as of today, it contains almost only non-English threads. Well, apart from USA, but I guess Usans can set it to watched and hope that it’ll override muting.)

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Shall I spell it out as FEATURE REQUEST? :grin:

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I’m merging both conversations since they talk about how to see content just in one language(s).

My workaround for this is to edit my sidebar to include the categories I care about, by doing this, I have a quick way to see what’s new or unread. Also I track the categories I care the most to read so I can go to /unread and get a full list with only the content I want.

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A post was split to a new topic: Email links point to the old topic when merged

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Aren’t that seriously hindering searchability? (My keyword was “english”, not “my language”.)

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Not really, since this topic seems to be the first result when searching:

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…except nether title nor snippet contains relevant(-looking) quotes. Just based on my experience as of today when I have tried to look up answers before asking. It seems obvious to me that unfortunately Discourse cannot replace stackexchange-like QA sites, since it is extremely disorganised. :slightly_frowning_face:

18

Let’s move issues with search to a separate topic over :lady_beetle: This forum issues and requests, it would be useful to see examples of the searches you tried, what you got and what you expected to get instead, thanks!