suggestion: automatic language selection

Submitted by KIAaze on Fri, 2008-04-04 06:43.

Posts: 98
Joined: 2007-09-10

When you go to google.com for the first time (or from a clean unpersonalized system), you are automatically redirected to the Google page of the country you're in.
Firefox.com does the same.

Why not do the same for getgnulinux.org?
It will make the link buttons even better. Smiling

P.S: I actually hate it when google does that for me, but http://www.google.com/ncr simply solves the problem. ^^

Fri, 2008-04-04 10:05 Yeah I hate that too with

libervisco

Posts: 3783
Joined: 2006-05-04

Yeah I hate that too with google. Smiling

I'm not sure if it's neccessary for GGL though since particular language sites are actually under their own domain names and as such in a way advertised separately. When speaking to someone in german you would link them to http://www.linuxfueralle.de/ (provided they're a native speaker of course) or english to getgnulinux.org etc.

I can imagine cases where it could be useful and those where it might not. For example it's clearly useful if someone did somehow heard of GGL, but is not a native or good english speaker and lives in Spain, to get a spanish site immediately. On the other hand, an american traveler could happen to be in germany on some conference and get the german site even though he doesn't want to. Same goes for germans who prefer to read english online..

So, maybe just having flag buttons is a nice solution as is, but let's see what others think. Smiling

Thanks

Libervis Network - Because Life's Not Read-Only

Fri, 2008-04-04 11:08 Personally I think language

tbuitenh

Posts: 1059
Joined: 2005-12-21

Personally I think language selection based on IP address is annoying on any site. It makes the wrong assumption that if you are in a country, the language of that country must be your first language. Also, it is as if the creator of the website assumes the visitor is too stupid to recognize his own flag.

And what about the countries with multiple official languages?

CAN I HAS FIXD CAPSLOK KEE PLZ?

Sun, 2008-04-06 14:13 Automatic language selection really sucks

reptiler

Posts: 721
Joined: 2006-03-28

tbuitenh wrote:

It makes the wrong assumption that if you are in a country, the language of that country must be your first language.

I agree. I find it quite annoying that I get Google in Chinese on fresh systems, or when I clear out my cookies...

Mon, 2008-04-07 12:36 Well, is it possible to

KIAaze

Posts: 98
Joined: 2007-09-10

Well, is it possible to detect the system language?

Fri, 2008-04-11 12:13 this is my Firefox user

Whistler

Posts: 106
Joined: 2006-01-03

this is my Firefox user agent string:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; zh-CN; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071128 Iceweasel/2.0.0.11 (Debian-2.0.0.11-1)

so there is a "zh-CN" which indicates my system language. But I don't think this is available in IE.

whistler_wmz at users dot sourceforge dot net

Thu, 2008-04-24 15:38 The consensus usually is

ariadacapo

Posts: 538
Joined: 2006-07-13

The consensus usually is that language selection based either on IP (general case) or browser user agent string (which most people don't customize) can easily become annoying.

We do plan to implement a redirection when/if we release localised versions of the same language (ex US English vs. UK English). But this is not a priority right now.

Speaking of flags, we will drop them soon (the distinction between country and language is sometimes a sensitive topic), probably when the next translation is released. We have a fairly good idea of an alternative, and will discuss when the time comes.

Thanks

Olivier.

I apologize in advance that I often need lots of time to reply to posts - thanks for your patience!
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