Discuss & Discover

:pray:

Dear @sujato & @blake,

I concur with @mikenz66. Itā€™s not easy to link without having to type the ID onto body of the post.

To help out and minimize the trouble for you, would you like posters to type the ID on the body?

with aƱjali and mettā,
russ

:pray:

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Thanks @Russell. I think itā€™s good to clarify the best and/or most efficient way of setting up things so that the site works well.

I agree, the automatic linking should work from the title, hopefully this is possible.

Discuss & Discover and Textual Details options inside the sidebar on a sutta text page arenā€™t there for any language except English

is this a part of the design?

iā€™m trying not to dare to presume that their accessibility could be useful for readers of other languages as well

Yes, I think itā€™s just an oversight

On a related note, would it be OK to post Essays/AV in Chinese, or is it best to keep things in English for now? For example, Chuang Chā€™un-chiang čŽŠę˜„ę±Ÿ, many of whose Chinese translations are on suttacentral, has written guided readings of 12 MA suttas and 20 SA suttas.

I suppose in the future one could do something clever with tags so that you can choose whether or not to see Discourse posts in other languages.

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I must say I am thrilled to see this idea take off so well, and to see such interest in it. Our aim is, absolutely, that there should be resources in multiple languages. How that is to happen is something we havenā€™t considered yet.

There are two distinct issues.

  1. If we have multiple posts in different languages, how do we keep the results relevant and the discussion focussed?
  2. How do we moderate discussion in languages that we donā€™t understand?

There are different ways of approaching this. The simplest would be to introduce a way of posting topics that allowed distinguishing languages. We could include a language tag, for example, maybe assign ā€œEnglishā€ by default, and if youā€™re posting in another language you can specify that. Then, on SuttaCentral, your results would be only for the language that youā€™ve chosen to read suttas in.

This wouldnā€™t be (all that) hard to implement, but it would pretty much render Discourse useless as an actual forum. At the moment weā€™re both a forum and a place for posting resources, but if thereā€™s lots of stuff in different languages, conversation will be impossible.

A better option, I think, would be to support people from different language backgrounds to run their own Discourse instance. Once we have our system worked out, we can communicate with those working with the websites in different languages, most of who we know already, and, if they want, set up forums for them. Then they do the moderation, foster conversation, and run the site, while we provide technical support. Posts from the different ā€œofficialā€ forums would get pulled on to SuttaCentral, once again, based on the language selected there.

This would get more complicated in terms of things like, how do we organize updates and so on. And of course it relies on finding interested and competent people to help. So itā€™s something that needs a deal of care and consideration before moving forward, and we need to have the kinks pretty much ironed out here before going ahead.

In any case, these are a couple of approaches that Iā€™ve thought of, probably there are other ways of doing it as well.

TL;DR: Weā€™d love to support different languages on Discourse, but weā€™re not sure how to do it yet.

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