more Russian-speakers are using DW

[charmian]

I've heard that more Russian speakers are using DW, and reportedly some English-speakers are complaining about it. They don't like the way that the Latest Posts page is not 100% English.

Actually, I think an influx of Russian users is not only not bad, but potentially a good thing for DW. The growth of English-speaking users IMHO seemed to have had plateaued prior to the recent DDoS. With a new group of users coming in, there's the potential for viral growth there as well. There seem to be at least 2K of Russian users, although I'm not sure how much that is relatively. However, growth may be limited by the fact that the site and its documentation are all in English.

Comments

[flourish]

Some DW users are douchebags! I'm glad to see this is happening.

[charmian]

I guess whatever group you get, there's bound to be a few bad apples. I myself didn't see any of those posts though.

[azurelunatic]

I did see stuff from one specific person, who I have seen around other parts of the site, attempting to be helpful to the site as a whole. Their attempts at help have never struck me as particularly well-thought-out nor actually helpful.

[synecdochic]

I really do wish we could offer the site in other languages! There's a ton of reasons (at least six huge ones and a bunch of minor ones) why we can't, though, and while all of them are solveable eventually, they're not the kind of things we can fix until we're a) larger and b) more profitable :(

[sophie]

Just to clarify, though, that shouldn't stop us from being able to implement thing like Azz's suggestion, which could then be used to do things like offer filtering of the Latest Things page, right? I don't *think* that better multilingual support would come with an expectation of actual support for other languages, but you'd know better than me on that.

[synecdochic]

Oh, yeah, things like that suggestion are something else entirely -- that's not "the site talking to you in your language", that's "the site making it easier for you to find your language community". I'd love to be able to do stuff like a Latest Things language filter.

[charmian]

Yeah, it is too bad. Perhaps some day in the future...

[synecdochic]

I'm really hoping. The translation effort turned into such a clusterfuck on LJ, though, that we'll have to do some serious thought to make it better on DW. At least we'll have plenty of example of What Not To Do ...

The endless-treadmill nature of the task is really discouraging for translators, though. If you look at the translation stats on LJ, you can get a picture of what I mean; for instance, the German translation team used to pride itself on keeping 100% translation, and now they're down to about 41% translated. That's not even because a ton of new features have been implemented; it's because there have been updates and changes to the various text and messaging on the sites (FAQs are particularly vulnerable to this) over time, causing complete retranslation to be necessary. (And the system doesn't necessarily save the old version, either, so you don't know what's changed.) It's maddening.