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

[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.