Observation:
The forums are very hard to read and participate, if you don't speak French. I ask every French and English-speaking person to look at this screenshot and think how inviting you would find to participate in roleplay: https://cloud.planetmaker.de/index.php/s/n6G9A34bzTigsbRThat's how the forum looks when you speak no Icelandic (sorry my friends from there). In reality it looks like that if you speak no French and to a lesser degree no English.Yes, one can click 'translate' on every single one - but would you do that, if you don't even understand the topic?Suggested solution:
DeepL with Ryzom-local caching.The frequency and volume of new posts to the forum is (my guess) relatively low compared to what is spoken ingame (if you know actually better: please bring numbers). Thus one could send each forum posting to a one-time translation and store the results in the forum-DB. That saves bandwidth and translation costs. And it allows to deliver the automatic translations from the same source and at no additional complexity in the forums software. The forum translation service could employ an existing forum-posting-bot which would edit the postings (say a cronjob once a day) and insert the missing translations for where the posting does not provide a hand-made translation within the existing language tags.Gain:
You will have a forum which becomes as accessible as the ingame chats - thus MUCH better accessible. People from all kind of language backgrounds will feel much more at home and you can also draw role players with different language backgrounds to actually use them - or people seeking actively help when employed also outside the roleplay forums.---