Author: Kevin Stafford
Date: 23:57:41 11/07/01
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Perhaps it would be possible to add a link to automatically translate the text of a message with babelfish or another similar service. The translations are obviously not perfect, but I'm sure they would be sufficient to get the point of the message across. This would be an easy to implement solution (at least I believe it would), and would allow a much broader base of users to participate in the forum. Beyond this, I've wondered occassionally why this forum full of extremely intelligent programmers and general tech people doesn't use more advanced forum software. I realize that what we have now does the job, but there are many useful features I believe that could be added with some off-the-shelf forum software. I'm not talking about a wide variety of smilies or anything like that, but features like the aformentioned translation links, user-configurable profanity censors (to get around the previous moderation problem of how much profanity is acceptable), and perhaps a choice of views in which to view the posts, instead of showing every response to every thread on the main page. I'm thinking of something like the open-source Jive (http://www.jivesoftware.com/, check out the forums there for an example), although they've started charging for it now. A quick google search also brought up Snitz: http://forum.snitz.com/, and Phorum: http://phorum.org/ as free solutions. These are all made to be easy to install and configure in a short time. Anyway, this is all just something I've been thinking about, and I'm curious what other people think of it. I realize a lot of the readership are purists, but there are advantages beyond the flashiness a new forum would provide. This is especially true with the high volume of posts the chess thinkers forum has been getting lately. A feature which provided some sort of personal censor list is sorely needed there in my opinion. Regards, Kevin
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