Dolibarr is a great product, but I can’t stop to think how much better it would be if there was only one forum which everyone could communicate there. I personally go between the French and English forum, and use google translate to understand the French forum. Many times I’ve found a solution people are asking for in the English forum with no activity or answers, and the French forum has the same question and with a solution. I can only think of the saying “divide and conquer” when I see this happening (with Dolibarr being the one conquered). I’ve not even tried going to the other forums. I know using English as the “international” language is perhaps in bad taste to some, but sadly English is considered the principal unofficial “international” language (PS, my native language is not English). The community support would be a lot better if there was only one forum (isn’t that the philosophy of Dolibarr to start with anyways? only one program and using translations if somebody desires?). I see Github projects with much less activity, but I receive much faster support and help simply because there is only one forum and all the community is there in that forum. Dolibarr community is fragmented and we can’t help each other as easily, leaving many (including me) frustrated when we have a hard time finding support. And also think about the people that put a lot of their time into giving help to Dolibarr, only to latter find out that the same problem is in another forum and all their time they spent writing up a solution/explanation is basically unseen in the other forums.
Edit: I’m not saying that the solution is to have an only English forum (even though that is the solution to many international projects in github and outside), but perhaps all the forums could be integrated into one and use some google-translate API (or other) in the website to automatically translate and do searches across all posts of all languages to see if there’s a relevant post.
Interesting question, there are 4 main forums for Dolibarr community (English, French, Spanish and German).
I agree that one forum instead of 4 would be better, but translation API … It will end with strange messages…
Dolibarr decided to go International and English a few years back, but I agree that French forum has much more active users than the others.
Don’t know what would be the best way to handle that.
The problem is that the community is mainly french speaking people and if you do this the forum will be much less crowded…
You have many online tools to translate into french, we use them a lot to translate to english, but why always want that french people adapt to other ?
Il y a un proverbe en France qui dit “on ne peut pas avoir le beurre et l’argent du beurre”… applied to this post, it means that you have a wonderful tool mainly made by french speaking people, and it is kind of normal for non french speaking people to adapt to this situation if they want a good support.
I know this is not politically correct to say this, but sometimes it is good to remind the facts.
I know that, nut at least the forum for development and technical issues should be English. If you are a developer or technical support I suppose you can speak and write English…
true for me but far from true from all people
i mean in France, a lot of company use dolibarr, and integrators like altairis have most of their customers in France (or in french speaking countries) so there is no need for technical support people to know english… developers are better at this but not not necessarily very fluent in english
I think it just depends the mission of Dolibarr. My impression coming from outside, is that Dolibarr takes focus in being one program with multiple languages. But the Dolibarr community is not one community with multiple languages, is multiple communities with one language.
When I made this post, I was frustrated because I was having problem, and was using Google translate to translate and search the French forum (and I think other forums too). I found solutions and now I’m happy with my installation. So my original thought was to somehow combine all forums into one and somehow automate this manual translate and search I did. But I agree with what @ksar mentioned, it would be tricky to implement well, and results would probably be messy still… until maybe just recently? Seems like discourse released a multilingual plugin in June: Discourse Multilingual plugin
Maybe one forum could import all posts from all forums, and use this plugin? Seems like the Dolibarr community is perfect target for experimenting with the multilingual plugin, after all, it seems very Dolibarr-esque?
Hello
There is the same debate on the french forum at the moment, and it seems to have a consensus for one single forum with multiple language.
I agree with that too; it will be easier.
Now, i do not know who decide and who take the lead on this project
Best regards
Christophe
