[Mageia-discuss] IRC community channels - need a ruling from the board

[Marc Paré]

Le 2010-10-03 20:19, Wolfgang Bornath a écrit :
> 2010/10/4 Marc Paré<marc at marcpare.com>:
>>
>> The ISO country codes were devised for such situations. The recognized
>> German language code is now "ger" as seen by the ISO Country code charts.
>
> Thanks for this lecture, it's the first time I even hear/read about
> those 3-letter codes. In all the years of internet usage, in web,
> usenet, mail I never came across this. Whenever somebody referred to
> Germany and the language German it was "de". You never stop
> learning...
>
> So we should change all the URLs for the language-specific pages like
> mageia.org/de into mageia.org/ger (and all other languages) same with
> the IRC channels, unless the channels are country-related. I wonder
> whether the users of such pages and channels know this. I don't think
> that anybody in Germany would search for "ger"...
>
> How would you suggest to solve this?
>

I'll just use my magazine as an example, when I post a news item, I post 
the country code. Some readers said that they were confused about this 
and I just posted a link in the FAQ to inform them. Most of the readers 
are now well informed of the system and I get very few comments about 
country codes anymore. http://www.EarlyMusicNews.org (it's in kind of a 
live re-build right now -- for a couple of reasons.)

There just needs to be an FAQ for the explanation to users and the IRC 
channels are already mostly there. If the UK users wish to have their 
own channel, then, following the naming pattern that Mageia has adopted 
it would be #mageia-uk for the UK country channel, #mageia-eng for the 
english language user channel; #mageia-de for the German country 
channel, #mageia-ger for the german language channel. Once people get 
the hang of it, it will be better understood. I don't really think it 
would be a big deal to re-organize.

There will be the usual complaints from the few but the FAQ will just 
explain and common sense will prevail.

Marc