934987 - mozillians.org should not put the locale into the url

Status: VERIFIED WONTFIX

(Participation Infrastructure :: Phonebook, defect)

Description

[Arpad Borsos [:Swatinem]]

Putting the locale identifier into the url is kind of an anti-pattern. Better to use `Accept-Language` for first visit and then maybe a Cookie later if someone explicitly changes the locale.

Comment 1

[Gordon P. Hemsley [:GPHemsley]]

FTR, I think it's Accept-Language that does the detection in the first place when you visit a URL without the locale identifier.

Comment 2

[Axel Hecht [:Pike]]

IMHO, this only matters if you surf a page and share the link, or if you're manually editing the url.

If you share the link, there are two use-cases:

* share what you're looking at, including the specific language. For example, "there's a bad translation for X, or a layout bug in Hebrew".
* share the page you're looking at to people with a variety of language preferences

I'm not sold that one is better than the other, but I can see that working around the URL in the latter case is easier than in the first.

If you're manually editing URLs, the more detail you have the better, I guess.

Comment 3

[Axel Hecht [:Pike]]

Also, this is deep in playdoh/funfactory/whatnot land. I guess we should fix it over there, and not fork the behavior just for mozillians.org.

Comment 4

[Ed Morley [:emorley]]

(In reply to Axel Hecht [:Pike] from comment #2)
> I'm not sold that one is better than the other, but I can see that working
> around the URL in the latter case is easier than in the first.

I would say the second case is *much* more likely than the first - and the first is better suited to a "report this page" type link.

Comment 5

[Andrei Hajdukewycz [:sancus]]

(In reply to Axel Hecht [:Pike] from comment #3)
> Also, this is deep in playdoh/funfactory/whatnot land. I guess we should fix
> it over there, and not fork the behavior just for mozillians.org.

Unlikely. This isn't just a random decision, it's actually essentially required for sites that serve content. You won't find many sites that serve actual content that don't put locales in the URL, because it's what Google recommends and it makes both caching and SEO much more complicated if you have URLs that can be serving any random one out of 50 completely different sets of content, for example.

So, for example, this makes a LOT of sense on AMO and SUMO. It also makes debugging simpler, and frankly it's only an issue for people who are paying attention to URLs to begin with. Which is basically nobody.

Now, the only reason I'm leaving this bug open for now is because I think there actually are good reasons for Mozillians to be an exception to the general rule that locale in the URL is correct:

Mozillians doesn't actually have content, that is, we don't publish anything on it. It's a collection of user profiles, and connections between those user profiles. Essentially all we're localizing is the UI, so, like Facebook, it would actually make some sense to use Accept-Language by default and let you set your preferred language as an account setting and then use that. We also don't care much about SEO, since the majority of the site is behind a registration wall, and even for people who make their profiles public, making sure those people show up in a Google search is not very important to us.

However, I'm not convinced that it's worth spending any coding time on this. It's a minor quirk for people who copy paste URLs on the site, and that's all, tbh.

Comment 6

[Francesco Lodolo [:flod]]

I don't think we should change the current behavior and keep locale codes in the URL.

Having said that, it could be useful to have a "Translation bar" like the one is under work for mozilla.org (bug 906943).

Comment 7

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

(In reply to Francesco Lodolo [:flod] from comment #6)
> I don't think we should change the current behavior and keep locale codes in
> the URL.

These kind of comments aren't really helpful. Why do you think the current behavior is right / preferable? Anything that hasn't yet been mentioned in previous comments?

Comment 8

[Francesco Lodolo [:flod]]

(In reply to Dão Gottwald [:dao] from comment #7)
> These kind of comments aren't really helpful. Why do you think the current
> behavior is right / preferable? Anything that hasn't yet been mentioned in
> previous comments?

Sorry about that. Andrei explained perfectly in Comment 5 the reasons why we shouldn't fix this upstream, and my comment was mainly meant as a reply to his last paragraph.

(In reply to Andrei Hajdukewycz [:sancus] from comment #5)
> However, I'm not convinced that it's worth spending any coding time on this.
> It's a minor quirk for people who copy paste URLs on the site, and that's
> all, tbh.

Comment 9

[Andrei Hajdukewycz [:sancus]]

After putting a lot of thought into this, I'm going to step up and WONTFIX it. While it's not an unreasonable request on this type of site, it doesn't seem worth the time to write code to deviate from the general webdev behaviour, not to mention the risk of introducing additional bugs by deviating from that.

The overall user impact of leaving things as they are is pretty minimal.

Comment 10

[Matt Brandt [:mbrandt]]

Bumping to QA verified wontfix per comment 9