937390 - Threads should allow language changes

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(support.mozilla.org :: Questions, task, P3)

Description

[Ibai Garcia [:ibai]]

Since introducing the concept of support forums in languages that are not English (i.e. https://support.mozilla.org/hu/questions/ or https://support.mozilla.org/pt-BR/questions/), some questions in different forums are in a language that is not the one of the locale. See:

https://support.mozilla.org/hu/questions/971001

As a moderator, I want the ability to send questions in languages that we already have active forums to the appropriate forum: portuguese questions in the english forums should be send to the portuguese one, etc.

This is a small problem, but worth solving.

Comment 1

[Kadir Topal [:atopal]]

We've always had this issue. Mostly from people who use the English Firefox version, but speak another language. Are you saying it's gotten worse since we introduced multiple languages in the forums?

Comment 2

[Ibai Garcia [:ibai]]

Not necessarily but now we have the ability to make it better by sending questions to the right forum/language combination. In the past we couldn't send them anywhere.

Comment 3

[Ricky Rosario [:rrosario, :r1cky]]

We might need this sooner because English questions are being asked in the Finnish support forum:
https://support.mozilla.org/fi/questions

Comment 4

[madalina]

I fully support this, non-English language forums are getting quite a high number of English questions. This is an issue for small forums like Finnish or Hungarian as they have a small number of questions anyway and half of them being in English can be very confusing.

Comment 5

[Ibai Garcia [:ibai]]

There are 2 things: One is to have this feature to treat the symptom. 

The other and most important one is: Why is this spiking with Suomi and Hungarian? Why do users of this language ask questions in English? 

Do users think that the whole help center is in English? Maybe we should encourage a minimum of localization before having a forum?

Comment 6

[Kadir Topal [:atopal]]

That's a good question to bring up, Ibai. There are up and downsides to requiring more localization before allowing forums. There might be easier ways to address this at least in the short term: We could show a message in the AAQ in non-English languages that encourages people to post in that language instead of English or transfer them to the English forums in case they really want to ask in English. 

Re Localization:

* Forums make a lot of sense for small languages where relatively few people are using Firefox. If your target audience is small, it might make more sense to just answer questions as they come up, instead of localizing and keeping articles up to date at all times. On the other hand: Translating the top 20 can be done in relatively short time (less than 20 hours) and would deflect most questions, even for small languages.

* The UI does not change much and localizing it is useful, even if all you are going to use is the forum. On the other hand: You'd have to localize at least parts of the KB UI and the AAQ flow too, and we don't break out strings by area. That's almost 2000 strings today and localizing that will take you on the order of 60 hours.

Maybe it's time for us to break those areas down, so that you can decide whether you want to localize the discussion forums and the administration parts, or only the user facing parts for the KB and the support forums. I filed bug 939733 for that.

To conclude: I don't think we can reasonably expect teams to translate the UI first, before they can take advantage of the forums at this point. However, once that is less of a hurdle, we could expect the UI to be localized and strongly suggest that teams localize top 10/20 articles in case they want to use the support forums. In the mean time I suggest we use a message in the AAQ flow to encourage people to ask their question in their language. What do you guys think?

In any case, putting this into the next sprint, so we can at least alleviate the symptoms until we can address the root cause.

Comment 7

[:ibai]

I think that translating the UI of the site is the first step before opening a forum. How can users find a way to ask a question if the site is in English?

Regarding the article translations, you know my appetite to ensure certain level of coverage (probably more than 20 articles) in order to activate the locale instead of pushing it to the English site. With this context, perhaps we should create a process that goes something like this:

- No UI translated: The locale has no SUMO version and users are forwarded to English or a preferred fallback site (Catalan to Spanish, etc).
- UI translated and local community wants a forum: The site becomes forum centric and we don't promote the non translated articles.
- UI translated and local community doesn't want a forum and KB articles are less than XX: The locale is hidden until the level of articles is created.
- The threshold is passed: SUMO is up and running (with or without forum depending the interest of the local community).

As you say, is probably a better experience for users and a better investment of the time to focus on the forum when the amount of people visiting us from a specific locale is small.

Ultimately we should aim to have a model that is good for contributors as much is good for users looking for help.

Comment 8

[madalina]

Until now the rule of thumb was that if the AAQ and Support Forum UIs were translated we would give a green light for forums.

I understand why this is happening on Hungarian (the UI is not completely translated and there is plenty of English in the AAQ flow). Finnish on the other hand is pretty much fully translated, the AAQ and the support forum are all in Finnish. The remaining strings don't seem to be anything a user would face that would determine him to believe this is an English support forum. So this is a bit strange for me up to the point where I wonder if there is another cause for this to happen, not only the UI localization.

Either way I am ok to ask for full UI localization before forum launch. We can also add a message in the AAQ flow as Kadir suggested. However I would strongly advocate for also introducing the ability to move threads to other forums as right now, no matter what the root cause is, we have a lot of English threads that are not being dealt with.

Comment 9

[Kadir Topal [:atopal]]

Madalina, to clarify, the feature to move questions to the correct forum is planned for the next sprint.

I'm assuming that we are discussing future plans here, which is probably not a good idea. We should file a new bug for that or discuss in email/forums first.

Just to reiterate. Currently, if we expect people to localize the UI, that's about 60+ hours of pure localization work, before they can make use of the support forums. Since we are talking about locales that don't do much localization of the KB itself, that's quite a lot of non-support related work. Not sure, if we really want to do that. Maybe there is another model we can use (we could pay for the UI translation for example, if the community pledges to do the support part)

I like Ibai's idea of making the site more Q/A focused in case there is no localized KB.

Comment 10

[Ricky Rosario [:rrosario, :r1cky]]

User's with change_question permission get to change the question locale. This should be similar to what we have for changing product+topic.

I think this is 2 pts:
* New locale picker form (it should only allow AAQ_LANGUAGES).
* Add it to the UI in the question details template.
* New view to handle the form POST.
* Test(s) to verify it is working.

Comment 11

[Ibai Garcia [:ibai]]

That sounds good to me.

Kadir/Madalina, let's discuss the specifics for requirements in a separate thread. I think that we are getting into something there.

Comment 12

[Rehan Dalal (Inactive)]

I've been working on this but forgot to "take" it.

Comment 13

[Rehan Dalal (Inactive)]

Landed:
https://github.com/mozilla/kitsune/commit/da9ee820b2a65a48ead68382113174684a77517b

Pushed to prod by Will, right now.