Still no supervision in the French and Spanish forums?

I know the message below is extremely long, so I would like to ask humbly anyone opening it to bear with me and read if in full. Many thanks to those who do.

Why am I finally giving up?

The OP of this post is dated August 6, 2005 and my message is really a continuation of a discussion that began February 27 of the same year in another thread. It is true that my efforts for trying to improve the forums in Spanish had started much earlier than that, but I will ignore that previous phase, as it was not public, and involved some unpleasant incidents, of which being excluded of a non-working private group for quoting its coordinator to explain why it wasn't working, was the most unpleasant.

I have been treading mills for my whole long life, so not getting any results in four years wasn't as discouraging as it may seem to some. However, the chaos introduced in all the Adobe forums by the new UI that we have been imposed by force and without listening to our complaints and requests for improvements has transformed the forums in Spanish in a completely useless appendix of the forums in English. Eighteen posts in the last four weeks, and only two in the past week, are certainly not an indication of a healthy, active forum for a language that has a larger number of native speakers than English. And my sad conviction is that, if in months Adobe has not been willing, or has not been able, to do anything visible to diminish the chaos in the forums in English, it is really more than Quixotic to expect it to do anything to rescue the forums in Spanish from their at present inevitable doom. Certainly not if it has neglected and ignored them completely for years.

One powerful reason for foreseeing doom is this: all Adobe products, including all the ex-Macromedia ones, have now been housed in just one single forum in Spanish, without even a couple of sub forums to make it easier to find one's way through the different topics. Considering the really large number of Adobe products, it would be insane to consider this is a good or practical idea, or that it can contribute in any way to improve those Forums (that Forum nowadays).

However, the main reason for not having any faith in seeing the Spanish forum grow and bloom is that it seems to have been closed to newcomers, specially if they do not know any English. It is the newcomers who feed any forum and keep it alive; without them, any forum becomes just a nice meeting place for old timers. Although it is true that many of them keep asking the same old questions, it's the talented ones who bring the challenging new questions that, especially in technical forums such as these, open interesting, far reaching and enlightening discussions that make all the participants understand better how the programs they use work.

I invite you to consider how a Spanish-speaking user of an Adobe product who never heard of these forums is supposed to obtain help in them. (In what follows I will speak of a "he" not because of my machismo, but just to keep the text simple). His obvious first step in trying to obtain any kind of help would be to visit one of the Adobe sites in Spanish, such as Adobe Spain. He will find there a button labeled "Soporte" (support) with a dropdown menu where he may or may not notice a "Foros" (forums) link. Assuming that he does, and that he knows one can obtain free and quick help if forums, if he clicks on it, he will be taken after a considerably long time to a page that is fully in English, as it is in fact the index page of these forums, http://forums.adobe.com/index.jspa.

Obviously, he is in trouble, but we will assume he is not one to be easily defeated. So, as his question is related to Photoshop, he clicks on the blue Ps icon, only to be taken to another page fully in English. And the story will repeat itself if he tries to proceed any further. So if he finally finds his way to the right forum, he will be faced with just the two following alternatives: he either gives up, or he posts his question in Spanish -provided he can get through the login procedure for first visitors.

Assume now that he still doesn't give up (or that his question was related to one of the Adobe products not having special icons). He may notice there is an INTERNATIONAL FORUMS link down in the non visible part of the page, which perhaps looks to him sufficiently close to FOROS INTERNACIONALES as to guess its meaning and click on it. He will find four countries listed there (with their names in English!): France, Germany, Japan, and Spain. He may be learned enough to know that Spain is English for España, and click on that button in relief. However, he might not be, or live in one of the many other countries where Spanish is the official language, and so think the Spain button is not for him.

Well, let's now assume that, by whatever means, he finally manages to press the Spain button.  Marvel of marvels! At long last, a page with a large fractions of its texts fully in Spanish! But wait... there are some disturbing factors. "Last post" (in English) is from "5 days ago" (again in English; and I am quoting from the page where the above process took me some minutes ago, which is the opening page of the forum in Spanish). And the 7th thread, from "1 week ago" has 0 "Replies" (in English). Not really very promising.

At this point, exasperated by the number of things on the page he can't decipher, he may notice a button at the top that reads "United States (change)" (all in English), and he may be clever enough to guess this may be a way to get everything written in Spanish. So he hopefully clicks on it, only to be taken to a new page fully in English where he is supposed to know what he has to do. Assuming he goes through the long list of places - languages (fully in English), he may be clever enough to notice there are only two entries associated with "Spanish" (quite a different word from Español!). If he chooses one of them, he will be taken out of the forum and to one of the Adobe Store sites -for example, back to Adobe Spain.

Well, never mind, you think, at least he will now have everything in Spanish. Unfortunately, not so. Assuming he manages to find his was back to the forum in Spanish, on getting there he will see that everything is just the same as before. Even the button in the top row still reads "United States (change).

Now I would like to ask the patient reader who has followed me to this point the following question. Assume for a few seconds that Adobe was a German company, with all original versions of its products in German, with an excellent set of sites and forums in German, and you were trying for the first time to get help in English about how to use one of its products. Would you survive through the process I have just described if you change "English" to "German" and "Spanish" to "English"?

One last thought. In the above, I was careful not to say anything about the extremely abusive price policy Adobe applies outside the USA, simply because this is a problem affecting every such country, and not only Spanish speaking ones. But it is another factor to consider.

Claudio,

I believe a translation here would help the OP get some help.

http://forums.adobe.com/thread/434077?tstart=0

This is a case of No Spanish supervision of forums.

Alas, time to fight a beauty, less time for forums.

It is early this year: time to enjoy the frailness of the cherry blossom.

So this thread survived the journey through the abyss.