Still no supervision in the French and Spanish forums?

Good morning,

If I may add my opinion here, I think that offering a forum in some language to let it die slowly because of sheer lack of atention and care is not doing a service to anybody.

In fact, I think that is like a restaurant service: No client is forced to enter, but no restaurant is forced to open either if people at charge is not ready to serve proper meals.

Fortunately there are many forums out there in Spanish (and I guess in French) too that can serve 'proper' threads and information. Some of them are good and some are pretty bad. But what annoys (astonishes, perhaps?) me is that a big firm like Adobe finds useful enough to open two sets of forums only to let them die of lack of maintenance.

And by the number of people that speak both languages plus English, you'd not think that finding people to patrol them would be difficult, would you?

But I am afraid this seems to be one of those corporate black holes: Nothing comes out ;)

Sorry for the unfortunate term, I must have been thinking in French ;)

Ditto for the French forums, Dorothy?

I'd be glad to continue what I started with JC (translating the "how to get help" page) by translating some FAQ's but there are a lot of posts in the wrong place. Also, I think that it is time to have product forums, so that we do not have to ask "what program are you using" on each message...

I wonder if someone has been looking for such person. Fourteen months is a somewhat long period of time for nor much to happen.

Couldn't we have all the forum pages written in proper Spanish in the meantime?

I would think that the best possible thing that could happen would be to find someone that spends time in the spanish forums that has an appropriate temperment that the host team would consider to be a good candidate for joining the team. Until and unless someone is in there with host rights, not much will happen. I've made my efforts in the past, and gave up any desire to help out due to some difficult temperments in people I was trying to work with. For better or for worse, that's where I'm at with it.

Thanks, Nigel, for thinking about the situation before throwing such advice as "don't use the forums" or "create your own". The lack of supervision is just one of the aspects I habe been asking to be improved.

As far as I can remember been told by people in the know nearly two years ago, the forums in Spanish were created as a service for a small group of Spanish speaking users in some Central American country. When I discovered them almost by chance, I found a site with very bad translations of the original English text in some places, and no translations at all in others, and that was hardly used at all because it was not known or publicized. When trying to find what could be done to improve the site, I was offered the chance of collaborating with the person in charge.

After trying to get in touch with that person for a couple of months (I never did), it turned out that that person wasn't really in charge, that he didn't know or use Adobe products, that he was an extremely busy man in his country, and had only offered to collaborate in this as a personal favour to someone with some influence here, but wasn't really interested in the matter.

I then turned to JC, who had also offered to help in improving the forums in Spanish. His response was very efficient as usual, and we slowly but steadily introduced important changes in the site, which make it much more easier to use now than when I discovered it. Apparently, when the site improved, Adobe Spain began publicising it on its site, and the number of visitors began to increase considerably.

I understand that in the meantime the French and German forums were created, both in a much better shape that the original Spanish one I knew. I also understand that in middle 2004, some still undisclosed European branch of Adobe took at least the French and Spanish forums officially in charge -just by looking at the main page of the German ones, I would guess they were luckier. Everything was stopped then; no more changes. I had just sent JC a proposition for a new, less cluttered, more rational entry page that included a link to instructions for newcomers, that he sent to the new authorities. I understand that even him doesn't know if my proposition has been read.

It is true that in these many months, JC and I have introduced some very minor changes here and there, but his hands are tied and we can do no more than that. Frome some things JC has told me, I understand that at least some pages in the Spanish forums use very old templates, which would explain the lack of some functionalities that are present in all the other forums. For example, there is no "Subscribe to this discussion by email" button at the bottom of the new message box.

So what am I asking for? First of all, I am not asking for any "right"; I think that Pierre's phrase there was unfortunate, as it gave people who don't try to understand the problem, who have nothing constructive to offer, and that in my opinion should take their witty remarks elsewhere, a chance to continue ridiculizing a situation that obviously doesn't affect them and doesn't even interest them.

Perhaps I could sumarize my requests like this. If that unnamed Adobe branch doesn't have the funds, the will, or the intention of doing something to improve the forums in Spanish, why not just leave JC, with the aid of people like me, to at least make the site functional, and have all the pages written in proper Spanish?

In my opinion, doing nothing in fourteen months, preventing anything to be done, and simply ignoring the free help that is been offered is not a wise course of action. Plus, of course,

>Adobe have created forums for use but without supervision. You only have to look at the mud-slinging that occasionally goes on in the lower depths of the English-speaking forums to realise that this is a recipe for disaster.

Guy, I prefer to read you when you make contructive posts.

That's a bit harsh. Adobe have created forums for use but without supervision. You only have to look at the mud-slinging that occasionally goes on in the lower depths of the English-speaking forums to realise that this is a recipe for disaster.

Yes, Claudio summarized the situation perfectly. He and I are lucky to know English well enough so that we can get all the help we want in the English speaking forums.

Halas, there are a lot of Spanish and French speaking users out there that do not speak another language than theirs (I'm sure that a lot of Americans can relate ;) ). Don't they deserve the same service everyone gets in the "regular" forums?

They probably are -or nearly- for the fairly large number of Spanish speaking users of Adobe products who don't know any English. As those forums are now, it would be exagerating to say they are no good, but they are certainly in much need of many improvements. This is probably one of the causes of the still low although steadily increasing number of visitors. You may not understand this, but there are some of us who think that stopping to use them is not a solution, but trying to help in improving them is. For this, we don't need the kind of help you are giving.

If Adobe eliminated their forums in English, certainly it wouldn't be as if they were cutting off water or electricity. But I'm sure there would be quite a few English speaking users of their products who would feel it was nearly as bad.

By the way, I don't need to use the forums in Spanish; I get all the help I require in their English version.

Guy,

Thank you for your support to our cause. Brief, precise, and to the point. I'm sure that now "they" will not be able to continue evading the issue.

Don't you feel like learning some Spanish or French to be able to post in a forum where the only control is that of a handful of fellow users with no power to censor, ban, make read only, or delete threads? You probably wouldn't mind its cluttered main page, its strange mixture of languages in many of its pages, the far from perfect Spanish of others, the missing buttons, and other such trivia.