Suggestions

[quote name="@ProwlerBC" date="2018-10-26 07:56:39" ] My issue is that harassment or other, worse things could slip by if the moderators don't speak other languages. It would be easy to slip by the filters with no punishment, unless someone had very concrete proof. no support [/quote] Again we allready have roman lettewred languages used in PMs and co without prioblem - what is missing is the full range of signs other languages use. And the harassment is not going to change from what is there now. If I wanted to curse at you in polish or german or italian in a PM I could do so right now and it would be just as hard to modderate as chinese if the reading your PMs (without your knowledge?) cannot read/understand the language.

[quote name="Ekon" date="2018-10-26 08:17:16" ] [quote name="@ProwlerBC" date="2018-10-26 07:56:39" ] My issue is that harassment or other, worse things could slip by if the moderators don't speak other languages. It would be easy to slip by the filters with no punishment, unless someone had very concrete proof. no support [/quote] Again we allready have roman lettewred languages used in PMs and co without prioblem - what is missing is the full range of signs other languages use. And the harassment is not going to change from what is there now. If I wanted to curse at you in polish or german or italian in a PM I could do so right now and it would be just as hard to modderate as chinese if the reading your PMs (without your knowledge?) cannot read/understand the language. [/quote] One other thing: I don't think that the staff actively moderates the PMs. (which would mean that they have to read each PM sent). I have the feeling they look at PMs when they get reports about them. So, allowing other characters, and other languages, in PMs would probably not affect much. They wouldn't really have any extra work to do, unless more harassment DOES occur because now people can do it in a different language. However, that harassment would still have to be reported to the admins before the issue of language comes up. If the harassment isn't reported, then the admins don't know about it (unless something is said in a public place where they do monitor.) IE, if someone sent me a harassing letter in Chinese, I would probably delete it, as I can't read Chinese. So, the admins would never know about it, as *I* wouldn't know that it was a harassing letter. I hope this makes sense, it did to me when I typed it, but now I am having doubts.

Support! Forums need to be English for the staff to moderate them, but since we can use other languages everywhere else on the site, we should be able to send PMs in alphabets besides Latin, too. :0

To everyone saying “But what about harassment/etc. that the staff can’t read?!”: That argument makes no sense at all.

We can already leave profile comments in non-English languages, write dragon bios in non-English languages, and write user profiles and statuses in non-English languages. Being allowed to send PMs in, say, Chinese or Russian is no different than being allowed to leave profile comments in those languages.

Also, we can currently send PMs in non-English languages, provided they’re using the Latin alphabet. People can PM each other in French, Spanish, Tagalog, German, Norwegian... We may as well be able to send PMs in alphabets besides Latin, too. Can staff read every language that uses the Latin alphabet? I doubt it. That means there are already PMs that they can’t moderate, assuming they even moderate PMs at all.


“You can’t send a PM in Chinese, you could harass people and staff couldn’t read it!” is no different than “You can’t send a PM in Indonesian, you could harass people and staff couldn’t read it!” (something people can already do, since it’s the Latin alphabet). Literally the only difference is the alphabet used.

If someone gets spammed with PMs in any language, that’s harassment. If someone gets spammed by rude PMs in French- something that can currently happen- can they not report it because “it’s not English”? I don’t think that’s a rule on the site anywhere. Harassment is harassment; getting spammed with PMs is rude, regardless of content.

@Ningyo Also, I think romanized chinese/cyrillic, or other languages using the latin alphabet but without accents makes it more difficult to moderate than them using their own writing system, since translators can't translate them.

Support!
If harassment is the reason it doesn't work, people can just as well harass others with foreign languages in a Latin alphabet

Full support. It sucks not being able to use your native language when just privately chatting to people.

"but harassment" is an argument as weak as a sheet of tissue paper - all three languages I'm fluent in and all but two out of the other seven I'm partially learned in use the Latin alphabet. I can harass, if I so wished, in all eight of them as things currently stand, and I could even hack together an awful romaji version of the remaining two.

If this was truly a problem for the admins for moderation or other purposes there would be an "English only in all communications all over the site" rule. I also agree with the comments that have been saying that allowing accents/other scripts will aid translation efforts more than disallowing them, as having to place accents in retroactively and trying to reconstruct a weird romaji script (that have no set "proper" way to spell words - one word could be written any number of ways) would be more effort than just throwing a thing in a translator and testing for accuracy, etc. etc. etc.

Personally I'm also of the mind that it might be a thing that will be fixed if/when PMs get a revamp.

While I do think the forums should be kept to English, I don't see any reason to restrict what language players speak among themselves in PMs. If harassment really became a big issue, online translators could probably establish at least the gist of a message, or be used to look up a specific inappropriate word.

They could either add the ability to use non-English writing to PMS...

... or take it out of the site entirely, removing that functionality from areas of the site that currently have it.

I don't mind which, but it would be nice if everything was on level ground.

Support! This seems really strange that it's not already implemented. 100% support.