Doug Belshaw
activity timestamp 3 years ago

@BonfireBuilders I had a conversation with a global network organisation today which has local hubs. The problems the project lead described could definitely be solved by Bonfire:


  1. Difficulty in number and membership of groups
  2. Confusion as to who is allowed to do what within groups
  3. Multitude of different platforms, some for staff, some for members, some public
  4. Different hubs using different tech
  5. Language barriers between networks


We're doing user research for this client and, without sharing any sensitive data, I kind of also see it as research for Bonfire 馃檶
Eduardo Mercovich
activity timestamp 3 years ago

Doug, that seems super interesting and very well aligned indeed.


Your mention of language barriers also makes me trigger another small limitation on other microblogging services that Bonfire could make better: the ability to express the language used, per post.


Many people (me included) uses 2 or more languages.

  • If the language setting is in the configuration, there is only one.
  • But if it can be set by post, I can express when I'm posting in Spanish and when in English, so people can filter those.

WDYAT?

Doug Belshaw
activity timestamp 3 years ago

That's a really good point, @EduMerco. It would be even better if, as well as providing benefits to others* it was also of value to you as well.


I'm sadly monolingual, but I wonder if you can think of things that would be useful in the composer interface that would benefit the person crafting the message?


* i.e. people can filter by language on their timeline
Eduardo Mercovich
activity timestamp 3 years ago

Sorry Doug it took me some time (just needed focus on work deliverables and events).

Yes, as benefits for the writer I can think at least 2:

  • UI appropriate labels and translations where there is text (nothing terribly valuable, really, but smoothing),
  • spell checking (although not so easy since today is common to have mixed languages in a toot, but anyway...). Eventually this could create a shared list of words in the instance or a group so as to make a better spellchecking for everyone.


As benefits for everyone, as you said, there is filtering and also translations. If we know each person preferred language/s, we can offer translated versions by default for certain languages.

This could be part of each User preferences. That is, each account can specify what language/s:

  • the UI is preferred.
  • the posts are filtered/allowed
  • the posts are translated or not by default.

WDYT? :)