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Topic: French Widelands website

Jaypad
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Joined: 2015-12-12, 10:59
Posts: 40
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Pry about Widelands
Location: France
Posted at: 2016-01-05, 06:58
The website is open source and support for translation can be added to the Wiki by any Django developer. It will still not be as flexible as a stand alone web site, but I still think that is a preferable solution. Alternatively, we could kill the Wiki and instead write the pages that we want to have in some text based format. This could then be translated on transifex like the rest of Widelands and we would have a consistent experience in every language. What do you think?

I can't do Django developpement. PHP / MySQL is for me an easier solution because more people have skills to maintain the code. Translating the wiki (or the pages which replace it) could be an option if users can browse the website in their langage easily.

(I go to work, I will update this post in a couple of hours to answer to all messages)
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kaputtnik
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Posted at: 2016-01-05, 09:20

Having one original and several (localized) copies is the best... as long the original is held up to date. But isn't that the main problem: Keeping our wiki up to date?


Related to the term "redirect" i believe there is a misunderstanding. May Vassili or Jaypad could clarify what they want:

  • An automatic forwarding to the french site if a french user enters wl.widelands.org
  • Just a link to the french site on wl.widelands.org a visitor has to click

I think the latter one causes no responsibility to SirVer.


Fight simulator for Widelands:
https://wide-fighter.netlify.app/

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SirVer

Joined: 2009-02-19, 15:18
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Posted at: 2016-01-05, 09:20

Yes, I think that would be possible. It would require coding as well to get to this level of functionality and we would loose the wiki though.


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Jaypad
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Posted at: 2016-01-05, 10:44

Ok, I'm back.

Our project is the creation of a french website for the french community of Widelands, similar to this one. But it could contain some new parts (for example, the news of the french community), and others parts will redirect to wl.widelands.org (forum, developpement pages).

kaputtnik
Having one original and several (localized) copies is the best...

Exactly what we want to do. But not an exact copy, we want to have the possibility to add stuff if we want.

We will host, no problem on that.

Redirecting does not change the situation though. The host will still be under widelands.org, so I am still legally responsible. Redirecting makes this even more pronounced, because I have no control over the site at all - I cannot even take it down if some authority (i.e. police) requests that. I will not do that, sorry.

Ok, you are right, and I understand your point of view. Unfortunately, this was what we wanted.

Taking a widelands.fr domain will cost money. I am ok to give my time, but money, it's another problem. Vassili and I must talk before going on.

Relating to the licence :
About saying we must do a website under GPL License, i think you still speak of the only case we do it on your server; because nothing forbid to speak of libre things like we will.
I am not a lawyer, but my understanding is that if you use GPL assets in a product (a web site), you have to make the source of this product available. But frankly, I consider it doubtful that we will go after you if you do not open source it - there are better ways to spend time.

It seem to me that GPL require to use the same licence for derivative work, right? So, we can't use a more permissive licence (CC0 for example) for our work. But this won't be a problem for the moment, as we probably will do nothing if we must pay for a domain.


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GunChleoc
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Posted at: 2016-01-05, 14:50

I pay less than 10 € a year for the domain registration for my website - that is less than 1 € a month. The real cost is the hosting.

The Wiki software that I know of that allows multilingual websites is Mediawiki (used by Wikipedia). This would be a big software change for us though, and it doesn't flag up changes in the source text for translators - they might have some plugin for that though.

I know that Transifex also have a service for website translation, but that's targeted at businesses rather than at FLOSS projects, so it would cost money.


Busy indexing nil values

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Jaypad
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Joined: 2015-12-12, 10:59
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Posted at: 2016-01-05, 19:18

Vassili and I just talk together.

We decided the following :
- Vassili will own the domain widelands.fr and will host the french website
- The website will redirect our users to the french Forum

So, we just request you a french flag with a link to widelands.fr somewhere on the main page, to let the french users know that a french website exists. We will tell you when you can put it, time for us to create some content.

Naturally, we will put a link to redirect non-french speaking users to wl.widelands.org.

If I write stuff that doesn't exist here, I will do my possible to create here an english version.

Edited: 2016-01-05, 19:19

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GunChleoc
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Posted at: 2016-01-06, 00:50

Sounds good to me face-smile.png


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SirVer

Joined: 2009-02-19, 15:18
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Posted at: 2016-01-06, 11:59

I just wanted to add 2c for this website project to manage expectation.

Widelands is an old project - 13 years and counting. How committed are you to widelands.fr? Will it be around in 4 years, in 10 years? Widelands probably will.

In many ways, this project reminds me of the wetab port of Widelands. A community member felt it was too troublesome to add the supporting code into the core Widelands code base, so he forked Widelands and released one version. He then lost interest - and the project died. A sad outcome: the porting was a lot of work, but it was in vain since nothing was upstreamed and keeping a diverged port up to date was too much work for an individual. Would the code have been integrated into the core code base, wetab might still work today.

I saw roughly a hundred people coming and going on this project and the one thing that I learned from this is that everything must be community owned and run to allow for consistent progress. Judging from experience, my prediction for widelands.fr is that it will be build and maintained for a year or two, then start to get neglected and bit rot because interests wear away and other stuff in live becomes more important. I do not mean to offend with that - it is just what happens most of the time, very few contributors stick around for longer than a couple of years and both of you are very new members of the community.

Once widelands.fr stops being updated, there will be a site that has stale information that the core team cannot modify or take down. For that reason, widelands.fr can only be endorsed as a fan page from us, not as official page.

I am not gonna lie, I would prefer that you invest yourself into our existing stack, learn the technology and improve it for the benefit of the whole community instead of doing widelands.fr. That would have been the best for the wetab port too, imho. But I understand that you want to improve Widelands in your own way and I applaud that. I also applaud your enthusiasm of making Widelands more accessible for the French speaking - and if widelands.fr is your choice of doing so, so be it. But it cannot be the "official widelands website, but in french", it will be a fan made website for Widelands with the official page being widelands.org for the reasons I outlined above. And widelands.org can only endorse and link it as a fan site.


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Vassili
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Posted at: 2016-01-06, 12:18

I understand you about the perenity of widelands.fr, and i will answer you are maybe right.

We start at two, so we have two times more chances to not abandon our project.

"For that reason, widelands.fr can only be endorsed as a fan page from us, not as official page."

I was well aware before you post it, you never would recognize our site as official ( i feel you don't like everything and everybody in this project); but I had not planned to pretend our site as the official.

"And widelands.org can only endorse and link it as a fan site."

Are you saying you refuse to link our project to wl.widelands.org mainpage?

Edited: 2016-01-06, 12:23

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SirVer

Joined: 2009-02-19, 15:18
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Posted at: 2016-01-06, 12:34

i feel you don't like everything and everybody in this project

I respect everybody working on this project - and I like everybody who contributes to the Widelands community. So the second part of the sentence is untrue. As for the project, I am only concerned what is best for Widelands. As stated, I think better for Widelands is to improve widelands.org, not starting widelands.fr. But making widelands.fr is better than doing nothing.

Are you saying you refuse to link our project to wl.widelands.org mainpage?

I think a link on the landing page is not appropriate but I think it is time we add a links or "endorsment" section somewhere prominent on the page - maybe a new top level menu "Links" or a sidebar with "Links" could be added.

I thought about this before and there are other pages that deserve some endorsment, for example Einsteins and King_of_nowhere's 20 strategy thome, and several tutorial pages and some video series on Widelands.

What do others think?


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