Most frontends (I don’t know any, really) doesn’t allow you to set a default language for your post. For that reason, a lot of frontends allow you to post without any language selected, while defaulting to English. But that is not universally true. Photon recently started requiring language to be selected and started defaulting to Undetermined language. This now creates unnecessary friction when the community doesn’t have it as allowed language and requires the user to select allowed language for every single post.
It really is a simple change on your end that will take you seconds, but can save a lot of time in the long run and some frustration for people that want to post in your communities.
On lemmy-ui frontend you can change it by going to community settings and under languages you can select multiple ones by holding Ctrl key.
P.S. This community is a great example of one that doesn’t allow Undetermined language.
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but can save a lot of time in the long run and some frustration for people that want to post in your communities.
On the other hand, it will most likely mean that people will just default to post without any language. And if no one does it, then why bother with the option at all?
My feeling is that the “right” way to fix this is by improving the client, instead of just making things completely relaxed.
It’s a matter of opportunity cost. If 10 seconds of work once can save 5 seconds per post, why wouldn’t you do it?
Sure, long term, all clients allowing setting default language for all posts would be ideal, but that has a lot higher opportunity cost.
And Undetermined is a selected language (id = 0). English is (id = 37).
why wouldn’t you do it?
Personally? because I don’t really care about comments and posts from people who think that 5 seconds to select an option is too much time.
Some friction is a good thing. If having to select the language to complete the post works as a filter, then you can bet that the ones being caught in that are the ones who are less likely to add anything meaningful or thoughtful to the discussion.
In the next version or the one after that, I believe it will default to your browser/system language. The undetermined language thing isn’t actually good for anyone.
Least of all, people finding communities in their tongue.
If Sync ever updates, I hope it adds language to the post form.
I believe it will default to your browser/system language
Oof, I feel like that’ll cause a lot of English comments to be marked with the speaker’s native language
this is only for setting the default user language during registration based on the browsers accept language headers.
The undetermined language thing isn’t actually good for anyone.
How is it bad? I never said it was good, I said it’s a friction point with a zero cost solution until setting default language for posts becomes available on all clients.
Least of all, people finding communities in their tongue.
Language specific instances can already set allowed languages on instance-level that can’t be overwritten by communities, so it’s a non-issue.
One of the things that really make sense but might be overkill is to have integration with any of the open source Large Language Models. The client could wouldn’t have to ask the user or rely or system settings, and autodetect the language. Depending on the content, it would even make sense to have some override system (e.g, I am not fluent in Spanish, but I would be interested in seeing football news from La Liga directly in Spanish without having to wait for the UK newspapers to pick it up)
Rather, make Language a required field so I don’t have to spend time blocking users and/or communities who post content in languages other than what I want.
I’m in full agreement, assuming that setting default language for all posts is implemented first. So far no client allows that as far as I know.
On lemmy-ui frontend you can change it by going to community settings and under languages you can select multiple ones by holding Ctrl key.
Thank you for this information! I thought you can only select one language in your personal settings and thats why I haven’t selected any language at all until now, but selecting multiple ones works the same way as you described it for the community settings. Maybe this should be clarified on the settings page.
On lemmy-ui frontend you can change it by going to community settings and under languages you can select multiple ones by holding Shift key.
Probably better to use the Ctrl key - if you click ‘Undetermined’ and then Shift-click ‘English’ it will select both and everything in between, but if click ‘Undetermined’ and then Ctrl-click ‘English’ it’ll just select the two.
Thanks, update body post.
I don’t think I intended for photon to require a language to be selected. If it’s left unselected, does it use your profile default? If so, I made a bug.
It selects
Undeterminedby default and there is no way to change default in Photon settings or profile settings. The only way to change the language is on per post basis.Version 1.31.2
this is likely related to https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4971
Hey, I recently updated photon (v1.31.3) and unintentionally fixed this issue (mostly). It’ll now default to undefined language, so it’ll use the community default when posting. You’ll need to click “set language” if you want to explicitly set one.
Actually, if a users doesn’t select a language, the client is supposed to submit the post without any language selected (not even undetermined). THE SERVER then defaults the post to one of the languages allowed in the community.
This is probably how Photon has worked until now, since it obviously never got an error no matter where you posted, even though it didn’t have a language selector at all.
But since photon now has a language selector, it is now defaulting to making posts with “undetermined” unless the user changes it, instead of null. If it was using an actual null value then the posts would be correctly defaulting to something valid for the community.
Source: Thunder ran into the same issue when language selection was added to posting and commenting.
@Xylight@lemdro.id might want to experiment with that a bit.
I recently changed how language selection works, it’ll default to undefined then when you click “set language” then it will actually select a language
Great! Is that in a recent release? I haven’t updated my photon instance in a bit.
Love your work btw, it’s so nice to have a great UI with multi-account support for browsing/posting/modding at my desktop.
Yeah, it’s recent with a slightly changed design for the post page. (v1.31.3)
