How do I turn the language of the site back to English?

Wonder what went through the person’s mind who decided to force a language on non-English visitors based solely on location/browser…

“Give users a choice? They surely wouldn’t want a choice? Let’s just take a wild guess what country they are in, guess what languages they speak, guess which of those languages they prefer, and use that! What could possibly go wrong? There surely won’t be any backlash.”

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I was jokingly referencing possibly the most famous quote in RateBeer forum history from this thread:

https://www.ratebeer.com/forums/at-the-coldplay-concert_120207.htm

“I see your post which are way too many for anyone that actually has an outside life or maybe you get buzzed fast and just start posting random garbage. I’ve came close a few times to actually say do you have an outside life or any friends? You just answered my question. Seriously a ColdPlay concert, that’s as weak as your post are.

Come back at me with some more weak shit I’m gonna scroll past from now on. You bring this site down.” -Crizay

Just joking, Martin! :beers:

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This sounds like you are concerned about possibility. And I’m sorry, but if providing a small button/link/preference setting/whatever is too much for RB, the problem isn’t possibility but will.
Don’t get me wrong - I think it’s a great idea to provide good beer info in as many languages as possible. But the choice of which language to read should be left to the reader.

Let’s say there’s something wrong with a section of the website that can be translated in two or more ways. If I would have to use the website in German and needed to describe the problem to @services, I’d have to switch my browser language, re-visit the problem in English and only then I would be able to give an accurate description with 100% confidence. That’s just an unnecessarily complicated way to go about this.

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In firefox, there’s a global setting for your language preferences. You don’t have to chose just one language, you can list several, and even give them weightings.

The simple way of setting the preferences is: about:preferences#content
There’s a lower-level interface in about:config , the intl.accept_languages setting, which you can set to a value as specified here: https://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html#sec14.4

Note that stupid websites like google use Geo-IP detection, which is utter bogosity, for the reason @martinus states. From what @services has said, It sounds like ratebeer is doing things the correct way, in which case, please give yourself a pat on the back. Unfortunately too many users aren’t aware of this language preference setting, so it didn’t really catch on with website authors, which meant that it was less useful, which meant that there was less mention of it, which meant that there was less use of it, which meant that it was basically in a downward spiral. Which is unfortunate, as it’s exactly what 99% of people need, and has been in the HTTP standard right from the very early days - it’s a solved problem.

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Holy shit @services keeping it condescending. I nominate you for 2018 Ratebeer Troll of the Year. Sorry @AdamChandler

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@cubs holy shit that thread is a great read.

It’s the same with Opera. So I went to my browser preferences and deleted every other language from the preferred languages. I’ve only got “English” left in there. But the newer parts of RB are still in German. Even after restarting my computer, logging out and back in. German. While other websites are now in English, RB stays German.

I’m pissed off about this. A simple button or preference setting would’ve made it optional to switch. Now I suddenly need to switch browsers to get RB in my preferred language? Fuck this, seriously. I’m losing my patience. Fast.

That sounds more like a bug then.
It sounds like @services intentions were right, it’s just that the implementation was a bit ratebeer.

And the best solution isn’t even a cookie, it should be remembered on the server, as you don’t want to magically revert every time you have to clear all your cookies because of /le bug du jour/ (if it’s made to sound exotic, perhaps it will piss people off less?).

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[quote="LazyPyro, post:14, topic:4264, full:true"]

Wonder what went through the person’s mind who decided to force a language on non-English visitors based solely on location/browser…
[/quote]
I quite understand it, honestly. It’s what modern consumer review sites do. TripAdvisor even translated the reviews. It made me stop using the site (well, that and that it constantly tried to force the app upon me). But ratebeer isn’t just a consumer review site, it’s a community as well, with lots of interactions between users of different countries.

For RateBeer it could even be a nice thing to greet new users in their home country language. Might get more returning users, especially from countries where knowledge of English isn’t strong, and through that a better database. But please do give the users a choice as well, regardless of browser settings, as for those who are here for e.g. the community it makes the experience much better.

We got good feedback. It will be fixed.

We’ve recently been rolling out changes several times a week now. Some will be small missteps and we appreciate the quick feedback. It helps keep us on track and evolving quickly.

Cheers

Joe

Oh I absolutely agree with you there, my point was about how critical offering the choice is. I’ve personally worked on localising projects in the past, and in the process learned a lot about all sorts of peculiarities in various combinations of countries, languages and age groups that I had no idea about before.

Some examples:

  • French teenagers absolutely hating the fact they had to use English, rating 1 star until French was added then changing to 5 stars
  • Dutch users appreciative of Dutch language option but 90% of them wanted to revert to English because “we only speak Dutch in everyday life, we use English on the internet”
  • Romanian users split 50/50 between those fluent in English being confused when using in Romanian because they are so used to using computers/phones in English, and the other half being thankful because their English was too poor to fully understand everything before.

It made me realise it’s literally impossible to please everyone, the only way to do localisation right is to offer a choice instead of trying to predict what the users want. It was frustrating to see RB making the same mistakes I did, but it looks like they’ve taken the feedback on board now so hopefully the users affected by this will be given the option to switch back to English.

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Absolutely. And not just for localisation. Give the users plenty of scope to customise and personalise. Unfortunately the one-size-fits-all mentality seems all too prevalent in the IT world these days. Once upon a time I used to have to spend plenty of time tinkering around with software to get it set up the way I wanted. I don’t have to do that so much nowadays. Instead, I just have to spend even more time trying out loads of apps until I find one that works the way I want it to. If I’m lucky.

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Well, either I’m back to the old pages, or I’ve successfully transferred alliances to New Zealand, but my settings are back to English at least.

Tried a cache refresh (ctrl + F5 I think) after changing your settings?

Yes. Deleted all cookies and cache. Still the same. I’ve been contacted by @services and have provided details about my setup. We will see.

@services has come through with a fix for my issue of unrecognized preferences.

I have to say, the personal contact and quick fix have left me mildly optimistic. Thanks to whoever is behind this account! :slight_smile:

How do you change the language settings again?

I was unsuccessful in changing it, and thought I could live with the search function being in Dutch until a solution was offered, as promised. But now rating is in Dutch as well and I find that I was so annoyed by it that I didn’t even want to rate anymore. A week later I still am, and this needs to change. There was even a two year old rating on top of today’s beer’s “recent” ratings, presumably only because that one was in Dutch.

Please make it stop…

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@services, can you help?

We are looking into the sort order of ratings at the moment, as it is currently incorrect in certain scenarios.

Thanks for your patience!

Thanks!

I’ll try :slight_smile: