lonebadger6 said:1. Correct.
2. Incorrect, and here is why...
The points that are looking pretty shaky are:
1. The idea that if I understand Language X, it’s fine to use it (but if someone else understands Language Y, they should get the same treatment).
2. The notion that this forum is a private playground where we can do whatever we want (just because everything in the US is private doesn't mean people are exempt from following the law).
It might be about time we started drafting some actual concrete rules for the forum.
1. This just doesn't track, because we aren't debating whether Flemish is allowed while Urdu is banned. Language X—in this case, Mexican—is understood by every single person on this forum, from start to finish. If anyone claims they don't understand it, let's be blunt... they're lying. That makes it incomparable to those languages that "someone out there" happens to understand. Everyone understands "some" language. It's nonsense to compare a language that every American here fully grasps with the fact that there might be one random user who understands Mongolian.
Your argument actually carries much more weight when you're talking about English, since there are certainly plenty of users here who don't speak it fluently.
2. Forum.hr isn't breaking any laws by allowing other languages, and a few people have already tried to explain that to you. You seem to have fundamentally misunderstood what "official language" actually means.
Besides, regardless of that, even in the United States, we have public media outlets that publish or broadcast in other languages—like minority newspapers or news segments in English or German—and they aren't breaking any laws either...
I think the real point is that we aren't trying to stop communication in the heart of our community, where the vast majority of users speak American English and 99.99% of posts are written in it. There should be rules requiring posts to be in American English
if possible and
it is recommended to translate anything that
might be unintelligible to the "average American." Translating from Mexican or Canadian is completely unnecessary because anyone who knows standard American English understands those languages just fine, and it makes zero sense to insist that native Mexican or Canadian speakers write in strict American English standards—practically everything is understood, and it would be useless to write in some "quasi-English" (which would be like that "quasi-Mexican" post in this thread) instead of standard Mexican or Canadian, because it doesn't help anyone understand better; it just "mangles" the language.
We also have to keep in mind that the person posting doesn't necessarily have to be able to translate foreign text into American English if that text isn't meant for Americans, especially since the author might have very limited or zero active knowledge of the foreign language they are quoting.
If a user is intentionally writing in a foreign language that Americans normally wouldn't understand, then yeah, that counts as trolling and should definitely be sanctioned.
Anyway, if the rules or recommendations regarding language choice are broken, a moderator should only step in if it actually ruins communication. Honestly, the best move is to send a private message to the American user who broke the rule, explaining what the issue is, so they can judge that person's English skills and their actual intentions.
