Adobe website and forums navigation

Question

Hello!
I'm not new in here, but Adobe changes the whole website and navigation from time to time and it's not getting better, unfortunately.
Perhaps someone of the admins can clarify this:
1) If I go to adobe.com, the page is in english. That's normal. If I log in and my native language is german and Adobe knows that I'm from Germany, then it would actually make sense to switch to german after login. But it does not.
2) If I log in and select a different language (german in this case), then the website appears in german. But if I go to the forums, it's english again. This is paradox.
3) If I'm logged in to Adobe, then I'm not automatically logged in to the forums. This is paradox too. At least to me.
4) If I'm in the forums I need to click "Login/Register" and it asks me for a screen name. I know a lot of english terms, but "screen name" does not makes sense since the rest of the world would call it "nickname". It also does not ask for a password, nor can't I register. I can just set the screen name. Well...
5) If I set the screen name to something like "Nobody", while my login name at Adobe is my real name, then the top line suddenly says "Welcome Nobody". If I then click on "Your account", it loads the page again and then it shows my real name again. Confusing.
6) If I'm logged in and chose german as language and then select forums, I won't be taken to the international german forums. This is paradox.
7) If I go to "Forums" and then below to "International forums -> German", then the page appears in german and says "Foren", which is german for "Forums". But there are no forums, it is only one forum. But for what? For all Adobe products? Confusing.
8) If I'm on that page from 7) then it's half english, half german.
This is what I could see by just browsing Adobe's pages for a few minutes. I actually don't want to know what will happen if I browse some more...

Answer 1

Hello Kanguyen,
Early in the morning yesterday, when I still had several hours left before logout, I wrote a long answer to your message, although I didn’t really have the time for it. Unfortunately, when I tried to post it, I found that I had been logged out, and I was absolutely unable to relog for the rest of the day, apparently because the Adobe site (adobe.com) was down. Compared with this, the announced Server Maintenance notice seemed like a bad joke. In any case, I will have to try to remember all that I wrote and was lost.
I must have begun by thanking you for your long and detailed reply to my previous message. With the increasingly deteriorated atmosphere around here, one tends to forget how very nice it is to interact with someone willing to listen to arguments, and to try to understand what one says without resorting to disqualifications. Which unfortunately seem to be replacing arguments in this forum. However, let’s get back to our conversation.
No, I have never asked for more participation of (Spanish speaking) Adobe employees in the forums in Spanish. I come from the traditional Adobe (pre Macromedia fusion) forums, where we were constantly reminded that no Adobe personnel participated officially or regularly in the forums, and that the forums were not a way of addressing Adobe. Therefore, I couldn’t have asked for the forums in Spanish what the original (US English) forums did not have.
What I did ask for, and for several years, was the appointment of at least one Spanish-speaking moderator in those forums, and for more attention from Adobe Spain to them. Sadly, no moderator was ever appointed in those forums, and the now single forum in Spanish still hasn’t got one. On the other hand, a surprising side effect of the new forums format is that the forum in Spanish is now listed in the Adobe Spain site, as in all the other localized forums, under the International Forums label. And I say surprising because for years there was no mention of the forums in Spanish in the Adobe Spain site.
I have just checked, and although the language problem is solved for users who change it checking the Remember... option, it is still there for newcomers seeking help for the first time. I would think that, typically, such a Spanish speaking person in trouble would naturally look for help in www.adobe.com or in www.adobe.com/es. In the first case, s/he would get a page fully in English, with no provision for changing to another language. In the second, the page would be in Spanish, again with no provision for a language change. In either case, going to Support/Soporte > Forums/Foros would take the newcomer to http://forums.adobe.com/index.jspa , fully in English, and then the story would then continue as described in my previous message. As an ignorant in such matters, I cannot help thinking if it is really so terribly difficult to make the forums.adobe.com software to somehow “remember” where the user is coming from and act accordingly. Explicitly: that if the user clicked on the “Foros” menu in the Adobe Spain site, s/he is taken to the index in Spanish. Naturally, with similar solutions for other languages.
I thank you for explaining the user interface/content difference. It is a valid and powerful argument against translating everything; and I certainly wouldn’t expect messages written in other languages to be translated to Spanish. However, there are some things that in my opinion are important enough to deserve the extra effort of specially translating and manually inserting. I am thinking, for example, of the different Announcements (text included) and the titles of the Stickies, plus perhaps some of the FAQs. No doubt, it would be easy to find natives willing to provide the required translations for Adobe personnel to replace in the proper places. I would do it gladly in the case of Spanish, and Pierre would probably be willing to provide the required French versions.
I agree in that the solution that you adopted for the language change problem is probably the best within the existing constrains, although I still think it wasn’t working as today when I performed my previous tests. However, I would like to ask you to consider what I said above about the transition from the Adobe Spain (or whatever) to the Forums index page. (In this paragraph, I have used the plural form of “you”, for which you don’t have in English a separate word as we have in Spanish).
Finally, I want to stress again that grouping all Adobe products (including all the ex Macromedia ones) in just one single forum, as in the Spanish case, makes the use of that forum far from easy. If you couple that with a far from perfect search engine, you end up with a nearly unusable site. This hasn’t happened yet in the forum in Spanish because the number of posters is very low. I hope that this number will grow in spite of the difficulties, but then the problem will become increasingly noticeable.
Claudio.