Every now and then, I’ve encountered a post concerning forum rules not being up-to-date on a specific local board, in relation to the official forum rules.
@Bitserve, brought it up today on another thread (see
Plagiarism as a result of cultural differences- Bitserve), and @iasenko had a related concern (see
Plagiarism as a result of cultural differences - Iasenko).
The out-of-sync situation occurs in some of the important local threads due to the OP no longer being active, capable, aware, or concerned with the thread he created. The issue is a bit more related to those that are specific local board only lurkers, which may barely understand English enough to search for the rules in the general forum English sections; although not exclusively.
Take for example the following:
a) English Forum rules:
- Owner last active: 14/01/2019 (@mprep)
- Thread last update: 27/12/2018
- 33 rules (rule nº 33 verses on plagiarism) + examples + FAQs + Guidelines for threads
b) Spanish Local Forum translated rules:
- Owner last active: 17/08/2018 (@dSerrano5)
- Thread last update: 02/03/2017
- Content: 28 rules + fewer examples + almost the same FAQs + Guidelines for threads adapted to local board.
c) German Local Forum translated rules:
- Owner last active: 17/03/2015 (@Zephir)
- Thread last update: 14/01/2015
- Content: 26 rules + fewer examples + almost the same FAQs + Guidelines for threads adapted to all/local board.
d) Portuguese Local Forum translated rules:
- Owner last active: 11/01/2019 (@Adriano)
- Thread last update: 26/09/2014
- Content: 24 rules + fewer examples + almost the same FAQs + Guidelines for threads adapted to local board (fewer than existent).
Most of the other local translations that figure in the Translation section of the official rule’s OP seem to at least have the 33 rules, but they may be other local board translations that are not references there. For example, the Indian Local board has a set of rules that is a combination of local forum rules and global forum rules (see
Unofficial List of Indian Sub-Forum FAQ, Rules, Guidelines, Resources), but the set of forum rules included seem like a summarized subset and not exhaustive (last edited July 2017).
Also @Lauda’s translation seems to have been replaced by @ marlboroza’s in the local Croatian board, but not the link in the English version.
Is the above important?
Well, if people can be banned for not sticking to the rules, and there are local language boards, then it would seem a proper deference that they could actually see the set of rules in their local language, and that these are kept up-to-date.
One could always argue that the most updated version of the official/unofficial rules are those found on the English sections of the board, and that is even what I recommend people on my local board to read, but not all are going to be capable of understanding them (even though common sense is a sweet substitute for them).
The solutions would depend on:
- The will to resolve it (which is related itself with the perceived dimension of the issue).
- The technical possibilities that the platform can provide (i.e. sharing a thread’s OP by multiple owners may seem easy, but it depends on the underlying software features).
The starter pack set of conceptual solution could be:
- a) Give "someone" (admins/mods) the ability to transfer ownership of important
thread OPs. This obviously needs a protocol to demand, evaluate, contact current owner, and finally transfer ownership if necessary.
- b) I thought that some threads should be forum owned, but the above really tackles this as a kind of lease of the thread to a specific forum member.
- c) Have multiple owners on a single thread, as @Iasenko suggested.
What can currently be done in such cases is to PM the mods to see if they can get the thread owner to update the content on behalf of a request made by another forum member, or directly PM the thread owner.
In our local board, I tried (months ago) to PM a mod to make them aware, and asked then to contact the thread owner with whom I have never crossed paths (and had been inactive for at least a year at the time when I tried this). No luck there so far though.
Ideally, all this would be forum owned and forum maintained, but since there is an unofficial-official tone to the rules, I guess the solution is currently community member empowered.
The above I find does not apply solely to the forum rules, but perhaps to other important forum related threads. @Iasenko mentioned that he does not have a local forum, but rather a thread instead, and that the OP of that thread was last active back in March 2012. The OP of a local language thread may need to perform updates to include the rules and general guidelines for example.
I’ve also got some concerns relative to how to ask for a post to become a sticky, and ultimately who that decision rests upon (some OPs may turn into stickies on the general English sections, but not on the local language sections, and therefore lack the same kind of local visibility).
I guess this is not an absolute pressing matter, but perhaps we could take a look into it after the DT changes are rolled-out.
