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This website showed to me in French while I have my browser in English and am in the Netherlands. If I want to switch to Dutch, it won't let me. My basic under

This website showed to me in French while I have my browser in English and am in the Netherlands. If I want to switch to Dutch, it won't let me. My basic understanding of French is that this product is not yet available in my country. Still horrible experience. Why not show me the English page? This website makes the wrong assumption someone's language is tied to the location.

berkes 5y ago
> This website makes the wrong assumption someone's language is tied to the location. This is a bit of a premature "remote debugging" done, though. From what I see, they use Solidus and Rails as backend. This does not rule out your conclusion. But it is not a typical thing: in Rails (and Spree, from which Solidus is forked) it is, for example, far easier to read out the `Accept-Language` header than to do geo-ip language detection. It is easier to the right thing than the bad. Again: not saying this makes it guaranteed the cause. More likely causes: location-based caching (you got a cached version which was generated using French), or same thing with a CDN. More likely, because with Rails (and Solidus, and Spree) it is easy to make too-simple-caches, easier to ignore a parameter when building a cache, than to do right thing.
- dncornholio 5y ago
  What if I'm in France but speak English? It won't let us switch language / region separately. This is what I meant
  - berkes 5y ago
    I'm not dismissing the issue you encounter: it is stupid and ugly. I'm merely pointing out that your analysis of why it happens, is lacking. It reminds me of customers who submit a feature-request or issue in the form of a concrete solution, rather than a good description of the problem they encounter. "I want a dropdown with flags to switch to another language" vs "I cannot switch languages". The latter presumes nothing, leaves the implementation to product-manager, -owner, UX designers or developers. The former is not only bad (flags for languages are stupid) it has a big chance of being dismissed entirely. Big chance the dev sees it and thinks "hmm, out of date, we already have that dropdown", but that due to a bug, setup, caching, incompatibility, browser-plugin or whatnot, it doesn't show up for the client.
    - dncornholio 5y ago
      I might have been a bit snarky? I skipped all the compliments and went straight to the point, but that's just me. All the information is there to reproduce the first issue, showing the wrong language in the wrong country. My second statement wasn't a technical analysis but a principle one. One should not assume someone speaks the language of the country he or she is in. Plus, sometimes a country speaks more than 1 language.
drdebug 5y ago
May be this will help https://frame.work/fr/fr/locale/edit https://frame.work/fr/fr/locale/edit
- 3np 5y ago
  Unfortunately, it does not. Country and language are still coupled, so there's no way place a pre-order with shipping destination France with the website language set to English, for example. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30166510 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30166510 As mentioned there, for countries like Switzerland with more than two languages, whichever language chosen would be wrong for a majority. I'd even claim that for the market they're targeting, having English and nothing else for all regions would likely be way better than the current situation.

berkes 5y ago

> This website makes the wrong assumption someone's language is tied to the location. This is a bit of a premature "remote debugging" done, though. From what I see, they use Solidus and Rails as backend. This does not rule out your conclusion. But it is not a typical thing: in Rails (and Spree, from which Solidus is forked) it is, for example, far easier to read out the `Accept-Language` header than to do geo-ip language detection. It is easier to the right thing than the bad. Again: not saying this makes it guaranteed the cause. More likely causes: location-based caching (you got a cached version which was generated using French), or same thing with a CDN. More likely, because with Rails (and Solidus, and Spree) it is easy to make too-simple-caches, easier to ignore a parameter when building a cache, than to do right thing.

dncornholio 5y ago
What if I'm in France but speak English? It won't let us switch language / region separately. This is what I meant
- berkes 5y ago
  I'm not dismissing the issue you encounter: it is stupid and ugly. I'm merely pointing out that your analysis of why it happens, is lacking. It reminds me of customers who submit a feature-request or issue in the form of a concrete solution, rather than a good description of the problem they encounter. "I want a dropdown with flags to switch to another language" vs "I cannot switch languages". The latter presumes nothing, leaves the implementation to product-manager, -owner, UX designers or developers. The former is not only bad (flags for languages are stupid) it has a big chance of being dismissed entirely. Big chance the dev sees it and thinks "hmm, out of date, we already have that dropdown", but that due to a bug, setup, caching, incompatibility, browser-plugin or whatnot, it doesn't show up for the client.
  - dncornholio 5y ago
    I might have been a bit snarky? I skipped all the compliments and went straight to the point, but that's just me. All the information is there to reproduce the first issue, showing the wrong language in the wrong country. My second statement wasn't a technical analysis but a principle one. One should not assume someone speaks the language of the country he or she is in. Plus, sometimes a country speaks more than 1 language.

drdebug 5y ago

May be this will help https://frame.work/fr/fr/locale/edit https://frame.work/fr/fr/locale/edit

3np 5y ago
Unfortunately, it does not. Country and language are still coupled, so there's no way place a pre-order with shipping destination France with the website language set to English, for example. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30166510 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30166510 As mentioned there, for countries like Switzerland with more than two languages, whichever language chosen would be wrong for a majority. I'd even claim that for the market they're targeting, having English and nothing else for all regions would likely be way better than the current situation.