International Forums on PAL?

[Jeremy]

This morning I was talking with an old friend in the industry and he was asking why we don't have an international section in the forums here at PAL.

I suppose my first response was that I had a bunch up on PAP when I ran the community there, and they never really got super active. The other challenge is moderating the forums.

At the same time though I realize this was 3 years ago. Our industry has grown quite a bit in respect to becoming more globalized. I'd love to hear some feedback from affiliates and even affiliate managers on this. Would it be beneficial to the community/industry, or waste of time.

Feel free to give your unbiased assessment here.

[Newjabber]

Waste of time

[Tim]

Yeah, waste of time. I think you have enough sub-forums as it is.

[Mackan]

I don't see the point of doing it either. The number of posts in those forums would be minimal if any. Just the way it was at PAP.

[Adam_1]

Works well on forums where people get together in person weekly or sell physical items that needs to be grouped by region, such as rennslist (car forum) but I cant see any benefit in our industry

[Chalkie]

I guess not too, over on the GPWA there is a whole bunch of forums for all sorts of regions/languages with their own mods too ...

Might get a post every couple of days, hardly worth it, however, having said that there is no cost to it so perhaps it would be worthwhile giving the space to them anyway.

Nothing ventured as they say

What mods have we that speak a diff language? try one in their language as a starter

[MPC]

It's not a low hanging fruit. There's definitly a market and PAL is probably the best site to go get it, but it's a long term project. Take into consideration that a lot of people actually want to work in English, even if it's not their first language. I'm french. Never once did I seek information on affiliating in French, simply because I prefer to work in English. Perhaps I'm a bad exmaple since I'm French Canadian. But we have a lot of international presence already, and they choose to work in English. (but perhaps that choice is forced, simply because there isn't a good affiliate resource in their languages)

What was attempted at PAP 3 years ago was just not to right approach in my opinion. They created like 20 subforums, one subforum per language. Error 1 - Going after too many languages at once. Build it gradually. Error 2 - mixing up all the languages together on the main site. I don't want to see xhttp://www.pokeraffiliatelistings.com/forums filled with all kinds of langauges. Either go with subdmains, or subdirectories like xhttp://www.pokeraffiliatelistings.com/fr/forums/.

The chalenge there will be to build the traffic and get the initial content and discussiosn going, and then keeping them going. If there's not enough traffic, people will just revert back to xhttp://www.pokeraffiliatelistings.com/forums.

I also think you have to be a bit strategic in setting this up, with a long term goal in mind. Find a way for all language forums to interact. I'm not contradicting what I said earlier. Let me explain: If I want to sell a domain, that post should go on all forums so I don't miss out on a potential buyers (or at least, I should have the option to opt to post cross forum, or just main forum). For anything that involves a transaction (link exchange, website sale, services, content, etc), the poster could request responses in the langauge of their choice. Or if you want to get really funky, try integrated instant translations, altough I'm not sure how good they'll be.

Some components of the forum should be cross forum. Like the PM system for instance. The general idea is to keep things visually seperated, but technically intergrated. That way, people don't miss out on the key stuff and they don't all flock back to one spot because of low activity in other spots.

That's how I would go about it if I had the ressources. And I presume you do

[Strider1973]

I think that there are many people who can read and understand a text written in English. But does this mean that they automatically prefer to use English as their business language?

Something like this PAL forum doesn't exist in the German speaking market (with 100M people). There are a few poker affiliate websites, but they don't have enough traffic to form a community.
And 2+2 for example managed to have sub-forums on their domain in other languages.

Before discussing it over and over again, I would just start a trial. If you decide to start with a German sub-forum, I will be willing to help moderating it.

[sirtiner]

I think it would be nice, you could try it atleast but only if you add swedish otherwise its a bad idea .

[Ridge]

I dunno, one thing I know is that I HATE CAP and GPWA having all those forums everywhere that rarely get posted in. IIRC the ones on old PAP/PAW were never used much.

If anything maybe make an international forum as a catch all instead of one for each of the 20 most popular countries.