Make LJ Search by language: e.g., search for only English-Language communites

[helianthas]

Title
Make LJ Search by language: e.g., search for only English-Language communites

Short, concise description of the idea
When users search for communities and journals by interest, they can now limit that search to include results in only certain languages that they choose.

Full description of the ideaRight now, a search for "interest = i-phone"

Comments

[azurelunatic]

I can think of at least two ways one might start to do this.

One, by attempting to detect the language of the posts and comments; I know things like Google Translate are half-decent at comparing a given chunk of text to a set of dictionaries and figuring out what language it's likely to be based on that, beyond just looking at the character set.

Two, by asking the community maintainer to choose the primary language for the community. This would be quicker than attempting to brute-force match stuff, but would leave multi-lingual areas of LJ (say, a community that posts in English, German, and Japanese) at a disadvantage.

[worldserpent]

I think the latter would be okay if it were optional. In that case, comms that were multilingual would simply opt not to choose anything.

Or, if most of the non-English comms on LJ in Russian, and most of these comms are users of Cyrillic Services, then it could be done that way.

[mlady_rebecca]

I'd say making the community maintainer specify the language is a better choice.

Support Request #1156964 redirected here

[sarcazm]

I requested the same feature, not just for communities but also for simple random new journal searches as well.

"it would be great if there was a way to specify whether you wanted to search specifically for journals in russian or journals in english.

i can't read cyrillic, likewise, i've checked the "my guests" feature and most of my random hits are russian journals that also opt not to follow me because of an OBVIOUS language barrier.

my friends have complained to me about the same issue. even on this form you specify what language i'd prefer my response to be in from a dropdown menu, and i chose, obviously, english.

would it be so difficult to do the same when it came to running that search function? it's really inhibiting meeting new people who actually still utilize livejournal and DO speak and write in english, as opposed to those who have abandoned it for twitter and facebook.

thank you."

so obviously, i am not the only one here having this issue, since i found this open discussion already on the topic.

[boredinsomniac]

This suggestion has been submitted for staff consideration.