That's absolutely correct. English language skills are the barrier to admission. And to be a global forum you'd have to assume that the Pagoda would also be distributed globally: and it just is not.
We have around 2500 members. The system automatically deletes inactive members that have not been on the site for over a year, and have made few posts. So that number is pretty constant. As is the 10% that makes most of the posts… in fact, 20% of the membership made pretty much all of the posts. Even of the population of Full Members, i.e. those that pay,
less than half have ever posted on the forum.
In our history we had a spanish language section on the forum. Despite having a Spanish board member, after about 2 years only about 10 messages were posted there. We decided to stop fooling ourselves and removed that section, back in 2007 it was, I think.
Similarly, there'd be little in it to open a German section: those who wish to discuss technical details in German have already found their way to Pagodentreff.de. Pagodentreff.de boast a much larger membership, but they do not prune inactive accounts. If you look at their active poster base, I am fairly certain you'll see similar statistics to us: 20% of the membership make the vast majority of posts (>80%), and I think that if they were to prune their members too, they'd be left with around 2500 members.
You could argue that it might be sensible to try a Spanish, French or Italian section again -- now that we are bigger. It would indeed be very easy to set-up. However, the statistics re posting would also apply to that population: only around 10% of those who sign up, will actually post on the forum.
The number of Pagoda's in France, Italy, or Spanish speaking countries is far, far less than the number in the US (the prime export market), and Germany. Even if all of these owners were members, by applying the 10% rule, you'd perhaps get a couple of posts in those languages - per month. And then we'd need someone with expertise to be able to answer these posts in that language to make it worthwhile, otherwise people will stop posting… which is exactly what happened with the Spanish forum… it just petered out to nothing.
So, my expectation is that English language skills will remain the price of admission… but with Google Translate the barrier to entry is dropping all the time. I'm sure that those hits you see from Spanish, Italian and French speaking countries use Google Translate when necessary.
The table below shows the language settings of the browser people use to access the site. It gives you some idea of their native language:
Peter
