@certik and I discussed this briefly offline this morning. We tentatively agreed to propose the following to the community:
We will put a notice about language in Welcome to Discourse (thread that new users see first):
- The official and recommended language of the Fortran Discourse is English.
- If you are uncomfortable writing in English, try and make the best effort to post in English using Google Translate or a similar automatic translation tool.
- Otherwise, you are still welcome to post in a language other than English. In that case, it is possible that few or no responses if there are no existing users who understand it.
In this approach, we are inclusive and don’t explicitly discourage posts in other languages, however we encourage posting in English so that everybody can participate.
In the scenario of a non-English language post, we can follow the guidelines 2-4 that @vmagnin proposed, so that English-speakers can read and respond.
What do you think about this proposal?