[alt.bbs] All BBS's speak English??

av74381@korppi.tut.fi (Vesterinen Arto) (02/01/90)

I have been running a local bbs on Atari ST for couple of years here
in Finland. Some of the BBS's youngest users don't speak English very well
and they have hard time understanding the functions of the bbs. 
I have used Steven Grimm's BB/ST and now my system runs  Michtron's Multiuser
BBS program. I have had good experience of both of these programs but
I would like to make things little easier for my users and get a Finnish
speaking BBS software. There are also other confusing things than language,
for example dates should be of form dd-mm-yy, not mm-dd-yy. Time
should be military time, not AM/PM form.

I don't know any commercial bbs programs which could
be translated TOTALLY (without serious hacking ;-) ) into another language. 

For best results I quess I should write my own piece of software, 
or port some PD bbs on my system.

If there exists any PD bbs software INCLUDING the source code (Citadel?), 
would you please e-mail me how to get these.


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I  Arto Vesterinen                   I  Internet  av74381@tut.fi  I
I  Tampere University of Technology  I  UUCP      tut!av74381     I
I  Finland                           I  Bitnet    av74381@fintut  I

pozar@hoptoad.uucp (Tim Pozar) (02/02/90)

In article <10973@etana.tut.fi> av74381@korppi.tut.fi (Vesterinen Arto) writes:
>I have been running a local bbs on Atari ST for couple of years here
>in Finland. Some of the BBS's youngest users don't speak English very well
>and they have hard time understanding the functions of the bbs. 
>I would like to make things little easier for my users and get a Finnish
>speaking BBS software. 
>I don't know any commercial bbs programs which could
>be translated TOTALLY (without serious hacking ;-) ) into another language. 
>If there exists any PD bbs software INCLUDING the source code (Citadel?), 
>would you please e-mail me how to get these.

    The next version of Fido will be multi-lingual.  You will be
able to port it to any language you want via text configuation
files.  This will include "ANSI" (note quotes) escape sequences
to paint different colour text and graphics.  

    As soon as it comes out, I will upload it to SIMTEL.  Look
for "Fido 12s".

	    Tim

-- 
Tim Pozar    Try also...
Internet: pozar@toad.com   
    Fido:  1:125/555
  PaBell:  (415) 788-3904
  USNail:  KKSF / 77 Maiden Lane /  San Francisco CA 94108

ALC@psuvm.psu.edu (02/03/90)

Certainly... PCBoard 14.2 can be designed to run under any language.
All messages are stored in a separate file which can be easily edited
using a utility which comes with the system. There are already several
language files available on Salt Air, the support BBS for PCBoard.

randy@m2xenix.UUCP (Randy Bush) (02/04/90)

The new version of Fido, 12s, and the upcoming (17 March) version of Opus are
multi-lingual.  There are utilities to translate all commands, prompts, etc.
into most languages.  I do not believe any of the test crew for these have yet
tried languages that use extended character sets, e.g.  Finnish, so that may
reveal bugs.

-- 
..!uunet!m2xenix!randy   randy@m2xenix.psg.com   (Randy Bush)