Namecoin Forum

One of my goals for 2015 is to improve our translation efforts by building translation workflows and I would appreciate input from others. I figured I would start by experimenting with Transifex and the website.

One question I have is whether we should bother with language specific TLDs. They add to the cost, but I didn't want to assume that users with non-latin scripts would not have trouble accessing our latin domain names.

That being said, the only users who need to understand Namecoin are those who might be concerned about a governmental adversary, then they need to be a technically savvy user and likely speek a second language. Based on the OpenNet Intiative's censorship index and cursoury research into language education, I think Arabic, Mandarin, and Russian are the only scripts that justify dedicating financial resources.

Thoughts? Suggestions?

typically users have a tool to change typing between their language and english, while having a domain name in strange characters makes the domain more difficult to access to latin-character users.

Regional domains, like namecoin.co.uk and namecoin.ru are more likely to suffer legal action because they have to comply with local laws that may bar freedom of expression, having one or two backup domains is enought, .info, and .ch or .se for example.

As for the website, it's more important that is secure and have regular backups. Then comes UTF-8 and localization plug-in. Anyone that may be interested in nmc it must know some english, but i'm sure there will be many volunteers to translate the content, technical and practical.

I generally agree with tosh0 that regional domains are unwise from a censorship standpoint. The current .org and .info domains are pretty close to optimal; the U.S. hasn't even seized wikileaks.org. Note that Iceland recently seized a domain from Islamic State.

tosh0 wrote: Regional domains, like namecoin.co.uk and namecoin.ru are more likely to suffer legal action because they have to comply with local laws that may bar freedom of expression, having one or two backup domains is enought, .info, and .ch or .se for example.

Sadly, both Namecoin.se and Namecoin.ch are taken but I own Namecoin.cc and Namecoin.eu. I've sent an email to the owner of Namecoin.is asking what his plans are (he happens to be a friend). Anyone seeking to disable all of our ccTLDs would have to hit 3-4* jurisdictions. Given that wikileaks.org is still functioning, I believe that this is overkill.

I'll put international domains on my TODO list, I need native speakers to tell me what I need to register anyway; translation of English naming schemes that concatenate names (like name+coin) is non-trivial.

Any other input on this? I was thinking of having a language drop down menu but since we have control of the server we should be able to write redirects based on the browser's language preference and the TLD being used.

*.cc is a ccTLD but it is managed by Verisign. I have an industry contact that claims .cc is subject to the US's arbitrary domain seizures but I have been unable to find an example of a .cc domain being seized.

indolering wrote:

tosh0 wrote:Any other input on this? I was thinking of having a language drop down menu but since we have control of the server we should be able to write redirects based on the browser's language preference and the TLD being used.

I'm pretty sure privacy-aware browsers (like TorBrowser) don't send a language header.

biolizard89 wrote:

indolering wrote:

tosh0 wrote:Any other input on this? I was thinking of having a language drop down menu but since we have control of the server we should be able to write redirects based on the browser's language preference and the TLD being used.

I'm pretty sure privacy-aware browsers (like TorBrowser) don't send a language header.

Sorry, poor phrasing: we should do both.