websites and stupid assumptions

2007-08-27

I just went to a blog and wanted to leave a comment. So the site redirects to blogger.com where I can leave a comment. The site correctly detects I am located in Finland. Very good! That’s so clever! Amazing what you can do these days!

The only problem is that like most of this world (barring around 4-5 million native speakers) I don’t speak Finnish. Not a word. Really, I have a coffee mug that lists pretty much all knowledge I have of this beautiful but incomprehensible language. I haven’t even managed to memorize most of that. And somehow I don’t believe “maksa makkara” (pay the sausage?) is going to help me here.

So, no problem, lots of sites make this mistake. Just click the little “gimme the english version” link that surely must be hidden somewhere …. missing in action. So I check the url …. no obvious way to change fi to en there either. Maybe on the frontpage …. nope, www.blogger.com insists on Finnish as well. So www.blogger.com is unusable for me. Lets just hope it doesn’t spread to the rest of the world. That would be really annoying.

Anyway, this assumption of setting the language based on IP address is just stupid and wrong. First of all, the site should respect my browser settings: doesn’t list Finnish, at all. Neither does my OS. And the browser sends this information as part of the http headers so you can know that my preferred language is US-en. Secondly, Finland is bilingual and for some 500.000 people the right language would have been Swedish. I happen to speak some Swedish at least. And finally any modern country like Finland has a large number of travelers, tourists and migrant workers like me. So not offering a way out is just stupid. Confronting hundreds of thousands of users (just in Finland) with the wrong language when each of them is providing you with their preferred language is even more stupid. Additionally, not offering a link for English is just retarded.