Q&A enhancement: multiple answers and multiple languages

Arantor

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Q&A enhancement: multiple answers and multiple languages
« on May 31st, 2012, 02:32 PM »
After we had some... interesting... comments regarding the Q&A at Noisen, I figured I'd solve it once and for all.

So here's what I'm currently working on, making the anti-spam Q&A support multiple languages and support multiple answers. The UI's the first part I'm tackling and so far this is where I'm up to. It's not quite as pretty as it could be, but it certainly seems to be coming together.

 multi_qa.png - 23.23 kB, 978x350, viewed 387 times.

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Re: Q&A enhancement: multiple answers and multiple languages
« Reply #5, on May 31st, 2012, 10:18 PM »
I've done some work on this one, tweaking it a bit. The admin page is quite capable of loading/saving entries at this point, I just have to modify the core verification code to use it.

But this is the sort of thing I had in mind when I decided to implement it. :)

(Btw, the number of questions is limited to the fewest in the supplied languages, e.g. if you put in two English questions and one French, it won't let you ask users for 2 questions since French only has one. The remaining plan is to try and offer the questions in the language currently in use, much as language processing actually uses, between session/user preference/forum default/English fallback)

 multi_qa_2.png - 37.73 kB, 978x426, viewed 220 times.



Re: Q&A enhancement: multiple answers and multiple languages
« Reply #7, on May 31st, 2012, 10:43 PM »
Of course it doesn't look right, but that's sort of the point, it's not supposed to. It's supposed to be different enough that I can tell at a glance which pool it's drawing from and so that I can ensure it adequately handles randomisation where it's supposed to show one question from two (when using English)

Honestly, this is the fun bit I'm up to now, rewriting the logic of the create-validation routine, one of the areas I know least from SMF, even though I successfully added hooks and an internalised validation method... *facepalm*



Re: Q&A enhancement: multiple answers and multiple languages
« Reply #10, on June 1st, 2012, 12:04 AM »
I have no idea how you guys can put up with learning tens of thousands of foreign words, and in the case of French, learn their *gender* as well... (Just like having to learn hanzi/kanji in addition to vocabulary in Chinese, Japanese etc...)
Do you know of Jane Birkin? She speaks a perfect fluent French, but is well known for always choosing the wrong gender much of the time :lol:



Re: Q&A enhancement: multiple answers and multiple languages
« Reply #13, on June 1st, 2012, 12:18 AM »
It was certainly the hardest part for me to make the mental leap from English to French when I studied it to cope with the fact that the majority of terms suddenly had gender to them; in English, the only items that have a gender are done so anthropomorphically - ships, for example where they are referred to as female, correlated to 'You treat her like a lady. And she'll always bring you home.'[1]

Then after a year of studying French, Spanish was also thrust upon me. Fortunately there's a lot of similarity in the languages - including the genders - so I didn't totally fail both, but I dropped Spanish as soon as I had the opportunity and concentrated on the you-will-study-one-foreign-language choice I was actually going to study. The sad part is that although I passed French GCSE in 2000, I haven't been back to France since then :/
 1. Now, anyone that can name where I got that quote without Google or IMDb wins a free internet.

Re: Q&A enhancement: multiple answers and multiple languages
« Reply #14, on June 1st, 2012, 12:22 AM »
I also dropped Spanish as soon as I could to focus on English ;)

Do you think you've lost your French due to not visiting France? Just watch French movies and be done with it :P
There's this craze about The Intouchables these days... Not a bad movie (has some of my favorite actors), but definitely not the best of its kind.

Anyway.... Gotta go to sleep.