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[Question] Why don't we have Korean and Chinese sites again?
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Post by
blademeld
Not the forums, just the database.
The information can be datamined, right?
Post by
150366
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
blademeld
Because Korea and China were removed last patch.
lolwut
I'm aware that China changed their rules about WoW, but Korea still has WotLK and is going strong on 3.1
Post by
pelf
Because nobody on the team speaks/reads/writes Chinese or Korean? Could also have to do with their storage systems and supporting Unicode across the board.
Post by
blademeld
Because nobody on the team speaks/reads/writes Chinese or Korean? Could also have to do with their storage systems and supporting Unicode across the board.
Interesting theories, however, I highly doubt the second part.
If it's simply a matter of not having Korean moderators, why not simply allow the users to view english comments but not be able to post any comments themselves?
After all, you don't need to know English to know what coordinate numbers look like.
Post by
Norrec
If it's simply a matter of not having Korean moderators, why not simply allow the users to view english comments but not be able to post any comments themselves?
I'dont think it's a matter of moderators, they're no moderators for the other languages proposed by wowhead atm.
Post by
blademeld
Awesome, now that that's all out of the way, why don't we have Chinese and Korean databases?
Post by
pelf
Interesting theories, however, I highly doubt the second part.
Well, I only mentioned it because of something an admin told me when I was complaining about signature length. I had some Unicode characters in there and I was getting cut off significantly before my allotted character count. They said it was because when they were ASCII encoded they were taking up more space and the character count was done post encode. Instead of › it was being stored as \x203A.
/shrug
It's a possibility.
Post by
Erorus
Here's a few more possible reasons. Pick your favorites.
No resources available to translate the Wowhead client application or Wowhead pages to Chinese/Korean.
A significant percentage of players in those locales play in Internet cafes or other public terminals, where it is difficult/impossible to install addons and applications like the Wowhead client.
Different Blizzard/The9/whoever EULAs in those countries may make data mining from WoW (with or without the Wowhead client) legally tricky.
If any comments/content appear on the Chinese Wowhead that the Chinese gov't doesn't approve of, cn.wowhead.com gets blocked by the
"Great Firewall of China"
and all the efforts to bring forth the Chinese Wowhead would be wasted.
Difficult to find a reliable advertising network for ads on Chinese/Korean webpages.
Any other cost vs benefit argument. They'd have to spend time and money making it, and if they can't get the ad revenues back to make it worth it, why bother? It's obvious at this point that Wowhead is part of a business that costs and makes money.
Post by
blademeld
I'm liking the cost versus revenue part, but it didn't stop me from visiting Wowhead in Korea, so I'm guessing local ads will still be there.
Post by
355559
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
blademeld
lolwut?
Post by
318568
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
blademeld
Not sure if I read this right, but are you saying there are no WoW databases in Chinese?
No, I'm asking why specifically
Wowhead
doesn't have a Chinese/Korean Version.
If you're saying why wowhead doesn't have a Chinese database, I think it is quite reasonable to say that is because the players already have their own database in Chinese.
There are other English databases that existed before Wowehad as well, Wowhead happens to be a bit more cleaner and faster than the other databases I've encountered.
Also, I don't know of any Korean databases without searching for it.
Also, not many computers are compatible to read Chinese, a lot of American computers/laptops like the one my friend has, cannot read Chinese code and it comes up as gibberish. E.G. GB2312 and BIG5 codes (2 major types) are not built in by default, while the other languages here on Wowhead are.
You can download language settings online and if you can't read chinese anyways, this is a none-issue.
Post by
pelf
this is a none-issue.
Better than a some-issue :).
Post by
Malgayne
Couple of things. The languages we currently support we were actually already receiving data from—the current version of the
Wowhead Client
works just fine on German, Russian, Spanish and French versions of WoW.
We thought originally that nobody using the Chinese and Korean versions of WoW used the Wowhead Client, but we've since had a few people inform us that they do. Regardless, though, we've never received any data from those locales, so something somewhere in the data gathering is broken. To fix this, though, we'd have to actually get ahold of a Chinese or a Korean copy of WoW, and start reverse-engineering.
Unfortunately adding non US locales has proven a little more difficult than we originally anticipated. The non-English sites get a lot less traffic than the English site (obviously), but each one has a totally different set of queries and searches that people run. One of the ways Wowhead stays quick and responsive is by caching search results—if you search for something that someone else has searched for recently, then we can show you the search results without ever having to access our database server, so the search goes much quicker. Unfortunately, it's much more difficult to save bandwidth that way on non-US sites, since there are a lot of searches that occur that we've never seen before, and each one has to access our database server.
The end result is that when we expand into a non-US localized site, we get (theoretically) 110% of our original users—but our database server gets hit nearly twice as hard, and Wowhead gets slower. That's why we haven't added any more localized sites. =/
Post by
blademeld
Cost versus profit.
Got it.
Post by
Malgayne
Not just that, but adding localized sites actually decreases performance on the US site because of the database load. =/
Post by
blademeld
Which can be fixed by doubling your hardware ;)
Post by
oscarucb
2012 now, and there still seems to be no wowhead database support for Chinese and Korean, despite the recent addition of Portuguese. Are there any plans to ever add this?
As an addon dev I use the wowhead cross-language database features extensively to help with addon localization, and it would be really nice to have support for the missing languages.
Barring that, can anyone link a working WoW database for korean and/or chinese?
http://www.wowbox.tw/
mentioned in an earlier comment is either dead or possibly unreachable from the US.
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