Discourse is trying to shoehorn the concept of “pretty slugs” to non ascii char set based languages. It may be acceptable to do this transliteration in Norwegen or Turkish, but stuff gets really weird when you do it in Korean or Chinese or Arabic.
When you look at alexa top 100 for say Egypt or China or any non-latin alphabet you never see this concept of a “slug” which is attempting to convert your alphabet to English. It is offensive and comical.
I am willing to bet big bucks that this issue would never have been raised repeatadly if the URL was site.com/t/42, most non-ascii languages are used to this anyway 99% of the time.
Personally I think going forward we should allow site operators 3 options
English slugs (default for latin based languages)
Percent encoded slugs (for full unicode support)
No slugs (default for non latin based languages)
I also think we should junk StringEx, I think it just does not fit in correctly with the philosophy of slugs and simply looks buggy, if people want to turn their language into an English farce, so be it, but do that in a plugin.
Probably not, as I’d venture to guess he has zero to little programming knowledge. Discourse is getting a lot more CM (Community Manager) attraction now and a lot of those who are engaging here on Meta are no longer devs/programmers, but the CMs. To ask a CM to submit a PR is just unrealistic.
Just for clarification, there is a big difference between changing CSS/SCSS and actual programming changes. I have no idea what @Qasem_h’s experience is, but I definitely see more CMs participating in Meta than what were here several months ago.
I think we are fine on the above specification, if you feel like submitting a PR for it I can merge it in.
