Hi there

Hi everyone!

I'm new to this board altough I have been lurking on this website for some time. Well it's introducing time:

I'm Robert from the Netherlands; I found this website by clicking on a signature on a other board. Probally like the rest of you: I'm really fond of arcade gaming!

Side-note: I think allot of potential members are being set-off by the excessive use of french on this boards, not becouse they hate the language but becouse they can not read it. (me included). So if you guys like to see more members maybe it's a good idea to switch the language to English?

welcom here... it's arcade belgium not arcade england... and founders are french spoken... but we NEVER forbid use of english or dutch...

and i think we're not looking to have the biggest forum about arcade but to have regular members...

have a nice stay here

Hallo Robert,

Hartelijk welkom hier! Ik denk dat het correct is. Veel mensen hier kunnen niet deelnemen omdat de taalgrens heel moeilijk is. Ook voor mij is het moeilijk met twee of soms drie talen te behandelen.

Andere sites in vlanderen zijn ook naast 100% in het nederlands. Misschien is het ook voor het faciliteit? Iedereen ga liever voor zijn moedertaal denk ik!

Ik ben persoonlijk niet tegen het idee. Het zou bij de site baas gediscusseert worden. Het zou misschien ook veel mensen die alleen frans spreken in intrekken zetten.

Do you have arcade forums in the Netherlands? It could be a nice idea to join our forces together. We also have cheaper shipping rates between or two countries, could be nice for trades and business!

@t3k1lla
I understand that when the majorit of visitors are french speaking, that you also like to post in french. However having the boards in english; would make it more accessible. (Or in Dutch, that would make it accessible for Belgium and Dutch visitors.)

I must add: I'm not trying to break 'Arcade Belgium' style/traditions. I'm just expressing my vision.

@footix
'We' used to have a dutch arcade board, but it became spam infested and bleeded dry. Maybe there are still some dutch arcade boards around. But they must be really small.... I never found an other dutch arcade board/forum.

I do think there are allot of arcade fannatics in the Netherlands that are wanting to buy arcade cabinets etc. So it could be a lucrative business venture.

Welcome Wombat!

You're right, language barrier is a real issue but it's true with all forums...

At the time of the website creation (2003), we chose to write in french because most of the arcade websites were in english language only and that we wanted to touch the Belgian players and operators (who often speak dutch and french but barely english, especially on funfairs). We decided from the start to simultaneously publish our pages in english as well so dutch speaking Belgians could read it too. We didn't chose dutch simply because our knowledge of the language is far too limited so would have taken too much time to translate our texts to dutch.

Now the reason that most of the forum is different. At the beginning of the forum, a small core of belgian members quickly formed. As they were all french speaking, all their post were in french. After a while, many members from France joined, posting in french too. I think this is why french remained the main language. I imagine that if the first posts were in english, english would have become the default language used here...

Now as t3k1lla says, nothing prevents you to write in dutch or english. You'll get reply in english which you can read. And he's right in that we don't try to become the biggest arcade board. Here, many members know each others in real life. Atmosphere is often bad on large arcade boards where many members behave badly towards others. What's most important to us is the kindness (quality?) of our members, even if that means having a smaller community. This is a place where everybody feels good and welcome, that's the most important.

I agree to you, mltilanguage forums never worked great. One language always overwhelms the others in the end. But separating languages (as seen on some forums) is not a good solution either because you divide the knowledge.

Totally switching the website to english has already been envisaged because translating texts is very time consuming and writing the same thing twice is never fun. We'll do a poll to see how many visitors read french only.

But switching the forum to english may scare our more faithful members away... So I'm not sure it's a good idea. Management's posts are written in both french and english but each member is free to write in his preferred language. He only should be aware that he'll get more reply if he writes in english than in dutch for example. But even if he writes in dutch, most of belgian members will understand and if we don't reply in dutch (because of too limited knowledge) we'll be happy to reply in english if we can help.

Anyway, you can believe me: If we had to do it again, we would choose english only for both website and forum. It would have made things a lot easier!