Fórum Português says "Olá Mundo!"

I’ve decided on making 2019 a pivotal year for  my career as well as for my personal life. I’ve committed to trying out  new things and doing projects that I think make me happy, no matter how  silly they are. This one in particular solves a longstanding problem  I’ve witnessed many times.

Portuguese people engage in lots of  online communities. There are tech communities, car lover forums, real  estate related facebook groups, etc. There seems to be a challenge  associated with providing a platform for discourse in several niches, as  observed in the top communities – they all seem to run 2008 burning  board software. It’s great nostalgia to open some of these websites and  to move back a decade in time, but it’s not a great experience. I won’t  get carried away with the details, but let’s just say that these types  of systems do not handle mobile clients at all and that there are lots of things that have since changed when interacting with web  applications such as browser notifications, asynchronous requests for  loading posts, etc. These are all changes that have yet to made it back  to the old forum systems that are still widely used today.

So I’ve decided to use my free time to help translate a significant portion of Discourse into European Portuguese, started an instance on a docker container and  slapped it onto a server somewhere in Europe. It’s not much yet in  terms of content, but I hope it grows to become somewhat popular. I  intend to provide it free of charge as long as there are people using  it, perhaps adding a modest donation button down the line to help pay  the bills, but that’s all.

It has given me quite a bit of work:  almost 1000 translated strings later, half a dozen social login  integrations and a fair amount of shitposting, I am happy to say it is  live at https://fórumportuguês.com . Yes, it has accents in there. Yes, I know… I also bought the  non-accented versions, but this is my opinionated way of saying that  2019 is a good year to overcome some old concepts. Internationalised  Domain Names are a thing for a while now.

Hat tip to my good friend Guilherme who provided copious amounts of ideas and proof-reading!

🚢 Here’s to shipping more things this year! 🚢