Re: Automatic language selection

Hi Norman!

You're doing a fantastic job ... but I don't want to be told what language to read the site in. I suggest offering the other-language mirrors as links for those who

wish to set them as a preference and encouraging visitors to use mirrors for local

downloads. When I type a function into your address, e.g. http://www.php.net/ereg,

I want that page to appear in English and not be automatically changed to German.

I've tried using the my.php.net settings, but it appears to be a bit wobbly because

I keep landing up back at German content.

There is no such thing as "other language mirrors", or at least not intentionally. As you can see on my php.net we clearly intend to have a preference list of languages. Your own setting overrides everything [if you have not specified the language yourself in the request otherwise - in the GET or POST query]. Then we remember the last language you used. After that we check what language you have set in accept-language. This stage is only reached, if none of the above were set (no explicit language, no preferred language, no last language). Only after this we check the mirror's default language. We had a few reports, that on some ocassions some mirror redirections also change the language, but none of us were able to reproduce it so far. http://php.net/ereg redirects you to a local mirror in case the server is too busy, and would only be able to serve you very slowly. Every mirror has the same code to check what language to serve the content for you, so the .de mirrors should also serve you content in some language depending on the above conditions.

Check out Google for a good example. They set a cookie for whatever site you want to set as your main choice as soon as you click on it so you can reset it

quickly on any new computer or after a cookie clean-out. The vast majority of

users will be happy with the automatic detection choice (the German site in

my case), but I can quickly set my preference to the American site by clicking

only once on the link.

As you can see above, we theoretically do everything to satisfy the language preference needs properly. There may be some bug in our code, but we cannot reproduce the problem. Can you please help us by looking a bit closer, and examine where you experience the problem, and under what circumstances [my php.net settings, mirror sites involved, search type (URL, search field), etc]? Thanks, Goba