As one of the very few Frenchies on board, I have *very* mixed feeling about this.

On the one hand, I understand the motivations : extend, embrace (pun intended , and at the same time bring into the fold and avoid fragmentation.

On the other hand, all the similar experiences I've seen of specific French forums for local "subcommunities" have been dismal failures. It was true some time ago for the Sharp Zaurus , it is even worse right now for the maemo devices, and it can even be seen in unrelated but similarly specialized categories like the BMW C1 "scooter".

The trend seems quite clear to me, the reasons less so. Maybe it is a "cultural" thing, as German forums seem to fare much better (as far as I can judge with my own limited grasp of the language). Maybe it's because we're a less geeky or more conformist society as a whole, so cutting-edge and/or non-mainstream items have even smaller niches than elsewhere, and the user base never reaches critical mass. Maybe, as has been implied here, there is a correlation between not wanting to bother with even *reading* vernacular English, and not having much of value to contribute in the first place ?

Whatever the truth, it remains that our maemofr.org is really nothing to be proud of, despite the best efforts and intents of its creator. Traffic is minimal at best, the less dismal conversations hardly reach the level of pissing contests on TMO, and to add insult to injury, the noisiest contributors can't even be bothered to write in their own language with less than a spelling/grammar mistake per word (think: frank.wagner = Shakespeare :-).

A few of us here have tried acting as go-betweens there, but it got old real quickly.

On the gripping hand, it might be worth a try, but I'm not sure there's much to be gained, our case sounds desperate :-)