Shoutbox

In the description of your skins, state if your skin changes texts.



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The reason for this is simple: Not all people use the English version of Messenger!

This also goes for extracting the resources of Messenger. Do not include (msglang_strings.txt) resources which you didn't change. That is, if you extracted them from the English version of Messenger and include it in your skin without changing anything, it would overwrite the normal language of the user's Messenger.

The same if you use the consolidated xxxstyle.txt files. There are a lot of language dependent strings in there! Make sure you do not include them if you're not going to change them, and/or use the original style files from the Windows directory, etc....

All this happens in a couple of the released skins already....

It is very annoying to see (english) texts popping up here and there when you are using Messenger in another language.

Your skin itself could be awesome, but not taking in account international support makes such skins "unprofessional", if you know what I mean.


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In the same manner, and for the same reasons, I also like to suggest to add an extra field in skin descriptions in the skin database: "Language", where the developers can state if they used and/or changed text, and if so, in what language.
(even when it is just 1 string resource which has been changed)

That's a very important point indeed: the consolidated version of the style sheet files is here to help you figure things out. It is highly recommended that you use the original, unmodified style sheets from the Windows directory (when extracting the resources) when you want to actually modify stuff and send it out to everybody. This way, everything that can change from one version to another (like the language) will still work properly.

Yup, I stuck with that for those exact reasons. The whole world doesn't speak English, which is why I didn't bother replacing any strings at all Just makes sure the skin appeals to a wider audience

Thanks cookie for take this point out.... I was about to open a thread about it...