robbkvasnak:Yes, there are some very, very poor people in the United States - some 17 million kids go to bed hungry at night here. I taught in a school where many of our pupils hardly had anything to eat at home so we gave them free breakfast. Sometimes the parents came with them becaus THEY didn't have enough to eat. Some people live here in cardboard boxes.
When I say that I am unrich I definitely mean lower middle class or maybe upper lower class. Back when I went to Hawai'i is was my first "vacation" in many years and I got it at a discount because I was going as a student. I also stayed way out in the country side with a family - not in one of those expensive hotels.
There are families here who live in their cars and park at night near a gas station so that the family can go to the bathroom and they wash themselves in the sink there. If you come here, you will see people looking through garbage cans on the street for food. Believe me! There are parts of Fort Lauderdale where grown men do not go alone because they could be mugged there. When I was teaching private school, one of our students from Italy was shot to death because he stopped at a fast food place in the wrong part of town and the people there thought that he was a rich tourist.
I am not writing this to put the US down. It is my homeland. I was born here. But it is reality and it is a problem that we have to work on.

And yet we have 10-20 million people who want to live here so badly that they are doing so illegally. Thousands risk their lives every day trying to sneak across the border. More than 60 million people visited this country last year and 7.5 million visas were issued (Ref)

Sure, there are hungry and homeless people in the United States. Someone gets shot almost every day in my city and there are parts of town I wouldn't even drive through in broad daylight. But according to recent polls over 130 MILLION people want to leave their own country and come live in the United States.

We may have had pretty ugly webpages back in the 90's, but back then it was still okay to be proud of your country, warts and all

Amike,

Paul

Since Oijos doesn't tell us what country she/he is from I cannot comment on that - but the n-word is totally inappropriate. And the amount of laziness or productivity is not an indicator of one's financial income/intake. Just as the aspect of a web page is not an indicator of the content. Remember the expression: Don't judge a book by its cover?
My husband and I just received an award for the best content article on teaching geography from an international association of geographers - but neither of us can design swank web pages. But I was just fired for being gay from a university teaching position that I have had since 2005. And that is legal here.
Furthermore, mentioning the problems of a country has nothing to do with how "proud" one is of where one lives. Personally, I am pretty much in love with south Florida but other parts of the US do not attract me at all. On the other hand I do have to clear up the myth that we are all well to do here. Not everyone here is Oprah Winfred. Some 50 million Americans don't have health care and are therefore just one sickness away from total poverty. That is not because they are lazy and definitely is not due to the color of their skin, their ethnic origin or their religion. My next door neighbor was from England. He bought a house here with a mortgage. Then the sharks from Wall Street threw us into a recession and he suddenly owed more on the house than it was worth and his pay sank so that the bank foreclosed on the house and through him into the street. He went to live with his family. So it was not his skin color or laziness that caused his becoming destitute. He is a wonderful cabinet maker but nobody can afford custom made furniture right now - except the very rich and they are really few and far between.
So back to the web pages and Esperanto: I do not believe that the fact that Esperanto is only the 60th most spoken language in the world (of more than 6,000 languages) is due to the old-fashioned web pages or dictionary covers. Follow the money! Right now, New York and London rule the international markets - it is money's language that we speak. Once it was Greek, then it was Latin, then New Latin, then French, and now English(es). And tomorrow's biggy? Well, we will have to wait and see. But if you DO want to create slick web pages, I think that all who speak Esperanto will be grateful to you.

I deleted the offensive message as soon as I saw it. Offensive posts, profanity and racism are prohibited in these forums, and any posts containing such language will be deleted immediately (as will posts linking to offensive, indecent, or racist websites).

erinja:Offensive posts, profanity and racism are prohibited in these forums...

May I ask who decides what is offensive and what is not?

An innocuous cartoon of Mohammed is offensive to some.
Some find the n-word abhorrent.
Bare breasted women walking on beaches is normal in some European countries while wearing jeans can get a woman killed or raped in certain parts of India because some men find them profane.

I want to ask whose sensibilites Lernu is trying not to hurt. Americans? Europeans? Chinese? Africans? And then what kind of Africans? Or Americans? or Europeans? Liberal? Christian? Moslem?

maybe when esperanto becomes a more fashionable language, its websites will look more fashionable. *shrug* mi supozas ke mi ne sufiĉe mojosas por zorgi.

Back on topic—Eventeo had a great-looking website a few years back. Sadly, the site is no longer active.

Yeah, we need more sites like eventeo and nunonia.

The question that matters: What content to put on a fancy new website? Noone visits a website only because it's looking good. So what is still missing or not implemented good enough yet about Esperanto in the web?

Demian:

erinja:Offensive posts, profanity and racism are prohibited in these forums...

May I ask who decides what is offensive and what is not?

Administrators make the decisions as best we can, following the standards of neither the most liberal nor the most conservative society. We are not the Taliban but there are limits to what you can post here and we try to keep the content as non-offensive as possible, to the extent that we can, while still encouraging open discussion of a variety of topics. If someone is offended by someone else saying "I don't believe in religion X or in any religion" then that's just too bad. If someone is offended because someone has made a post saying "believers in X religion are heretics and idiots and they should all be killed", then we are likely to do something about that post. Everyone has a right to their opinion but it should be expressed in a polite and friendly way, without insulting others.

The purpose of the forums is to give users a chance to practice the language, not to offend half of our user base by making inflammatory statements and posting indecent pictures. We are a site for language learning and practice, not for controversial content.

Racism is never ok, period. Insulting statements about nationalities, ethnic & cultural groups, etc. = never ok, period.

But as a rule, speakers of a language determine what's ok for their language. If we start getting complaints about someone's post from a forum, we take a look. We don't speak all language and we don't know what's considered profane and indecent in all languages, but user complaints are a clue. If you would like to discuss our standards in more detail, I suggest you send me a private message, since it is off-topic for this thread.

I think a website that is not necessarily about Esperanto but is written in Esperanto would be something good. There are plenty of websites about it, the market is saturated.
It would be refreshing to have site where conversations aren't dominated by debates on grammar and the philosophical ideals of Esperanto.
We need a site just for fun and relaxed chat. Somewhere to talk about things like music and TV stuff such as who was the latest character to be killed off in game of thrones etc. Possibly also in the form of a forum site but separate from lernu which has a tendency to turn conversations a bit deep and thoughtful (or completely idiotic, depending on who's joining in)

Them's my thoughts on it anyway.
Respekte, miaj gefratoj