Perpetrators should be drawn and quartered, and their precious bandwidth capped.

Harsh words--I know. Yet there is simply no excuse any more. My current victim of derision is Monda Civitano. Now, I came across a blog post which cited this article about that site. Part of interest is as follows.

The problem is that almost no-one speaks the language, therefore people see no reason to learn it. To change this pattern, La Fungo launched the new website http://www.mondacivitano.net. Visitors are asked to fill in an E-card to promise they will learn Esperanto if 10 million other people promise to do the same. The website contains links to free Esperanto courses.

I dare you, I really do, to find that information on the site. Even if it is there, the site is so fabulously hideous that one cannot stay long enough to puzzle it out. Ugh! Granted, the blog post was from Feb. 2008 and the article likely older, but there aren't even indications that there might have been some useful information there.

There's been a similar rant on Klaku which can be found here (all in Esperanto). Esperanto-Land needs to step it up. We need to make our websites more functional (stop it with the multitude of broken links!), clear, and appealing. Which is NOT hard, especially if the site is based off of Drupal or (even easier) Wordpress. Themes are easy, free, and lovely. Love them.

I apologize for my rant being in English, but I find that the scathing portion of my tongue is most comfortable in my native language.

Please, share your gripes (with hideous websites or with me) and ideas on how to move Esperantujo forward. I'm sick of all of our sites being from 1991.

Note: I graciously exclude Lernu.net, Eventeo.net, klaku.net, and a few others.

I know one really crap esperanto site, but it's mine ha ha (it's a wikispace which is developing slower than melting butter in a Siberian winter...).

Nonetheless, it seems quite a few of these domains were bought and never really developed much. However, I also know some sites which are too in development, e.g. the Ido site 'http://idomondo.org/' which might not look like much at the moment but is definitely under development (looking forward to it too).

I also seems that some of these sites are being used as advertisement spots (I know of a few big bizo's that chuck up random sites at unused domains and put relevant '' advertising there for the sad person who typed in 'goggle.com' instead of 'google.com' - don't try it though, don't trust those sites).

Everyone's too concerned about learning Chinese on ChinesePod or trying to learn the latest Spanish slang because the focus on language learning at the moment is traveling and commerce. For those who have the passion to learn such languages, go for it, but there are many people out there monopolising on the language market which leaves little interest for conlangs, let alone developing sites for them.

On this note, its not just languages like Esperanto that are suffering with bad web presence, Bayerisch (or Bairisch, I lost the argument about the spelling with my best friend, she's been to Bavaria) is an awesome, easy, and well-spoken (about 12 million peops) language but any information about it is in German, nothing for Oktoberfesters from Australia. And Indonesian, despite being extremely wide spoken (~250 million speakers incl.diaspora), has a disproportionate range of resources, at least way less than French which has much less speakers.