My point, and opinion, is that if EVERY error message begins with the words, "You are not allowed to".... it can become very very DRY. SMF doesn't think it's too good for you
. It's not the snobish butler that secretly plans your death at night.
Using two different phrasings, as in "You cannot just XXX even if this is your post." makes it seem like the forum is really talking to you. It makes it feel like, even though it's an "you are not allowed" message, it's not a cold one.... it's a friendly one, like "oops". People are more comfortable around friendly entities than snobish butlers
.
However, yes it should be clear that the error message corresponds to the right permission. With the English error messages (most of which I of course hand typed...) I tried to balance the need for "friendliness" with clarity. Except, I didn't write the strings in ManagePermissions, Compuart did. (but I looked them over and they seemed fine.)
I meant many of my points in a general sense. Maybe you can depend on the error messages and permissions tying together - and maybe you can't. What if there is a mod that changes the permission interface, but these changes require reformatting the language strings... ie. "delete posts" -> "Are you sure you want to allow this person to delete posts?"... then you get "I'm sorry, but you are not allowed to Are you sure you want to allow this person to delete posts?" - the error message wouldn't have needed to have been changed.... except specifically for that one language - this makes it confusing.
My primary meaning in efficiency was that PHP takes time to parse any file. While it doesn't take *that much*, it is safe to say that parsing is at least 30% of SMF's average load time. (likely more.) The more files it has to parse, and the longer those files are, the slower it's going to get. Maybe this doesn't exactly matter for
permissions, but once you're doing it with permissions why not do it lots of other places too?
You'll have to excuse me if I try to answer questions as if they affect the long run, as if people will come in four months and read them and make their own assumptions.... but I have seen exactly that happen too often. Maybe it might work in this one case, and you'd never have to worry about it... and it'd never cause a single person a bit of strife....... but there would be OTHER cases, and those would.
As for context; I know that, for example, Japanese uses very non-English grammar. It has been referred to as, basically, "yoda speak". In Japanese, you might say just the word "hungry" to mean that you are hungry. You might say "hungry, he is" or "allowed to do this, you are not". I won't pretend I know Japanese, but from my understanding, forcing word order is very very bad in the long run for internationalization - whether it be Japanese, Hebrew, Thai, or German.
And, yes, there are places where word order is forced... but I consider these places to be problems that need working out. By no means would I want to introduce MORE troubles where a phrase like "person is allowed to delete posts" might have to fit into a sentence that uses you. Even Spanish may have problems with such usage. (tengo, tiene, tienes, etc. - although in that case Usted could be used and that would mostly work, except that it almost should be Ellos not singular.)
-[Unknown]
