Virtualmeet.net has reached its first milestone. We now have support forums in Finnish, German and Swedish manned by native speakers and staff members Måns Rinne, Christian Burger and Olle Harju. Our mission is to completely integrate these languages (and more to come!) into the main site in 2008. Meanwhile, these forums operate in parallel to the English forum offering an opportunity to discuss, sign up for our meets and ask questions in these languages. With the exception of the Swedish rules, which will be published sometime this week, the rules are now also fully localized into these languages. As part of this launch, Matt Reed now takes over the main responsibility for moderating the English forum.

If you enter one of these non-English forums, you will notice that the forum language is automatically switched to match that of the forum. By clicking on the registration links, the user will be taken to a localized version of the registration page which also features the user agreement in the corresponding language. In short, it should now be possible to sign up and to fully participate in our events without knowing a word of English. That said, we naturally encourage everyone who has the interest and language skills to interact over the language borders.

To make a long story short (and a short night a little longer), I just want to emphasize that the whole staff did a stellar job in getting the job done on a rather short notice. Danke! Thanks! Tack! Kiitos!