

Ask HN: How Should I Handle My International Traffic? - dglassan

Hey HN,<p>I launched www.disrupt.fm a little less than a month ago and have seen some steady growth so far after a few blogs picked up the story (including Mashable!). The site allows people to download music for free in return for sharing it with their friends on Fracebook. The website integrates pretty deeply with Facebook, and since I recently read that about 70% of Facebook's traffic comes from outside of the US (can't find the link), it makes sense that I would be seeing a lot of international traffic. I didn't consider this when I was developing the site so I have a few questions:<p>1. What collation should I have my database set at so that I don't see funky characters when users upload songs with à/ã/ë and other special characters in them? It's currently set to utf8_general_ci.<p>2. What do you think I should do about all of this international music being uploaded? I assumed that there would mostly be american music being uploaded, but I've seen a ton of international music uploaded each day. should I create an international section and/or genre for when the musicians upload music? Or should I leave it like it is and have all the music in one section?<p>Thanks guys
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petervandijck
1\. utf8_general_ci is fine. Make sure your html pages are also utf-8 encoded,
and you should be good to go. Copy and paste this arrow → in your forms to
test if it displays ok. (Or any other unicode char.)

2\. Let it play out for a while. Then run with it: ask the English speaking
foreign users what's most important to them (translated UI? Separate section?)
and implement it.

Good luck!

~~~
dglassan
waiting it out seems like a good idea for now. It really hasn't caused any
problems yet so I guess I'll wait and see.

Thanks

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dglassan
clickable: <http://www.disrupt.fm>

