Suggestions

Everytime I try to type chinese in pm it just shows question marks, although comments bios and crossroads support chinese.
I don't really like sending a private message on another user's profile, and it's much easier for us to talk in our first language.

I don't know about other languages but I guess that Cyrillic, accents, Japenese, Korean etc are not supported in pm too.

fr has a large audience from non English-speaking countries, and since fr already supports multiple languages in some parts I think it's not so difficult for the team to do so.

Support.

I can understand keeping the forum English-only for easier Moderation, but if we can leave comments, write bio and CR messages in other languages, it makes little sense to not be able to do that in PM. It would be very helpful for non-English speakers to communicate and help each other. Not everyone can speak fluent English and/or brave enough to venture into forums with their not-perfect English to ask for help.

Support, it has been an issue for me as well as some of my friends here don't speak English well and PMs don't support cyrillic. I had to resort to offsite messengers and such just to explain some stuff or arrange a swap, that's really inconvenient.

I don't really know a language with different letters, BUT I fully support this. For the reasons mentioned above.

People who don't have English as a first language can use PMs to talk to each other more clearly and arrange trades, auctions, raffles, etc. It would make things much more streamlined for the non-English-speaking communities of FR. Support!

Support! It doesn't make sense that you can use non Latin scripts in profile comments, but not PMs.

I think the language support could have been taken out of PMs and forums for moderation purposes. That being said I see no reason to not make this into a "on your own risk" rule. Using languages not supported by the site (so anything but english) is on your own risk. If a trade goes wonky or harassment takes place you will have to help yourself.

My concern would be using a foreign language/foreign characters to harass someone (using difference characters to get passed filters, insulting someone in a foreign language that might be harder to moderate, insulting someone in a way s/he might not even be able to understand...). Granted, it would be crazy obvious who the guilty party is, but said individual could make a fake account, which means tracking down IP numbers, but then there's VPNs...

The difference with profile comments and bios is that other players have to willingly go to them. With a PM, the PM comes to the player, making it much more direct.

I'm not saying I'm against it. I'm not saying I'm for it. I just wanted to point out one difference and throw out something to consider.

To add somewhat on to gemajgall

The big reason that all other parts of the site are english exclusive (or mostly anyway) is for moderation purposes, right? Well... I mean... PMs are also moderated, yeah? Not by volunteer moderators, sure but they're still looked at.

Records are still kept, they're looked at for investigation purposes I'm sure, They can be reported, etc etc

So while I can get behind the idea of allowing multi-language PMs... how are they going to be moderated? If something is reported in another language and the staff have to look at it... and then can't read it... what happens then? They try out google translate or track someone down who can speak the language? There are ways around I suppose but it's something that they can't (assuming) moderate themselves... which might toss a wrench into the suggestion

I'm in the same boat as Gema and alpha

I'm certain the staff can look into PM's if they really have to, not that harassments occur via PM's a lot but it does happen I'm sure.

And I've been in the situation where someone was cussing me out in a different language I couldn't understand. Was on a public forum and I dunno if the person got in trouble since the forum moderators weren't the best at what they did, but it wasn't very nice regardless.

But suppose that is the big question here, should the staff have to look at pm's how will they help if it's in a language they don't understand?