There are two problems with adding a new language/regional specific section to the
forums.freebsd.org.
First, It's not going to end with just one language. There's going be daily request to add new one.
Second, Forums will face huge problem in SERP. Implementing a website under one TLD (in this case
.org
) to serve content in multiple languages and at the same time keep search engines happy is problematic. It doesn't matter how it get implemented, subdomain (???.forums.freebsd.org), lang-folder (/pt) or a just a subsection of the site (
forums.
). Using proper
hreflang
or not, whether forum software supports it or not. You are going to have problem in search engine. why?
Most of people who search on web to find solution to their technical problem, will not type complete sentences. It's not going to be a linguistics-perfect sentence. Generally, they type just one or two keywords, some long-tailed keyword and selecting search engine auto-suggestion. Technical terms and keyword are largely language-neutral. Therefore you can find similar content in both forums main section and language-specific portion of forums. Search engines start to produce mixed result in the SERP. For example I search for a problem in English (dtrace), and there is a good change to get landed on
pt section of the forums. And there's also problems with using VPN, browser language and search engine location guessing.
Finally, to label the 5th anchor-text on FreeBSD website menu as "Community", doesn't make it community. It is very easy to forget that it is just a Forum with administrators and owners who make the decisions. These kind of decisions are up to the owners of FreeBSD and FreeBSD Forums. I'm just a user and, frankly my opinion is irrelevant.
[EDIT:] On the community rant: I didn't want to be rude or nasty, but in reality, a community is a real life experience in a real neighbourhood with limited population mostly around a temple, church or other cultural entity, between people who share more than just a favourite ice-cream or OS.