"Ewe are my sunshine, my only sunshine,
Ewe make me happy when skies are grey..."

You're quite right, Morticia, there are Mudcat regulars who are highly regarded whose first a language isn't English, those three and others as well. Most of the time the Mudcat is a pretty friendly place for newcomers of all sorts.

But there was a thread the other day which demonstrated this process in action, and fortunately it got sorted out quickly enough, and that thread wasn't an appropriate place to talk about this issue. But I think it's something we need to be careful about.

I'd imagine if you got a hostile response to an initial post anyway it's pretty off-putting, but even more so if you're doing it in a foreign language. And one of the things I valuie most about teh Mudcat is the insight and the contact it gives with other cultures, so I'm not just being altruistic about saying we ought to be especially worried about chasing such people away. (And if it is actually te case that, for example, someone posting as from Mongolia is actually sitting in a bedsit in Manchester, rather than a Yurt a few miles outside Ulaanbaatar, what the hell.