I use the Language feature somewhat heavily in my game, because it's cool. I had assumed that any Language lines would be revealed to everyone in an archived thread, the same as private and secret lines are. But my new player (whose languages I forgot to set up initially) has just informed me that this doesn't happen: languages your character doesn't understand are still the randomly generated nonsense, even in archived threads. Is this intentional? It's not great? Am I the only person in the universe who actually uses the language system here?

You are absolutely not the only person that uses the Language system here. My games use it extensively.

Admittedly, I never, ever Archive threads *because* private lines are revealed, but I see nothing wrong with Language lines being revealed in archived threads. That they aren't is probably a limitation of the system.

Yep.  I use Language groups, but never saw any need to  archive threads.

I thought the whole point of archiving a thread (as opposed to simply closing it) was that all those details were revealed...

Out of curiosity, have you tested to see if Private to Language Group lines *are* revealed in Archived threads? (Because Private TO <Language Group> is not the same as <Language Group>...)

Because the kicker is, Language Group threads aren't private. They're scrambled. Archiving does warn you that private threads are revealed, but Language Group isn't private. Private TO Language Group is...so it would be worth testing.

If it is, then I suspect as I said above, that scrambling isn't revealed as unscrambled when Archived because it's a limitation of the system.

Hrm, yes, can confirm:  Language lines are still scrambled when you archive a thread.

Verified by: editing a post in an archived thread, then previewing the post as a different character.

Private lines in the post were shown, but a language line was still scrambled.

I'm not sure I would trust preview as a different character to support the archive flag at all.

I'm sure this is just an oversight.  The private and archive features predate the language feature.  Maybe jase consciously chose to do it the way it is, but I suspect he just didn't think about it at all.  As the only developer on a similarly large and complex system, I can attest to the fact that it is extremely hard to think about every interaction between features and account for every one.  (I'm actually the only back-end developer -- we also have a front-end developer.  jase, however, does it all.)

Oh, I'm aware, and I agree mostly with your assessment.

I would suggests the "preview as" function works as a quasi-viable test... because the private line to another character (not the one previewing) was still visible in the preview.  That, as I understand it, is one of the supposes correct functions of archiving a thread.  Lacking a proper user story with acceptance criteria (:D -- software tester here), it's about as close as we're going to get.

And playing devil's advocate (actually, I have Class levels in that) ...

Prior to the languages functionality being introduced on RPoL, I used to merrily type in my own pidgeon Dwarvish/Elvish/etc from the various languages dictionaries to be found on the interwebs.  Other players of my acquaintance have used other variations/made up languages for flavour when casting magic spells.

I can guarantee that if those threads are archived, you're not going to be able to read those manually typed fantasy languages ... so why should the language functions be treated differently ?  Yes, they could be, as the plain text lurks behind the curtain, but that's not to say that they should be.

Either way - if it's deliberate or an oversight, it doesn't matter - usually process applies, if someone wants languages to be revealed in archived threads then they need to put up a request in RPoL Development for other user to vote on and for jase's consideration.

Personally I don't want it, but then again I'm with others here, I don't intend to archive threads anyway, so I'd not vote for or against.

Well, at least I'm not the only one seeing this effect. I think I will go ahead and officially request a change in RPoL Development, and let democracy take its course. Because, like patchwolf, I had assumed they were revealed: that's specifically what I was using "Archive Thread" for! I try to make sure that any foreign-language conversation could be mostly inferred by context, but I still expected that archiving the thread would expose it for any of my players that weren't originally in on the joke. I just wanted to be sure I wasn't totally misunderstanding something!