Can not switch to English

[gbbr]

Describe the bug

I am sorry to open this here, but how can I switch the website to English? I keep clicking the language icon at the top right but nothing happens. Tried Chrome & Safari on macOS.

Steps to reproduce

Go to the website on Chrome or Safari on macOS and try to change to English, or click the small bell for notifications, or the username. None of them do anything.

Expected behavior

No response

Area

Other

[xr843]

Thanks for the report, and sorry for the slow reply!

TL;DR — quick fix for you right now: do a hard refresh (Cmd+Shift+R in Chrome; in Safari: Develop → Empty Caches, or Settings → Privacy → Manage Website Data → remove fojin.app), then reload the page. That should immediately restore the header buttons.

What we found: your symptoms (page renders fine but the language switcher / bell / username menus are all dead, in both Chrome and Safari) match being stuck on a stale Service-Worker-cached copy of the app. We traced it to a real bug on our side: the script that tells returning visitors' service workers to update has been silently blocked by our Content-Security-Policy — so browsers that visited before could stay pinned to an old broken bundle indefinitely, while fresh browsers worked fine (which is why it didn't show up in our own testing).

Fix is merged (#680) and rolling out: the update script is now CSP-compliant, and the app now auto-reloads once when a new version takes over, so this class of staleness should not recur.

Could you try the hard refresh above and let us know if the header works again? If it's still broken afterwards, a screenshot of the browser console (View → Developer → JavaScript Console) would help a lot.

[gbbr]

Dear Tim,

Thank you for the kind and professional reply. To me it seems still in Chinese, and clicking the language button, bell, or my name at the top right doesn't do anything. I have deleted all Site Data, and refreshed with Cmd+Shift+R several times.

I would look forward to using this site if it could be fixed to work in English. Let me know if there is any other way I can help or any other debugging data I can provide. I personally don't see any clue in the console output.

[xr843]

@gbbr Thank you for the follow-up and especially the screenshot — the console line in it (the bundle filename) is what let us pin down exactly what happened. You did everything right; two things were wrong on our side:

1. Timing: when you tested at 07:59 UTC yesterday, the fix had been merged but not yet deployed — the rollout completed several hours later. So your hard refresh and site-data wipe were correctly fetching… the still-broken version. Sorry about that; the earlier reply shouldn't have asked you to retest before the deploy was live.

2. "Still in Chinese" was a real, separate bug: your screenshot shows the navigation already in English but the search page itself in Chinese. It turned out our English translation file only ever covered the header/nav — the search page (tabs, filters, result counts, etc.) was hardcoded Chinese. We've now translated all of it, and also fixed a caching issue that would have kept your browser pinned to the old translation file even after we shipped the new one.

Everything is deployed as of today. Could you give it one more try — ideally one hard refresh (Cmd+Shift+R) first, then normal browsing? You should see:

• the language button / bell / profile menus responding normally,
• the search page fully in English (tabs "All / Texts / Full Text", filters "Country/Region / Institution", etc.).

One known gap: the names of the ~90 external source databases in the left sidebar are still in Chinese (e.g. 大英图书馆佛教写本 instead of "British Library Buddhist Manuscripts"). Those names live in our database rather than the UI layer, and translating them properly is tracked in #707.

If anything is still off after the refresh, please say so and we'll keep digging — your reports have been genuinely valuable, this thread alone has fixed four distinct bugs.

[gbbr]

Unfortunately still not working...

Screen.Recording.2026-06-12.at.09.11.08.mov