Your Dashboard, Your Language

The QuickBox dashboard used to speak more than one language. When we rebuilt it from the ground up for v4, it came back in English only. Translations are now back, rebuilt for the v4 dashboard. And this time they're personal.

Every user on your server now picks their own language. Your German-speaking friend can run the dashboard in Deutsch while you stay in English and someone else reads it in 简体中文, all on the same box, at the same time, without anyone stepping on anyone else. Meanwhile the CLI keeps doing what it has always done: one server-wide language, set with qb manage lang.

Here's how it all fits together.

The dashboard ships with the same seven languages as the QuickBox CLI:

• ●English
• ●Deutsch (German)
• ●Dansk (Danish)
• ●Español (Spanish)
• ●Français (French)
• ●Português (Brasil) (Brazilian Portuguese)
• ●简体中文 (Simplified Chinese)

This isn't a translated login screen with English behind it. The navigation, the App Dashboard, the System Dashboard, Profile, the Settings pages, user administration, streaming, notifications, security, VPN, SSL, backups and transfers all come across. Numbers, dates and "5 minutes ago" style times follow your language too, down to decimal commas where your language uses them.

The fastest way in is the globe in the top bar, right next to the theme switcher. Click it and you get a compact list of all seven languages, each with its flag and its own name, and a check next to the one you're using. Pick one and the page switches on the spot. There's no reload, and nothing you were typing gets lost.

When you pick from the top bar, it applies to the login you're using right now. Every tab on that login follows along, and it sticks through a refresh. If you'd rather drop back to your saved choice, the last row in the menu, Use account preference, does exactly that.

The same globe sits in the top-right corner of the sign-in card, so the login page doesn't have to be in English either. It's there so you can read the sign-in screen, including the password and two-factor steps, in a language that's comfortable for you.

That choice belongs to the sign-in screen. Once you're in, the dashboard follows your own preference, which brings us to the part that makes this per user.

Open your Profile from the user menu in the top bar and you'll find a Language card. This is where you decide how long a choice should last:

• ●This session applies to the tabs on your current login until you sign out. Handy when you want to check how something reads in another language without changing your usual setup. The button reads Apply language.
• ●My account on this dashboard saves it to your account, so it follows you to every browser you sign in from on this server. The button reads Save language. Saving also clears any one-off session choice, so what you see is what you saved.

Your account preference is yours alone. It's stored against your user, so nothing you pick changes what anyone else sees. And because it's saved per dashboard, if you run more than one QuickBox server, each one remembers your choice separately.

The full walkthrough is on the Dashboard Language docs page, and the Profile side is covered on Your Profile.

Most people won't touch a setting at all, so the dashboard works it out in this order:

1. A language you picked for this session
2. The language saved on your account
3. Your browser's language, if it's one of the seven (a browser set to de-AT gets Deutsch, pt-BR gets Português (Brasil), and so on)
4. The dashboard's fallback language, set by an admin
5. English

That fourth step is for admins. Head to Settings > General Settings and find the Timezone & Locale section. The Dashboard fallback language setting picks the language the dashboard uses when nothing more personal applies. It never overrides a language someone chose for themselves, and leaving it empty means English.

That setting is covered in the General Settings docs.

This is the part worth being clear about. The dashboard language and the CLI language are two separate things now, on purpose.

The CLI is server-wide. You set it with:

qb manage lang -o de

The codes are en, de, dk, es, fr, pt and zh-cn, and the full names work too (qb manage lang -o german). It sets the language of the qb command output and the server's system locale, for everyone on the box. It's also in the interactive qb menu for admins.

What changed is that the dashboard no longer rides along with it. Picking a language in the dashboard, for yourself or as the admin fallback, never touches the CLI language or the system locale. And switching the CLI doesn't flip the dashboard for your users. So you can keep the server itself in English for your logs and scripts and still let every user read the dashboard in their own language. The command is documented in the qb manage CLI reference.

Some things aren't meant to be translated, and we kept them exactly as they are:

• ●Anything you or your users wrote: app names you've customized, notification templates you've edited, messages, notes
• ●Raw output from the server: console and terminal output, logs, update and install output, anything you'd copy to paste into a support thread
• ●Technical values: paths, IP addresses, ports, usernames, commands and IDs
• ●Media titles and metadata from your media servers

The labels, buttons, messages and help text around all of that follow your language. The data itself stays untouched, which is exactly what you want when you're comparing a log line against a forum post or pasting a command.

Here's the honest part. English is the source, and the other six languages are first drafts we built and reviewed internally. They haven't had a native speaker go over them yet. They read well in the places we've checked, but a native speaker will always catch things we can't.

If you run QuickBox in one of these languages and something reads oddly, is too formal, or is just plain wrong, tell us in Discord or on GitHub. Point us to the page and what it should say. That's the fastest way these get from good to right.

Here's the same App Dashboard in every language it now speaks. Click any of them to flip through the set.

Translations are the headline, but a lot else landed since the last stable release.

rTorrent 0.16.23, and your config comes along. rTorrent 0.16.23 is now installable, and it renamed and removed a handful of commands. QuickBox converts your .rtorrent.rc to match when you install or update, and converts it back if you downgrade. Restoring a config backup from the dashboard converts it to the version you're running and shows you a notice about what changed. Asking for a version we don't support now stops with a clear error instead of quietly installing a different one, and the older, unmaintained versions are gone from the list. Details are on the rTorrent docs page.

Install the exact torrent client version you pick. qBittorrent and Transmission now install exactly the version you choose with -o (for example qb install qbittorrent -u username -o <version>), and the dashboard passes your pick through the same way. See qBittorrent and Transmission.

Shared torrent client updates are admin-only. Some torrent clients share one compiled binary across every user on the box, so one user updating it changes it for everyone. Updating those now takes an admin, from the dashboard and the CLI.

Newer PHP for new installs. New installs of PHP-backed apps like ruTorrent, Nextcloud and phpMyAdmin now use the newest supported PHP version, and routine PHP updates within the same version flow through again instead of being held back.

IPTVBoss updates from its own repository. IPTVBoss now installs and updates from the vendor's signed apt repository, and the update check repairs that source if it goes missing.

Emby websockets stay connected. Emby's reverse proxy now passes the websocket upgrade headers, so live connections through nginx hold up.

More accurate update notices. A pile of fixes to how updates are detected and offered: rebuilt packages show up as updates, Debian build revisions sort correctly, qBittorrent no longer shows a false update, and update notifications line up with what you actually have installed.

Room for longer words. Translations are longer than English, German especially, so the sidebar labels now size themselves to their space and wrap rather than cut off, long page titles stay on screen on phones, and a few tight rows (pagination, storage sync, security filters) wrap properly on small screens.

Everyone on your server can now use the dashboard in their own language, and it's one click from the top bar. Save it to your account and it follows you around. Admins get a fallback for everyone else, and the CLI keeps its own server-wide language with qb manage lang. If you're a native speaker of one of these languages, we'd really like to hear what we got wrong.