Does anybody know German or French Boards

In My Humble Opinion
1

I don’t know if this belongs into IMHO …

I enjoy the SDMB, but for a non-US citizen there is one disadvange: I can’t discuss the politics of my own country (at least not the things which are interesting mostly to the people in my country).

Does anybody know interesting German or French boards?

It’s not hard to come up with a list in google, but find the good ones is not that easy …

2

about.com has a French one. You subscribe to the email newsletter and then you can connect to the board through that. I don’t know if there’s an alternate method. A lot of the discussion is about French language and culture but there are some politics in there too.

Be advised, I had to sign up for the list about 5 times and it took almost a year for them to get me on it. Maybe they’ve fixed that by now. I think you can find the place to sign up here: http://talk.about.com

3

You might try the old-fashioned way and browse the relevant Usenet newsgroups (available e.g. on http://groups.google.com in case you don’t have a NNTP client.
On Germany:

  • soc.culture.german is the relevant English-language newsgroup but it is virtually unusable because, being English-language and about German culture, it is predictably overrun by kooks who project their particular hangups on Germany.
  • the more German-language de.soc.politik.misc group is more bearable and seems to be amenable to serious discussions, but the kook load is also high there. A common problem of unmoderated fora.

Web fora:
A list on chat and forum sites in the Open Directory.

The German-language forum of Die Zeit (a highbrowish weekly) seems to be reasonably civilized.