I had some time today to look into the plugin's code... and to learn some more PHP as well :-)
To get it working like I want I actually just needed to change one line:

serendipity_event_multilingual.php, line 423-425
if (empty($this->showlang)) {
return;
}

Patched to:
if (empty($this ...

Hi Garvin,

Thanks for the reply, I've noticed most of these dependencies already. My PHP knowledge is limited but I'll try to tweak the plugin to give the browser's HTTP language setting a higher priority when deciding which language to choose for the entry's text.

I maintain a German blog and I now want to make use of the multilingual plugin to translate some articles into English. Ideally I don't want a language selection footer or drop down box in the sidebar but have the language shown accordingly to the browser's setting. I've seen this working perfectly ...

That's really strange...if I got you right, the servers are basically the same but the error only happens on one server?

phpinfo() is exactly identical, as well as your php.ini?

Yes, you got it right and I'm still not exactly sure about the cause, but it looks like it had something todo with ...

On your new server, could you tell me if the PHP version is different than your original one?

Please compare phpinfo() output from the two servers. Might be that the one PHP version is outdated and/or not having iconv/recode capabilities!
It's all exactly the same, same packages, same ...

For both feeds. Looks like some server setting is responsible for this problem... But which one? I've basically cloned the old server as far as possible.

Yes, of course:

Website:
http://cmund.de

RSS feed from Gregarius:
http://cmund.de/rss/state.php?state=sticky&media=rss

RSS feed from Scuttle:
http://cmund.de/scuttle/rss.php

Temporary URL of the new server:
http://m8s09.vlinux.de
(remoterss currently set to fetch those feeds from the old server ...

I'm happily running the latest stable s9y version on Apache2/MySQL4 on top of Debian 3.1 for a year now. I'm also using the web-based RSS aggregator Gregarius & web-based bookmarking system Scuttle on the same webspace. These apps are supporting rss output as well and I'm using it to show the latest ...

You're welcome! I just noticed there were some typos in it, you'll find a corrected version at the above location now.

I've updated the German language file to fit version 2.4.8, in case anyone is interested:

Get the ZIP here

So after reading the mod_rewrite docs with a little more patience and a hint from another forum I could come up with a working solution:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^/categories/1-Example-Category$
RewriteRule ^index\.php?$ index.php?/plugin/freetag/Exampletag [R=301 ...

It still does only compare the requested file:

Does not work either... this is getting strange!

Hi Garvin!

Thanks for your suggestion, unfortunately it doesn't work (escaping). I've enabled some rewrite logging and it seems that despite escaping the special characters only the requested file (index.php) is compared to the rewrite rule, not the whole url.

EDIT:
After some more googling I ...

I have recently removed all categories of my blog in favour of the tags plugin. I'm very happy with my new freedom and the ability to connect the articles by browsing the tags. It appeared that one category was quite popular and some people have bookmarked it or subscribed to its feed. These people ...