What are your thoughts on making OSM(iD editor)'s messaging features more efficient?
Many users don’t even notice receiving messages.
OSM’s users don’t necessarily overlap with forums or wikis. It also does not overlap with other communication channels.
As a result, there are many editors who edit without interacting or communicating with others, and among them, there are editors who use non-agreed methods, but there is no way to contact them.
Better communication, even if it’s just in OSM, will lead to better editing, better communication, and better bonding.
I can’t offer a definitive alternative right now, but
I think the display of messages should be more prominent.
I think it is also necessary to convey the initial information of subscription. Quite a few people seem to think it’s just a formal message.
I wish the process of receiving and sending messages was easier.
한국어 요약(Korean summary)
OSM 메시지 기능을 더 효율적으로 발전시켰으면 싶습니다.
눈에 잘 띄지 않고 쪽지 수신이 잘 눈에 띄지 않으며 쪽지를 보내고 받는 과정이 더 간단하고 쉬웠으면 싶습니다.
Frankly I do not share your concerns about receiving and sending messages via osm.org being difficult or new messages not prominently displayed. All messages are additionally sent over via Email and you can reply to the email to answer them. What could be easier as this?
You’ve been commenting almost exclusively negatively on my posts again. Do you think there’s something wrong with my writing or the way I write or my attitude?
Please understand that English is not my first language, and if you think there’s something wrong with my writing or my demeanor, please tell me.
(You don’t even seem to like this reminder that it’s not my first language, but I’m not the only one who’s uncomfortable with it.)
Naturally, I think it’s possible to have a different opinion than mine, and it’s unfortunate that there are some users who, despite all the communication channels and numerous communication tools within OSM, don’t communicate with us at all, and don’t even reply when we reach out to them.
But that doesn’t mean we can’t hold that user’s feet to the fire, does it?
Anyway, let’s try to do something about it, let’s do something about it.
And anyway, it’s true that there are a lot of users who are just unreachable and don’t reply.
You’ve been commenting almost exclusively negatively on my posts again. Do you think there’s something wrong with my writing or the way I write or my attitude?
I am sorry for this, but it is nothing personal, rather it seems we have a different perception of what is happening and how to deal with it (as we are mapping on different continents, it is also possible that we are indeed experiencing (objectively) different situations). No, I do not think it is wrong to ask questions and propose ideas, but I do not share some of the concerns and solutions that have been mentioned. I know that many people are not replying to messages sent via osm.org but I do not believe it can be fixed by having more aggressive or prominent notifications. I also did not share the interpretation of “cultural circles” in the map that was posted some days ago, that’s why I mentioned the problems I saw in the map.
Please understand that English is not my first language, and if you think there’s something wrong with my writing or my demeanor, please tell me.
From what I read here, I got the impression to understand quite well what you were trying to say, but of course I could be wrong.
Naturally, I think it’s possible to have a different opinion than mine, and it’s unfortunate that there are some users who, despite all the communication channels and numerous communication tools within OSM, don’t communicate with us at all, and don’t even reply when we reach out to them.
I agree it would be desirable if everybody replied to messages we send out to them, but as it is not realistically going to happen, I think we have to find a way to deal with it. Trying to improve the responsiveness is on topic, but we will have acknowledge that we never will have everybody to reply, so the question remains how to deal with those not replying. Personally I have come to the conclusion to simply accept “no anwers”, as long as the person is not “harming” the map, and if they do, involve the DWG.
while messages come in e-mail form, Gmail sorts them into the “notifications” category most of the time which doesn’t trigger a notification on mobile clients
formatting on e-mails is pretty awkward, very narrow column which makes long texts unreadable
I suspect some people respond by email to messages they get via email
The proper solution would be a unified notifications page with browser notifications. But this is a major undertaking and openstreetmap-website maintainers are difficult to work with even if someone had time and skill to implement it.
Frankly I do not share your concerns about receiving and sending messages via osm.org being difficult or new messages not prominently displayed. All messages are additionally sent over via Email and you can reply to the email to answer them. What could be easier as this?
And I do share:
the indicator is small and gray
this is about the system signalling messages, I agree it could be made more visible (e.g. a popup / browser notification), but it is not something that is very important (to me at least) as you can safely ignore these because of the email notifications.
while messages come in e-mail form, Gmail sorts them into the “notifications” category most of the time which doesn’t trigger a notification on mobile clients
this is likely something out of our control, although we might be able to trick google’s client into a different behaviour if we cared for this (but we would have to do it for each and every mail provider who implements such automatic filtering and sorting). I guess there is a setting where the users can stop gmail from moving messages automatically out of the inbox, or at least stop it from doing it for osm notifications. On the other hand, arguably these are “notifications” (manual ones).
formatting on e-mails is pretty awkward, very narrow column which makes long texts unreadable
it seems you are having troubles with your email client or it is a temporary bug, I have never experienced this issue.
I suspect some people respond by email to messages they get via email
Oh yes, it works like a charm, just reply to the email and it will be sent as a reply to the person that wrote to you.
The proper solution would be a unified notifications page with browser notifications.
The “proper solution” really depends on the communication habits of the recipient. There is no single solution that is good for everybody, but email seems to have the biggest group of users from all current systems. A lot of people block browser notifications.
I think that it would be beneficial if changeset comment notifications appeared the same way as direct messages to the user. Not everyone reads emails and there are times when I have to send a direct message because the user is not reacting to the changeset comment.
My recollection is that the project to add changeset discussions was run by a former DWG member, and was a “Google Summer of Code” project. I seem to remember that the original idea was that notifications would work in the same way as other OSM messages, but lack of time prevented that from being complete before the end of the project.
Looks like the OSM website maintainers are open to a more comprehensive notification system getting built, but no one has been motivated enough to work on it yet.
The main issue is that while quick fix would be possible a real solution would be preferable. It is just the kind of project nobody has volunteered to do for a long time for the website and there haven’t even been contractors willing to do the work for money for similar sized projects.,
If a feature like this has been outstanding for years, why not evaluating a solution that doesn’t involve create and maintain a message system and rely on an existing and well-maintained one?
For example, I’m thinking that these very forums have a PM system with a good notification flow, as well as a very solid API to interact with. It should take less time to connect PMs through discourse API, than developing a new system and maintaining on it own.
While my suggestion might look provocative, I think it’s good to reflect on what’s realistic in the short-medium term, even if it’s not my suggestion.
To be clear nobody was suggesting adding significant more capabilities to the existing messaging system. A MVP would be, IMHO, a) allow system generated messages to go to the internal messaging system, b) allow other notification channels for messages than just to the registered e-mail address.
Interfacing to discourse would seem to imply doing roughly the same (and a potential notification channel could be to a users discourse account).
Do they? Personally I don’t get notified when a message in one of the forums that I’m a moderator for is flagged; I only know about it when I manually log into c.osm.org and see an unexpected icon in the top right-hand corner of the screen. That may be a user setting set by (or not yet set by) me, of course.
More generally, how would sending notifications to Discourse help with the issues raised above? Is it easier for OSM editors to poll or be notified about OSM messages in Discourse than it is to emulate what JOSM does now for OSM messages? How would it work if an OSM users is not yet a Discourse user?
Maybe a proof of concept of some sort would help. Not necessarily a modified version of iD, just something that could show the retrieval of Discourse messages, and of course something to send test messages into Discourse (“pretending to be OSM”).
I think some of them would improve, specially the ones about better user experience replying, but my main point was about not being blocked by having to develop/improve our own system (that might take an unknown number of years to happen) but finding other alternatives we can plug into (discourse PM and API might or might not be a good one).
Having been in a conversation about the highlighting of ‘too many changes’ in ID Editor, doubling lines with each refresh, I’d think that colouring the message counter box red e.g. when the counter is not zero with a email icon before (if there are messages) as “SekeRob 1” in standard grey does not really signal anything, would be kind of flick of the wrist for the maintainers, but maybe not. Just give me some bright, if not flashy colour to attract attention. (no, the email box is only opened once a day and from a revert actions taken today some barely seem to be able to wait a few hours on nothing that is breaking bad routing)
You are illustrating nicely why “fixing” these things is nearly never a “flick of the wrist” particularly UI related changes that should work on a wide range of devices and browsers.
If it works on Chromium it’s like working on the bulk of all browsers, even MS Edge I think to have read uses it, and yes, the about box… " This browser is made possible by the Chromium open source project and other open source software."
Somehow got the impression all these modern web development packages did much of this Browser A, B, C coding substantially on their own.
Anyway, me thinketh, throw it out there, maybe it’s a low hanging fruit, where ID is a high percent starter kit (wild guess) in which phase you’d want the novice contributor to read.
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dieterdreist:
