From the 1st of March 2024 you will no longer be able to login to the help.openstreetmap.org website and you will no longer be able to post questions or answers, or vote on any entries.
Sadly, no. The Q&A plugin has numerous flaws which cause the social dynamics of a Q&A format to break down, and I see no reason to assume that this will noticeably improve in just one month.
I regularly observe threads in Help and support which are conducted like any other thread, i.e. as sequential conversations (which then get confusingly reordered on the occasion that people do use the voting as intended).
Part of the reason is that this mechanism is part of a larger site with very different conversational norms, and people appear to have a hard time switching to a different mode of interaction from one thread to the next. But of course, this is made significantly worse by the pluginâs limitations. In particular, because we cannot convert between answers and comments, or between Q&A threads and normal threads, moderators cannot meaningfully step in when people fail to use the features as designed. The pluginâs other shortcomings (e.g. the co-existence of thumbs-up/thumbs-down and upvote/downvote, incomplete translation integration, etc.) only make things worse.
I would note that at least on paper you have the legal right to get a copy of all your content in a machine readable format. But given there is no mechanism to provide that that I know of, not to mention for other bits and pieces of OSM infrastructure, lets not venture there.
In my opinion, the Help and support category worked fine with the Solution option before we enabled the Q&A plugin. I understand that upvoting and downvoting appeals to folks who are used to the old OSQA site, but we kind of have that functionality anyways in the (dispassionate) and reactions and, ultimately, polls.
The Q&A plugin would be serviceable, even with its technical flaws, except that it doesnât fit how we actually communicate here. More often than not, the question doesnât have a straightforward answer or there are multiple correct answers. Especially in Tagging help & support, the initial âanswersâ are merely the opening salvos in a long-ranging language design discussion â what should the right answer be?
The plugin tries to accommodate these tangents by allowing us to comment on answers, but thatâs the equivalent of breaking up a meetingâs participants into small-group discussions and expecting the groups to hammer out a consensus without talking to one another. And the lack of quoting functionality just makes things worse, because folks have figured out how to use the normal quoting functionality in separate answers.
In my limited experience with the old OSQA site, the only reason that site didnât have the same problem was that there wasnât as much activity there. If we somehow found a way to graft this Q&A plugin onto the tagging mailing list, it would suffer the same problems.
No, we donât - thatâs something completely different. The idea of StackOverflow-style sites is that the best answer is at the top, and other answers are below, based on voting. This works well when people understand how this sort of site works, but a glance at https://help.openstreetmap.org shows that clearly not everyone does - people asking questions sometimes âanswerâ their own questions with followup questions rather than commenting on answers or asking new questions.
However, it seems a bit daft to turn the feature off just because a few people donât know how to use it - especially when the creator of every single new topic can decide whether to enable the Q&A format for it.
Itâs certainly clear that people want to have those sorts of discussions (this one is a perfect example of where that makes sense) - and there is literally nothing stopping people creating that sort of non-post-voting topic anywhere they want - even where post voting is currently enabled by default. The UI to turn it on and off is âclassic Discourseâ (completely impenetrable until youâve had it explained to you) but it does exist.
Thatâs not a fair comparison. The tagging mailing list (and some of the longer tagging threads here) are basically the B Ark of OSM - a great place to chat about stuff; not so great for âHow do I do X?â questions.
It is indeed a shame that some of the functionality in answers isnât available in comments (and thatâs true, by design, in Stackoverflow too), but the ability to comment on replies is extra functionality to the basic site - complaining that it doesnât do X is a bit like saying that you donât like the new bike that you got for Christmas because itâs the wrong colour
Iâve chosen the conventional forum format for the help topics Iâve opened, but Iâm not confident that users notice it easily enough â especially new users who are encountering both OSM and Discourse for the first time. Unfortunately, thereâs no way to convert a Q&A topic back to a forum topic after the fact, after it has gone off the rails.
If you can stomach another loosely fitting analogy, the situation reminds me of wiki talk pages. It can be made to work, but only with enough handholding to leave a poor first impression. That said, I appreciate that the Q&A plugin encourages us to stay on topic, albeit in a strange way. If sunsetting the OSQA site comes with some additional discipline on our part, maybe it will go more smoothly than weâre expecting.
These ideas do seem like they could make a difference. Do you and the other moderators of @mods-support need some kind of assistance from the governance team in that regard? I canât promise that we can always help, especially if it involves upstream changes, but please let us know in any case.
I presume that the âAccount Removalâ option promised in the Privacy Policy will remain available here as well:
âWiki and forum accounts will be renamed to a pseudo-anonymous name, but otherwise will remain as is.â
It would be advisable to ensure that after an âAccount Removalâ request, the userâs OSM edits and help forum entries, activities, can no longer be linked.
In other words, they should not receive the same user_USERID ( pseudo-anonymous name ) globally, even if the email addresses for the 2 accounts are the same.
And I assume that the help forumâs email->username database will remain forever because how else could a user prove they are not trying to delete someone elseâs data?
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