You can stay up to date with the forum without the need to visit it on a regular basis using various feeds:
The base URL for the feeds is http://forum.openstreetmap.org/extern.php to which you have to add some parameters to specify what you want to receive:
action: feed - show most recent topics/posts (HTML or RSS)
online - show users online (HTML)
online_full - as above, but includes a full list (HTML)
stats - show board statistics (HTML)
type: rss - output as RSS 2.0
atom - output as Atom 1.0
xml - output as XML
html - output as HTML (
fid: One or more forum ID’s (comma-separated). If ignored, topics from all readable forums will be pulled.
nfid: One or more forum ID’s (comma-separated) that are to be excluded. E.g. the ID of a a test forum.
tid: A topic ID from which to show posts. If a tid is supplied, fid and nfid are ignored.
show: The amount of posts to show. Any integer value between 1 and 50. The default is 15.
order: last_post - show topics ordered by when they were last posted in, giving information about the reply.
posted - show topics ordered by when they were first posted, giving information about the original post.
Examples:
-
Follow the Dutch forum with RSS:
http://forum.openstreetmap.org/extern.php?action=feed&type=rss&fid=12 -
Follow the Questions and Answers, Development and Garmin forums with RSS
http://forum.openstreetmap.org/extern.php?action=feed&type=rss&fid=10,13,26