Forum.osm.org transition announcement

Hello everyone,

I would like to share an important announcement about forum.osm.org, as a result of the latest agreements that took place last week.

By September 30th 2022 the forum.openstreetmap.org will be retired, please request a category for your community in the new ones as soon as possible using this process, which will allow you to propose your community moderators.

We expect the migration of data will be finished by that date, you can follow its progress here.

This announcement will be also shared in various other OSM channels for visibility, including the old forums. Please help spread the word in the channels you have presence and among your communities.

Cheers.

–
On behalf of the Forums Governance Team (@forums-governance)

Update (September 30th 2022)

Update (October 6th 2022)

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Could the date in the announcement be fixed, maybe? It’s either Sep 30 or Oct 1st.

Sep 31st may be seen as an event that will never take place
 :grin:

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Fixed. Off-by-one :wink:

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I’m posting about this in the Belgium forum. What would be the best place to link to to have a short explanation why the old forum is being closed and why the new platform is awesome? Would it be this: A new discussion forum for OSM | OpenStreetMap Blog
The wiki is a little brief :grinning: Community forum - OpenStreetMap Wiki
And the community.osm.org home page doesn’t seem to have an “about” link.

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I think the blog post is the closest thing we have.
Thanks for spreading the word!

The initial topic created when the forums went live might have some additional context/summary:

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Quick question. If a community doesn’t file the request for the creation of a category of a local chapter, what would happen? Let’s say the Italian community doesn’t ask for an Italian category, what would happen the existing discussions on forum.openstreetmap.org?

The current plan is that existing discussions are going to be migrated no matter what.

What do you think it should happen if a community doesn’t want a category here? (even if it was present in the old ones and migrated over here)

That’s why I’m asking: I have no idea. I think that those discussions should be preserved, but if there’s no target category they might be lost in the migration. The Italian community will likely request a category before September 30th, anyway.

@Firefishy is making sure no data is lost, that’s a top priority.

What to do with migrated categories that communities don’t want to use or have been inactive for month/year is something different. What’s people’s preference here?

Note that the goal is to make sure every category has a set of defined moderators by the community itself to ensure safe and healthy spaces here. That’s why communities are asked to request the categories in advance of the migration :slight_smile:

Speaking of the Italian community, the forum has been particularly silent because the community still prefers the Mailing List to the forum (there are pros and cons and everyone has their opinion). I think we will have the category anyway, but choosing the category’s moderator would take some time (I suppose). Anyway, thank you for the infos. I will start a discussion on the Italian Mailing List.

Note that these forums can be used just like a mailing list. You can “subscribe” to a category or tag from the top right :bell: and select “Watching”. You will receive every new topic and message and you will be able to reply by email (exactly like a mailing list).

Bonus: You can select individual topics to stop these notifications (mute a topic) or just subscribe to an individual one and not having to subscribe to the whole category (which I personally love and it’s not possible using mailing lists).

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Yes, I know. But some are part of the old-school internet when most of the communications were via ML and are still reluctant to migrate to a Forum-Style conversation.

I understand, in any case I would invite them to test it out, their experience is going to be the same as a mailing list, everything without leaving their email client.

In fact, I know a few “old-school” people here that only interact with topics and messages via email.

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We will, one step at a time: first the category, then the conversion to the forum from the ML and after that (we’ll map) the world!

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Note that these forums can be used just like a mailing list.

it may be true for the new one, the old one was almost unusable, e.g. quoting doesn’t work on iphone and the text was too small. If you close the page or had connection problems on send your draft was lost, etc. These things seem solved on discourse, others are still in the process of being solved (or we’ll have to live with them). Thank god the badge madness was stopped.
But still after six months we are still missing a thumbs down button/emoticon, it seems some things are very complicated on the new platform


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5 posts were merged into an existing topic: Could we have a emoji :thumps up: as reaction?


or they use Delta Chat :smile:

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On Fri, 09 Sep 2022 21:18 +02:00, Rubén Martín via OpenStreetMap Community > Note that these forums can be used just like a mailing list. You can

“subscribe” to a category or tag from the top right :bell: and select
“Watching”. You will receive every new topic and message and you will
be able to reply by email (exactly like a mailing list).

Have all the mailing list features been turned up? IIRC, it was not possible to create a new thread/topic on discourse via email. Is that possible?

Aside, maybe someone should write up how to use discourse via email.

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Email-in is not enabled for any category yet, but I guess that can be tested if requested. @Firefishy can talk better about this.

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