Forum.osm.org transition announcement

Discostu36 · 2022-09-28T14:26:00.272Z

Speaking of SEO: I hope that the community urls of the old forum will redirect to the new one? And what was the reason for the renaming of “forum” to “community”?

ezekielf · 2022-09-30T13:50:07.248Z

Discostu36:

what was the reason for the renaming of “forum” to “community”?

The new forum had to co-exist with the old for a period of time so they couldn’t have the same subdomain. I suppose the name could change after the old forum site is decommisioned.

Tordanik · 2022-09-30T15:49:06.285Z

Hi all,

we’re reaching the end of the co-existence period of the old forum software hosted at forum.openstreetmap.org and this new platform, so it’s time for an update on the current status and what happens next.

First, thank you all for populating the subcategories in the #communities section. Activity on the new site has sharply increased over the past month and it’s great to have so many conversations going on!

Our plan now is to switch off write access to forum.openstreetmap.org, and to migrate existing content. This will involve roughly the following steps:

Make forum.openstreetmap.org read-only. This is the first step and will happen in the near future, so please do not rely on the continued ability to have discussions on the old platform even though it is still technically functional at the time we’re publishing this update.
Import the existing posts and threads into the temporary #migration category of this site using a script. (It is possible that this will involve a maintenance downtime of this platform. If this is the case, it will be communicated in advance.)
Redirect existing forum.openstreetmap.org/... URLs to the content’s new location.
Move imported content from the #migration category to its correct location, e.g. a local community category. This will be done manually by members of the @forums-governance team.

Now, originally this update was meant to include a precise timeline for these steps. Unfortunately, and contrary to our initial plans, development of the script required to execute the import is not yet complete. We will post additional information as soon as we get a new update or estimate from @Firefishy. We’re sorry for this transition not being as smooth as intended.

Nevertheless, we hope you’ll enjoy your discussions on this new site while we’re working on completing the migration process. Please continue using the #site-feedback category to point out issues with this new software platform and request additional categories as needed.

emvee · 2022-09-30T19:33:16.904Z

Tordanik:

Make forum.openstreetmap.org read-only. This is the first step and will happen in the near future, so please do not rely on the continued ability to have discussions on the old platform even though it is still technically functional at the time we’re publishing this update.

That looks fine to me as long as the migration after that will not take too long time, max two weeks?. People sometimes want to react on old topics and if you are longer on the new forum search for previous relevant discussions on the old forum becomes less and less logical. If it is not possible within say that two weeks I would delay the migration.

Import the existing posts and threads into the temporary Migration category of this site using a script. (It is possible that this will involve a maintenance downtime of this platform. If this is the case, it will be communicated in advance.)

Move imported content from the Migration category to its correct location, e.g. a local community category. This will be done manually by members of the @forums-governance team.

Why not move the old sub-fora that match one of the new communities directly to that new community? I.e. users: Netherlands to community Nederland (Netherlands), users: Germany to community Deutschland (Germany), etc. etc.

For the remaining content of the old forum a temporary Migration category makes sense.

Tordanik · 2022-09-30T20:41:33.820Z

emvee:

Why not move the old sub-fora that match one of the new communities directly to that new community?

We might do that if it turns out to be an easy tweak to the script. But the development + testing work for that import is the slowest task in this whole process, so we would like to use any opportunities to make it a little simpler and faster.

Or to put it differently: If I can do a little extra work so that @Firefishy has a little less work, that seems like a good trade-off.

emvee · 2022-09-30T20:54:57.763Z

Tordanik:

Or to put it differently: If I can do a little extra work so that @Firefishy has a little less work, that seems like a good trade-off.

Is moving all topics of the of all sub-fora of the old forum from Migration to the correct new community really only a little extra work?

I would write a script that migrates all topic from one sub-forum of the old forum to one the sub-forums of this new forum. Then make a wrapper script that calls this script for each sub-forum of the old forum and indicate what is the place on the new forum.

TomH · 2022-09-30T21:36:12.889Z

We don’t even have an initial pass at the conversion yet and it will probably take several goes before we have something of suitable quality so I don’t think we are anywhere near ready to pull the trigger on this yet.

The announced date was always implausible and the complete lack of progress on the conversion has only shown that I was right in that conclusion.

emvee · 2022-10-01T07:30:43.676Z

Thanks, I was wondering why the github issue was not updated but I see it has been updated recently, that is a good thing, let’s be open on what the status is.

No, in this case I do not like the old forum to be read-only.

What probably can be done at some time first is to make it on the old forum no longer possible to create new topics, that way there will be more drive to move to the new forum.

Cartographer10 · 2022-10-02T08:03:10.448Z

emvee:

What probably can be done at some time first is to make it on the old forum no longer possible to create new topics , that way there will be more drive to move to the new forum.

I agree with this. In this way, people can also start to get familiar with the new forum. I think it is ready enough for this.

JeroenvanderGun · 2022-10-02T11:48:14.567Z

Tordanik:

This is the first step and will happen in the near future

This seems backwards. The first step should be to make the migration process work properly. In fact, the deadline for this has already been exceeded. The work that is overdue should be completed first, before you start with the next steps.

This is rather disappointing. Many people in e.g. the Dutch OSM community were happy with the old forum. We were okay with the transition to a new platform, because we were promised a smooth transition. Now you’re breaking that promise and giving us a messy transition instead.

nukeador · 2022-10-03T11:19:17.403Z

JeroenvanderGun:

Now you’re breaking that promise and giving us a messy transition instead.

Please, let’s assume good faith, there has already been shared how external factors have influence a delay on the original timeline.

Map_HeRo · 2022-10-03T15:55:10.638Z

Youah, the same with the old German forum … a lot of members still are unhappy with moving to the new platform and moreover with the repeated delay of the assured transmission.

Nevertheless no real damage is done so far. The old forum is still available for reference, we can still continue posting to the existing topics and we can additionally get used to the new forum. Nothing has got lost so far … and my own experience is that no transition works as smooth as everyone whishes it would, specially if most of the people working on the setup are volunteers as you and me.

What we should avoid by all means imho is to start dividing the community into “we” and “you”. We are all one community, even if we do our work in different regional groups or other parts of the OSM project.

JeroenvanderGun · 2022-10-03T18:12:31.596Z

The migration delay itself is not the problem. But if migration is delayed, then the rest of the transition process should in my opinion be put on hold until the migration is ready.

Peter_Elderson · 2022-10-03T18:48:19.000Z

How long before the migration must the old forum be frozen? One day should be enough, isn’t it?

Peter Elderson

Kovoschiz · 2022-10-04T18:15:45.315Z

Someone can update the forum banner in the meanwhile?

Tordanik · 2022-10-06T16:24:08.368Z

As of today, we have disabled thread creation on the old forum.

Compared to the original plan of setting the old forum to read-only “maintenance mode” right away, this has the benefit of allowing you to seamlessly continue existing discussions while we finish the work on the migration.

We have also modified the forum banner to reflect the delayed migration process. The @forums-governance team is going to keep you updated as we make progress on the migration tooling.

rmikke · 2022-10-07T09:44:07.183Z

Ummm, I have just created a new thread on the old forum…

mmd · 2022-10-07T09:52:00.338Z

It seems you’ve added another post to an existing thread: Zbliża się zamknięcie forum.openstreetmap.org (Page 2) / users: Poland / OpenStreetMap Forum

That’s still possible. Only new thread (or topic) creation has been disabled.

rmikke · 2022-10-07T19:43:01.838Z

mmd:

It seems you’ve added another post to an existing thread

Nope, I’ve added a test thread and deleted it.

It seems that moderators still can create threads, but regular users can’t.

nukeador · 2022-10-10T12:14:45.212Z

Hello,

A few numbers so far:

26 communities have now a category (4 more still in progress).
Every community with +400 topics in the old forums has been created, except from Switzerland.
There are 44 communities from the old forums that haven’t requested a category, but they were very low in traffic. Some might decide to be hosted as part of a regional category (#communities:latam or #communities:osm-africa)

If you happen to know contributors from the following countries, please let them know about how to request a new category here, thanks!

Countries without a category yet

Albania
Argelia
Australia
Belarus
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Bulgaria
Cambodia
Croatia
Cuba
China
Czech republic
Denmark
Estonia
Ecuador
France
Georgia
Hungry
Iceland
India
Iran
Japan
Kosovo
Latvia
Lithuania
Malaysia
Montenegro
Nepal
New Zeland
North Macedonia
Pakistan
Panama
Paraguay
Portugal
Singapore
Slovenia
South Korea
Sri Lanka
Switzerland
Turkey
Turkmenistan
United Kingdom
United States
Uruguay
Venezuela