Forum.osm.org transition announcement

[emvee]

@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 (Tobias Knerr)]

@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]

@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 (Tom Hughes)]

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]

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]

@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 (dr.ir. Jeroen van der Gun)]

@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 (Rubén Martín)]

@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 (Mikke)]

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 (dr.ir. Jeroen van der Gun)]

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]

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

Peter Elderson

[Kovoschiz]

Someone can update the forum banner in the meanwhile?

[Tordanik (Tobias Knerr)]

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 (Ryszard Mikke)]

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

[mmd]

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 (Ryszard Mikke)]

@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 (Rubén Martín)]

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