Not only that, but disabling the plugin would eviscerate existing post voting topics, leaving them unrecognizable. When we first enabled post voting, we committed to keeping it enabled permanently.
That said, can there not be a compromise in the form of changing the default format for that category to the normal format? Then users who prefer the post voting format can still choose it when creating the topic, and we can be more confident that they know how it works. A pinned post can draw attention to this option, in case the button isn’t in-your-face enough.
This comes from a different plugin. It works well, at least for solvable topics, such as:
By the way, the old OSQA site would also rank questions by votes, which helped to surface frequently asked questions and avoid duplicates. The post voting format does allow us to vote on questions too, but I have no idea what it does. It doesn’t seem to influence the Top sorting option in any forum, as far as I can tell.
Many of our most controversial and contentious tagging debates are ordinary things that regular people encounter in everyday life, and someone that’s not deeply following arcane OSM would be surprised to find that the answer is not a quick one.
The forums governance team has decided to turn off post voting by default in help and support. Topics can still be made as votes but the users will have to manually select this.
This project delivers some powerful punch. We promise a lot, we deliver a lot. Wow.
It’s hard work, it’s worth it. Thanks to many, thanks to us. A pat on backs all around (if you don’t like hugs or touching or virtual fist-bumping, OK, no offense meant). A gesture of thanks and good will from me to you. OSM rocks pretty hard.
The whole point of the help and support category is (now was) to not have long winded discussions, particularly not long winded tagging discussion, because they are neither helpful nor provide support.
The correct answer to a question about tagging were there is no well established modelling is “There is no well established tagging for that, here are the tools how you can find that out (wiki, taginfo). You can either invent your own, or discuss your options on the tagging mailing list or the tagging general discussion category in the forum.”
And that is the answer that such questions in general got on help.osm.org.
It would be exhaustive of me to provide examples, but any attempt to “prevent long-winded discussions” (especially about tagging) seems doomed to failure. OSM is, on its edges, essentially about long-winded discussion, especially about tagging. To me, it seems remiss that we might suggest that we can hose this off to some bit-bucket of software-taken-care-of “no long-winded discussion allowed here.” Poppycock. The far edges of OSM will be this, I have no doubt. To pretend otherwise seems short-sighted and wishful thinking.
We are a worldwide project across many cultures, countries, languages, Earth. This is good discussion. We must have it.
Tagging, especially. I mean: it’s gonna happen. (It has, it does, it will).
Nobody suggested avoiding long winded tagging discussion in general, just keeping them away from people that are looking for help, which we successfully did for a decade or so on the help site.
Mmm, I’ll say “mixed success” and we’ll call it a draw. It isn’t like I’m trying to win anything here, and I don’t think you are either, though it does seem that “we’re both right.” (To some extent / most extents).
Keeping boundaries between these things is a noble goal, and to be lauded when / as / if it happens, though to believe it can be kept “firewalled” like that forever isn’t realistic (imo).
We didn’t have “mixed” success, discussions of any type (not just tagging) were off limits on the help site. I’m not quite sure what you are referring to, but it definitely isn’t how the site was run.
The old Help forum was fairly targeted to answering questions. It wasn’t perfect, as discussions (some long-winded, though those weren’t frequent) did sneak in.
Blending that aspect (Q&A) into this forum is bound to be messy for exactly the reasons that we want to keep discussion (especially long-winded) out of a Q&A “category.” But as the (linguistic) “register” of this entire forum not simply “tends towards” discussion, virtually any post in it, EVEN a / the Q&A category is going to spawn discussion. The post voting format was a good try, but it seems to have failed (due to the confusing “diferent-ness” of the format). I think that is largely because of the tone / spirit / register of Discourse overriding something as straightforward as a Q&A. Perhaps we can improve this, knowing some of our tendencies and the limitations / restrictions of this software.
This site was advertised as being a way to take over both the long winded discussion forums and the Q&A style questions of the old help site. Lots of questions from new users have quick simple answers.
We could change the category heading and description, and possibly the placeholder text in the new post box, but forcing new contributors who do have a simple question that has been asked before to wade through reams of discussion isn’t the solution.
It seems like folks here have different perspectives about what’s actually been going on in Help and support. Maybe it would help to gather statistics about the number of answers, comments, and solutions in topics that originated on Discourse versus those that originated on OSQA.
The Solution button remains, so if someone is directed to an existing topic that’s been solved, they’ll see the solution right upfront. However, only the OP can mark a post as the solution. (Discourse nags the OP to do this.) I suppose this solves the problem of tl;dr for those who come along later, but not for the OP. Discourse can summarize the thread automatically, but algorithm doesn’t seem to be as intuitive as just counting reactions.
No - that’s just a little tickbox. If you look here you can immediately see solved questions - they are coloured green. The equivalent is here - whch is a spectacularly poor design in lots of ways (most screen real estate is just wasted) but one of those ways is that “which questions have solutions” is not shown at all.
Even on the old help site the number of people who actually went back and marked something as solved was very small, I think that holds here too. This is also not a great solution for a category aimed at new users as they can have a tendency to select a “solution” that involves the least effort whether or not it’s actually a good answer.
Upvotes are a far better indication of a good answer than whether OP has blessed the response.
I was referring to something different. For example, in this topic, you posted a response that the OP marked as a solution, so it bears a big green checkmark, and it appears right below the original post, even more prominently than an accepted answer in a post voting topic.
But I agree that the little checkboxes on topic listings are inadequate. Earlier, I also made the point that, in a post voting topic, the buttons beside the question act as a placebo – they don’t influence the listing at all.
That’s true, the solution plugin is orthogonal to post voting. For example, this topic has both post voting and a solution that the OP picked out. The analogue to post voting in a normal topic would be the button, which apparently shows only the posts with the most reactions. I don’t know if that’s intuitive enough for new users; it probably depends whether they’ve had more experience on Discourse or Stack Exchange or neither.
At one point, it used to be possible to both upvote an answer and give it a emoji, like the one I just gave your comment. That was a bit confusing, though emoji reactions have since been disabled in post voting topics. Those who chose to react instead of upvote – joke’s on them.
Can we change that placeholder text? That would be a great place to literally point to the button for more options while we wait for improvements to the post voting plugin that would make the board governance team comfortable enough to reenable it by default.
Well, I’ve (apparently) been using this forum since 2019, and my first instinct was to check if that button really exists. I then couldn’t find it on the first topic I tried, because it only appears on certain topics. So from that I’d say … no it’s not intuitive enough and doesn’t always work.
reactions.
buttons beside the question act as a placebo – they don’t influence the listing at all.
button, which apparently shows only the posts with the most reactions. I don’t know if that’s intuitive enough for new users; it probably depends whether they’ve had more experience on Discourse or Stack Exchange or neither.
point to the 
button for more options while we wait for improvements to the post voting plugin that would make the board governance team comfortable enough to reenable it by default.