I’ve read this in another topic :
I would find it a shame that the old Help website is delete, made read-only, with a notice to come here all right, but there are links everywhere (wiki, changeset discussions, mailing-lists) pointing to help.openstreetmap.org.
I’m pretty sure a static clone would be pretty easy to make and maintain.
Is there any discussions, decisions about this ?
Regards.
@H moving your message where we are preparing for Help OSM transition.
Adding a point about making a static archive of all the old content.
One of the obvious problems with Help as it stands is that many questions & their answers are either very outdated or no longer applicable. People still post new responses to them after years.
There are significant advantages to starting afresh without having to do triage on the existing help questions.
It would be very useful to be able to properly close queries so that they do not get revived and to indicate clearly which ones have outdated answers
@nukeador I don’t think auto-closing is necessarily appropriate. Sometimes someone asks a question which is not answered, but the topic eventually becomes one of broader interest. In the main I’d be looking for moderators to close topics which are no longer relevant/out-of-date.
I see there is an option also to auto-close topics that have a solution after X time.
in the help system you can accept an answer, but it is still possible to add new answers or act on existing ones.
Sometimes, the best answer changes by the time, or updates are necessary to reflect changes in the system
In case I was not that clear, I was just saying that a static, archived version of help.op… would be nice, for all the links pointing to it. But I would add a banner, or a note of some kind, on every page, to warn visitor that it’s an archived version, and link here for up to date answers… I’ve seen many communities doing this, and I think it’s quite relevant.
I was not saying we should try to import part or all of help here.
Hi. I was pretty busy with non-OSM things the past few weeks and it seems I missed a bit of progress here. 
I try to sound my opinion on a few points mentioned.
I’m also in favor of just archiving the old site in an read-only mode and start from scratch here. I guess I’ll need to build up my reputation from scratch, too, but I will get over it.
If I understand correctly, this site is meant to unify the old help (Q&A) site, the (some) mailing lists and the old forum. If that is the case it should become very clear to very user that different categories/sections of this site should be used differently. In the help section we should have one question per thread and limit us to straight forward answers. No discussions. Users should be able to quickly find answers when using the search function. Moderation is needed here. I’ve used my limited reputation based moderation rights quite frequently on the help site to split out new questions, change answers to comments and so forth. In the other categories I would not see need for moderation now.
On the old help site we frequently saw users asking questions in their native languages and it did work. There was usually someone with the same language skills or answering with the help of translation services. Having one built in would of course be a neat thing. I would not want to split the help section into languages.
We’ve seen quite some SEO spam recently. I’m not sure but I believe currently it is only Tom that can purge spammed questions/answered. Having more people being able to do that would be great.
One main advantage of the old help site (just as with Stack Overflow) is that one could thread answers and comments. It was immediately clear which comments belonged to which answer or to the question. Comments often being quite necessary also to get additional details on the problem. If someone created a new answer instead of a comment users with moderation rights could move the comment to the right place (there was a bug in the software, though; so that that sometimes did not work). Even with being able to vote on an answer I fear we get a lot of confusion if now asks to specify the question, answers and comments are all in linear order. Any plugin that could help with that would be highly appreciated.
I’m the only one that can suspend users I think but there are others who can hide questions, comments etc.
It’s a pain though for several reasons. Firstly even I can’t always see content that other people have deleted so it can be hard to verify reported users if other people have cleaned up. There’s also a bug that crept in at some point that means I have to hack around in devtools to suspend people!
You can see the people with moderation powers (black diamond next to name) here: https://help.openstreetmap.org/users/.
I can’t remember who asked me to act as one now, but at some point there was a shortage of people in the role.
When we start using this site to replace OSM Help most users here will still be on a low trust level. Can we manually promote all OSM Help regulars (or those who wish it) to a high trust level?
Support seekers are often new and one-time users with a high need for re-tagging (re-categorization here?), text formatting (users not knowing markdown, e.g. long lists of unformatted code posted or URLs not clickable) or splitting off new questions.
I suspect most of this would require trust level 4.
Indeed editing, splitting, merging and so on is TL4 only.
And TL4 is a manual promotion only.
So yes, a team should be promoted by admins as soon as possible. Reputation on the old site might be a criteria. Willingness also, of course. 
Ideally the most trusted contributors over Help OSM should be happy to be moderators for the #help-and-support category?
Who should be these trusted contributors? Is there a way to export the list of usernames?
As said before, the first page of the user list (sorted by reputation by default) would be a good start, if you filter out those no longer active. Also the second page (not especially because I’m on it ) lists some really active users.
Unfortunately there is no direct message functionality in OSQA, and no direct mapping of usernames to OSM either, though most people used (more or less) the same.
Maybe the simplest would be to ask a new question there, asking for volunteers and their OSM username. A quick check of their reputation would be enough to assume that they are trustworthy.
Or maybe just a thread here, why not linked from my “Tips for power users” post, to ask for the privilege, with reference to their OSQA account. Those who need it would easily find it, and an admin can just check their reputation there before granting rights here.
Hope this helps.
Does anyone know if it’s possible to do an export on the Help OSM users so we can sort by reputation and filter by badges?
I’ve been trying to do this manually but the UI is buggy and it doesn’t return me the full list.
I would like to have the most reputed users to be recognized here and also try to figure out a way to send them a private message to their OSM username (most of them use the same username on the site) to let them know about this transition effort.
I can probably query the database directly to get something…
I think all moderators are likely to be fully aware. The main users page shows the top 35 by reputations, and several of the top 10 have been active in this thread.