Do we know how adding almost 1M redirects affects the site performance?
I would keep recommending to check if we agree on the list of problems before jumping into any solution. Might be the case that there is an additional option we haven’t thought about that doesn’t introduce high risks and solves most of the problems.
Always keeping in mind that any solution will come with trade-offs.
First of all, it’s a bit strange for me to need to discuss about the future of the huge amount of mapping knowledge from the OSM forum in a different forum, doesn’t leave an impression, you actually want a feedback. But ok.
In my understanding it’s a must have, to migrate all the threads, which have been active in the last months, in order to keep ongoing discussions alive. This will lead to a huge amount of frustration of those users.
For all the history, I think it would be beneficial to import it as well to have a common database for searching all the previous and future knowledge.
You probably did not intend it this way, but to me, coming from a board member, this comes across as a bit of a strange (and rude) reason not to want to engage with such a large segment of the OSM community.
I’ve opened a topic on the Dutch subforum. (Anyone looking in: feel free to post in English there.)
The Mailing list discussion mentions migrating the help site content too. Is this a completely different set of discussions or meant to be in this thread too?
I think they’re completely different software?
Yes, the current plans don’t seem to include a content migration of the help site (but then the plans didn’t contain a plan for migrating the forums either), technically it would be possible but probably a bit of work.
The other aspect is that the help site contains/contained a lot of question from people that didn’t create an OSM account and by the very nature of their interaction were only there to ask the question. I don’t believe the current setup of this site would support that nor that it is even something that can be supported in a reasonable fashion in an “integrated site” (there are a lot of things to be considered, not the least legal issues).
I want to engage with people on a forum. It’s just that I can’t. 
Why? Your current username would work just fine. (You were asking for that 
)
Yes, please describe your problem, I am sure that we can find a way for you to join in. Worked for everybody else in a decade. 
Please stick to the scope set in the first post. The help site is explicitly not covered here, only the forum.
It makes sense to treat the two websites differently as they have a totally different purpose, history and requirements for migration. Mixing two different topics will make it so much harder to figure out a solution.
The old fluxbb forum with its bespoke Basic Auth integration can’t handle their user name: ᚛ᚐᚋᚐᚅᚇᚐ᚜ 🏳️🌈 | OpenStreetMap
I think nobody volunteers to fix this in the few remaining {weeks, months}.
I clearly vote for Option 1
Is there a specify number of months you consider conversations are still in need for continuation? I understand this as a requirement to continue conversations that are still active right?
Actually, my brain doesn’t recognize that as a name, either. %-)
But what is keeping her from simply creating a second account with the name in plain latin letters for sake of joining an important conversation? I regularly adjust my login name when my normal moniker “Nop” is rejected as too short for a particular system. There is no rule against multi-accounting in OSM.
I would rather assume that 1 MB of static data should not be a problem for any modern (or even old) system. It should only affect performance if one of the old URLs is actually used and needs to be resolved and mapped. And that should be a very low load, distributed over many years to come.
I guess the only answer is to try it and measure it.
I meant 1 million redirects. We don’t know if we can automate the creation of the redirects and if they will mess with the Discourse DB (in terms of size). Having said that I would prefer we talk first about requirements and not jump to test any solution without agreeing on those (multiple solutions might solve our problems)
I think that you cannot set a reasonable cutoff date. There is a tendency that the same topics come up again and again every other year, but it might be as well after 3 or 5 years. Some discussion have been literally ongoing for a decade and it can be of interest how perception has changed over time - or not. Especially on topics where the actual handling in OSM is rather counter-intuitive and in need of explanation.
So if you are looking for an old discussion and depending on an arbitrary cutoff date you need to search in different places. That makes life more difficult for everyone, as they need to know about the existence of the cutoff, about both sites and then need to search both.
Also, very often there are backlinks to older forum discussions. If you migrate everything, there is only one migration rule for such links and you can just transform them. If you have a cutoff date, you need to determine which rule applies to the target thread of the link and use different mapping for migrated and non-migrated topics. Again, makes things much more complicated.
Which would be the pros and cons of just moving most important open conversations that had activity in the last X months and if someone want to bump an older conversation just to post a link for reference and share a quick summary?
I’m thinking that most online discussions tend to become unreadable once they reach a certain number of replies (due the time required to catch-up) or when enough time has passed (due the facts and context not being accurate anymore).
Even with discussions on an active forums, it’s always a good recommendation to post a summary of the main ideas in a new fresh new topic once the “unreadable” point has been reached to be able to move the conversation to an agreement place.
I’m clearly for option 1.
In the German forum there are some threads where active discussions are going on which are 5-6 years old.
My priorities:
Is not a good idea because of 2.
The old forum has 832k posts. Assuming 1 minute per post (which is a very low estimate) this is equivalent to 1700 working days or 7 working years. Migrating might not be trivial but it will take only a fraction of that.
I would consider a conversation as “active” is there has been replies within the last 2-3 month. In order to have a easy possibility to continue a ongoing discussion/topic.