Migrating content from old forums

I don’t care if old ordinary forum threads are accessible or not, but old Help-treads could be interesting.

Maybe you should use a more ephemeral form of communication like a chat instead of a forum? Where I come from, it’s considered disrespectful and rude to open threads that have already been covered in depth and could have easily been found using the search function.

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In general not searching for already discussed issues or solutions takes a lot of other people’s time and effort. I would expect people to at least do a little searching before asking questions that have been answered numerous times before. But that’s an issue not limited to OSM.

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That’s not what I said, I just think there are different use cases and tools for short-lived and long-lived communication

I old threads in the help-forum can be interesting. I personally do search in the help-forum, but I’m not sure if a many others do.

I think it’s highly desirable to be able to search old threads easily and thoroughly. I was a member of the tagging group for a long time and some of the discussions I was involved with covered questions that were and still are important.

If along with Help topics, all the old tagging list threads were easily accessible and searchable with a powerful search engine, that would be a HUGE benefit. The search function available in the current OSM Help is a cruel joke. It’s ineffective, actually stupid, IMO; it can’t even deal with a two-term search!

I’m not against a good search function. But I’m think most users don’t use it. Which also shows in forums where the same questions and discussions starts over and over again.

“Use search” is often said to others in forums, but people don’t listen and don’t use it.

It’s a good idea to keep the old content available on-line, and being searchable, but for me, it’s not top priority.

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It is true that not everyone uses the search function before asking as question. However, we should not encourage this behavior. Duplicated questions should get closed with a link to the thread where the same question already got answered.

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It is true that not everyone uses the search function before asking as question

I always search first but the present search function is so limited that it seldom produces useful results. Even if I know ahead of time that a certain topic has been discussed I have trouble finding it. That’s why I’m hoping that this new platform will allow for more robust searches. In fact, that’s one of the main reasons I’m interested in Discourse at this point in time

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Not only that, but alerts you about similar worded topics when you are trying to create a new topic, just in case you want to continue that discussion instead of creating a new one.

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But naturally that feature can only work if the whole content of the forum is actually migrated to discourse. :slight_smile:

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I’d say, let’s pause this discussion for a bit and wait for results w.r.t. technical feasibility in forum content migration to discourse · Issue #604 · openstreetmap/operations · GitHub

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I’m guessing that this refers to the tagging mailing list? Neither that, nor any other mailing lists, are going away any time soon. The scope of this project is to replace, with like for like functionality, https://forum.openstreetmap.org/ and https://help.openstreetmap.org/, the software for which is no longer supported.

Discourse apparently can support “mailing list like” functionality, and once the forums and help functionality has moved here it might be worth looking at - but certainly not until then.

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Yes, my comment does refer to the Tagging mailing list. I had hoped those lists would be included in this new software ecosystem. I guess that will have to wait for another day.

Searching those lists is so difficult that some solution is needed but having a better Help system will be invaluable to OSMers going forward.

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it’s not that bad to search (or read) something, if you are already subscribed (depending on your client), but it’s horrible if you want to point someone to the archive

Or if a new subscriber wants to reply to or search for a thread from before they joined.

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Hi all, just saw this topic. Hope you don’t mind my opinion in addition to the many above.

After reading the topic post, I was convinced on Option 2 – let’s just start over! And, after reading all the comments below, I came around to those who are advocating for Option 1.

In the end I think the best would be an Option 1.5 – we can migrate some of the forums which are super active (like the de / ru communities) while also starting fresh on some others.

Reason being I’d love to see the users from the old forum find a place here and not be bitter about getting archived, and in addition would like to start fresh with a different forum hierarchy / category layout building upon knowledge of on what worked / didn’t work well in the past. I think we can have both.

I’ve proposed to do a test migration on a test Discourse to get feedback prior to actually do a migration.

It’s true that some very low activity part of the old forum may also be “archived” in a separate category in Discourse.

We will see, I hope soon :slight_smile:

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First migration test, with the latest 100 topics only to reduce import test time.

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Good job!
Is there a painless possibility to move country categories to language categories and add country tags should we want to ?