Are there any current plans of migrating the osm help site? This was discussed before, but I have not seen anything about this for long time now.
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This is on the agenda for the OWG meeting tomorrow. My personal expectation is that we’ll point users here and then take a read-only capture of OSQA. Unless someone jumps forward with the technical skills and time, I don’t see the content being migrated to Discourse. I don’t consider planning to keep using OSQA a viable option.
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Sorry if this has been discussed in detail earlier, but out of curiosity, why is keeping OSQA not viable? Is it because the development of the platform has stagnated, or is it the maintenance of the installation, or lack of connection with the rest of the OSM online communities, or something else?
By coincidence, just the other day I was made aware of the Apache Answer project which seems like more modern implementation of this concept. I’m not sure how easy a migration to it from OSQA would be, but if it were possible, it strikes me as a better choice than using the Help and support category in this forum, because Discourse’s UI still somewhat encourages a linear, chronological exchange of messages instead of self-contained answers with comment threads underneath.
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It is unmaintained with no security fixes for it or its dependencies and has known issues we have had to patch. It is written in Python 2 which has been end of life without security updates for four years. Even the people who backed a statement supporting Python 2 support recommend not supporting Python 2 anymore. The last commit was 11 years ago, and it’s been 15 years since any serious work was done on it.
Apache Answer might be interesting to look at in the future, but as it can’t import from OSQA, it doesn’t change what we’re doing right now.
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