18 months into actively mapping with OSM, and two recent topics are puzzling me:
A) I have been digging recently into old forum posts and I realized the same exact conflicting topics show up every few years (Grab, minor road classification, offroad guidelines…). I missed those, because the forum search function is not user-friendly, it took me a few times to figure you must scroll down to select Thailand forum after entering keywords.
Some people stopped participating in the topics, some new ones joined (like me) but essentially the content has been the same.
Some decisions were taken, a few may have been moved to the wiki, other topics were stalled.
The process seems to be repeated over and over, and I find this very unproductive.
How could we avoid this again in the future ?
- Let’s move important decisions to the wiki.
- Let’s make important and ongoing topics sticky.
Here is what I think are important ongoing topics that should stay sticky:
- https://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=74519
- https://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=73368
Do you agree? If yes, what other topics would you want to remain sticky ?
B) While the number of active participants in the forum is low, the number of views generated by topics is very unusually high.
FluxBB, the underlying website generator, confirmed to me that a view is incremented each time a topic page is loaded.
This could mean a lot of users are actively looking at forum but never or rarely participate. Or simply bots like search engines are obsessively crawling the pages.
Any ideas ?