The conversations box on osm are a mess

General talk
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Saying OSM is a social media is very hard when you really try to communicate with other people. I have been tricked by the poor design of the private messages boxes several times. The conversations are not followed by the UX, you have to find your way through the sent box tab from the inbox tab to find if you have already answered someone.

Why making simple chat so hard on OSM org? i believe everything should not pass though this forum, and the discussions space on OSM org are a mess, we should do something about it to make it usable juste like any other website that allows private messages and shows threads of conversations.

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Because neither you nor anyone else has written the code to make it better. You can help!

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i do help to build OSM on many other ways, i cannot ruby on rails and i cannot understand how anyone could have validated it to be this way.

my message is not full of joy and of “here is a merge request”, i know. but i guess the others users who found it bad did not even try to find a way to say it to anyone able to make it change.

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An inbox/outbox layout, as osm.org has, was absolutely standard in 2007 when this part of the code was written. If you use forum software from that era you’ll very often find something similar. UI conventions have moved on and the threaded/chronological approach is now more common, but no one has felt strongly enough about it to ever (AFAICT) even post an issue about it on the openstreetmap-website repository on Github, let alone contribute any code.

IMO the best way to encourage others to work on your idea is to be positive; not denigrate others’ work; and avoid value judgements. When you write

poor design

Why making simple chat so hard

a mess

make it usable

then you are immediately alienating the people who can make your wish happen. Some developers will see through that and say “ok, you could have phrased that better but that’s a good idea”, but others will immediately react “thanks for the insults, good luck finding someone to fix your personal bugbear”. Developers are human after all.

But if you can suggest your intended improvement politely and constructively, in the right place (i.e. here), maybe someone will choose to work on it. Perhaps include a few screenshots of comparable websites that have a layout along the lines of what you’d like to see.

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