Unite forums, OSQA, MLs, ... to a single discourse server?

Thanks, do you like to ping the Operations guys? They said they would like to help if anybody tests a server https://github.com/openstreetmap/operations/issues/377

Hi guys,

In Argentina we are moving forward with our project of migrating from Forum to Discurse and we want to ask you if you can send us a forum export to do our respective tests.

Best

What are we waiting for? FluxBB is a 17 years old forum, and has no mobile apps, nor live updates. It’s time to improve online discussion quality through improved software.

I’m not a forum admin, and therefore have nothing to do with this request, but as a volunteer in other areas of OSM I’d feel very tempted to reply by referring the person asking to Arkell vs Pressdram.

Asking in this way is very likely to put you at the back of any queue.

Oh, I am very sorry if you misinterpreted what I wrote, my intention was not to be rude, but to sincerely inquire what it takes to make this change. Unfortunately I think that everything will continue as it is for a long time to come. I find it difficult to implement the changes necessary to achieve a more dynamic community in the short term.

Is this project progressing, and did you get the data you need? While I believe it would be desirable for the OSM Foundation to host an attractive, modern forum for the entire global OSM community, and it would therefore be a bit sad to see the Argentina forum split off, what you learn during such a migration (or even just a test system or proof of concept installation) could be very valuable information for the rest of us. I would love to read about the results of your tests when it comes to importing existing content, integrating OSM logins etc.

As for the overall discussion: Frederik has a point that unification of communication channels is perhaps a bit of an utopian goal, and that there are upsides of people having their own cosy niches as well. My feeling is that a bit less fragmentation would still be desirable. But even if we just look at forum.osm.org in isolation, it could use a software upgrade. There are some relatively basic features, such as image upload or a sensible markup syntax, which we’re currently lacking.

Hi Tordanik,

I still haven’t found the person who could send me a FluxBB dump so we can run the tests. You know who I should be asking?

In Argentina we created a specific working group for the development of the community and at this point we are finishing our studies (with weekly Jitsi meetings):
Telegram > Discord & FluxBB > Discourse

We are in the voting stage of intentions. We haven’t started the tests yet.

Well…
We also consider the inconvenience of having many scattered channels (IRC, Forum, Mailing, Telegram…) and why they are scattered.
Look how curious, Argentina is the fifth most used forum, but for us it is almost nonexistent. We practically don’t use it, and we think we know why.

I understand the resistance of most of the old users (I’m 53 years old and 11 as an OSM member), but I think that ‘the old ones’ should make a greater effort to attract the new younger ones, which would be a vitamin injection for OSM

Unfortunately FluxBB is too old based and does not meet the current needs and does not attract the interest of use: Google Trends FluxBB vs Discourse: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=%2Fm%2F043jw35,%2Fm%2F0tkk306

We will be happy to share the experience with you and I am glad that it is of interest to many others

Best

I agree that the upgrade will benefit the project, but not for this reason. Using the same argument we should abandon OSM, See OSM vs Google Maps.

Hi all, I’m working with the Operations Working Group to explore migrating to a Discourse setup.

How important is migrating existing posts to the new Discourse install? What if we kept them here but in an archived state and asked people to start fresh on a Discourse install?

In other words, I can get a Discourse install running fairly quickly, but migrating existing posts will take significantly longer.

No need at all. Why littering a fresh install.

Well, there are quite some people who would like the old stuff available. And some can be quite stubborn. And there are some possibilities, but i guess these are known already https://meta.discourse.org/t/import-migration-tool-from-fluxbb/51168 and https://meta.discourse.org/t/importing-from-fluxbb/51322

I would prefer set the fluxbb to readonly and move to discourse. That way the old stuff is still available. For the how-to i would suggest, setting up a test-instance, get some key-users from some forums to check it out and explain everything and when that is done, let them explain that stuff to ‘their’ subforum with all the advantages. So everybody gets a heads-up and maybe its possible everybody can check out the new instance. I’M not sure if a transition time is actually seriously needed or good, but thats worth thinking about as well.

IMO, keeping the content available and links working is important. But migrating existing content into the Discourse install would only be “nice to have”. I can think of several features that would have a higher priority, and getting it done at all would have an even higher one in my book. :slight_smile:

Looks like we’re getting somewhere.
I agree with the last comments

I think it would be mandatory to keep the current Forum and create the new Discourse instance as ‘a new branch’.
That is, those who want to continue with the Forum can do so, and those who want to move to the Discourse should consider the Forum as ‘historical material’.

consider me for the tests!

best

An update here: I was able to finish an import of the fluxBB database into Discourse. It seems to have worked ok.

A couple things left:

  1. OSM-based login on Discourse: current forum uses your OSM login/password. I’d like to replicate that for Discourse.
  2. The imported Forum posts don’t have a real email address associated with them. It looks like the fluxBB database user records don’t have email address associated with them (likely because of the way OSM login works).

Woah, thanks for your hard work iandees!

Thanks for that import project! I see it as useful to bring forum posts forward into Discourse; not mandatory but just one less thing to check when searching previous subject activity.

Discourse supports oauth, and several tools already integrates with OSM via oauth. ¿Are you trying to do that?

They support OAuth2 out of the box, but OSM only supports OAuth1.0a at this point. I’ll have to write a custom adapter to support OAuth1 in Discourse.

Having read more about discourse over the last couple of days I am very excited that this gets some traction. I also would like to help with the implementation but I am not really sure what I can do. Please DM me if you have any tasks such as documenting or testing.

I have seen with other communities (e.g. Python dev forum and list) that Sam Saffron from the Discourse team is happy to help with the implementation if asked.

Personally I am most interested in the mailing list integration. I would like to get more involved with the forum and mailing lists but having two channels is not ideal. My main problem with the mails from a list is the signal to noise ratio which was also highlighted on the python discourse. https://discuss.python.org/t/if-mailing-list-mode-were-better/3951

Having an OSM Discourse canary might also be an incentive for some of the OSGEO channels to get a Discourse.

Would it be possible to support OAuth2 in OSM?