The new forum “community.osm.org” has been going for a while now, so maybe it’s useful to have a look at how things are going.

There’s obviously lots that goes into creating that forum as a site where people can share ideas - there’s the forum software itself, and the people looking after the technical administration of the site, the migration of the old forum (which has just happened) and the help site (planned for later), the various implementation decisions that got us to here, and also the people looking after content moderation (which is more actively managed than before). Of all of these, this diary entry is really only about the Discourse software itself.

I’ll not comment here about the future migration of https://help.openstreetmap.org/ to Discourse and the work required within Discourse to support that, since it would be unfair to judge something that has not happened yet.

Full disclosure - I’m one of the moderators of a couple of categories in the forum, but this is very much a personal view.

What’s good:

The software is actively maintained, unlike the old FluxBB forum software, or OSQA, which is used for the help site.

It’s working! Some communities that might have been a bit quiet or spread over private forums are now able to talk together much easier than before.

Searching works, with some caveats around the UI (see below for that). This may sound obvious, but mailing lists search at for example talk-gb can be a bit of a pain to use - a page such as this only shows the subject and the name of the poster, not the date of the message.

You can avoid “me too” answers (but see “reaction icons” below).

There’s a translate button on every post that supports the most common languages. This reduces the “echo chamber” effect that some forums had previously (and some other OSM channels still do now).

For browsing and reading, most things work on mobile. Initial login is slow, but it works (usually, eventually). It’s certainly better than OSQA which is not at all easy to use on mobile and needs a lot of zooming in and zooming out.

The barrier to entry is much lower than e.g. Telegram. If you have an OSM account, you can log in. You don’t need to e.g. provide a mobile phone number to a third party that you do not necessarily trust.

You can do most things by email (with caveats). See here and here. Email threading was nonexistent in received emails before a recent Discourse upgrade, but this has now been fixed.

You can automatically upload pictures without needing a separate hosting site (unlike, say, mailing lists).

You can use tags as “virtual categories” and post using them. It’s a bit complicated, and new users are never going to figure it out on their own, but it does have the potential to be a useful feature. This is a virtual “United Kingdom” category below “general” and this is a virtual Garmin one.

What’s bad:

The Site layout is poor. https://community.openstreetmap.org/ shows a couple of massive icons, some verbiage and half a dozen links (three on mobile). The remaining 40-odd forums (where most people hang out) are “below the fold” and in no particular order. See also here for more about that.

The forum structure is quite limited, although this may be an implementation decision. Replying by email can cause issues with quoting - depending on the email client, sometimes all of the previous messages is quoted again.

Composing messages on mobile (Firefox) is challenging.

The moderation approach is somewhat restricted by the tools available. When something is reported various messages and numbers are shown but it is not at all clear (except from experience) what applies to the person doing the reporting and what to the person reported. Also, some moderators have complained that they can’t do what they expect to be able to (i.e. not what they were able to do on the old forum).

I know that computer systems tend not to be, but it does seem to be random in places. What one user sees does not match what another user sees.

Pages are slow to load. A 4-second load time (even on a mobile phone) over a fast Internet connection in 2023 is simply ridiculous. See here for more.

It sounds basic, but it’s not possible to see who a reply was to. This is particularly a problem by email, where persons A, B and C reply. If C replies to B there’s nothing (even on the web UI) to indicate that. If B’s reply to A wasn’t visible by email (perhaps because of a local email filter) then it looks like C is replying to A. I mostly work around this by, where relevant, always quoting a bit of message to reply to - that way it’s obvious. See also here and here.

Although searching mostly works, the UI around searching is pretty “user hostile”. To see this, go here and press ^f (normally an in-page browser search) and that keypress is intercepted by Discourse and you are shown “find in topic” instead, which “simply doesn’t find” lots of text. Try searching for “persistent and stable” and it’ll say “no results found” Then browse to here and scroll up a bit, and you can see that that text exists. You can click on it to see the posts, but you can’t search for it. You can press ^F twice and search within page, but because Discourse doesn’t send the whole page to the browser, that search does not work from the top of the page - it’s well into “chocolate teapot” territory. See also here.

The back button does not work.

Users find minimum post length annoying.

The reaction icons are very limited - high on emotion, low on feedback. There is no “vote down” option, which will be essential for “help” migration. There is also no “that’s a really useful comment but I don’t agree with all of it”.

What’s just ugly:

The documentation is piss-poor. See also here for another example of functionality that appears to have been designed under the influence of recreational pharmaceuticals. There’s an about link (which says who the admins and moderators are) and an FAQ (which seems primarily concerned with etiquette guidelines). There is Discourse’s searchable “meta” site (which is good, but you are only going to look for it if you know that such a thing is likely to exist).

The best documentation we have seems to be this which is an introduction to Discourse for OSMers by OSMers. It’s written in German, but you can translate it using Discourse’s built-in translation button..

The upstream release process is a mess. Normally new versions of computer software are “released”. In mid-January a more appropriate zoo analogy would be to say that Version 3 of Discourse “escaped”.

Edit: Link to here removed as that issue is now fixed.

Edit 2: A couple of extra “good” points added - picture hosting and virtual categories.