[Imports] Migrating Imports RFC to Community Forum

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

I think that i the long run we'll get rid of mailing lists so such a 
move is inevitable at some point.

We shouldn't rush it though.

I think that most of what you write is correct, however I wish to point 
out two things that you have not mentioned:

On 6/19/23 09:08, James Crawford via Imports wrote:
> b) Mailing lists may be difficult for some users to understand, given 
> that it's an archaic technology that less and less new community members 
> are familiar with.

Imports are also difficult to do right. I think that someone who cannot 
be bothered (in the best case) or lacks the technical capability (in the 
worst case) to tackle a mailing list is never the right person to 
execute an import. We can't have an importer tune out mid-process 
because they have encountered an issue and are unwilling to fire up an 
archaic JOSM plugin to fix it.

> c) Mailing lists aren't as representative of the international 
> community.

Neither is Discourse of course - it can still happen that you get buy-in 
on Discourse and then you find out that local mappers are overwhelmingly 
against what you are doing, just they weren't on Discourse. Plus, I have 
heard people say that if you are on a low-bandwidth Internet connection, 
Discourse is a huge step back compared to a mailing list. It is possible 
that Discourse is excluding people too - just different people from 
those excluded by mailing lists.

Having said that, I am typing this in my thunderbird email client 
because I am using the Discourse email interface and it works quite well 
for me, although it needed some tweaking of my mail server and I'm not 
sure if it works equally well for someone who doesn't run their own.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"