[OSM-talk] forum.openstreetmap.org

[Richard Fairhurst]

Tom Hughes wrote:

> [osm.na1400.info]
> You say that, but I had a look at that forum this afternoon and
> there are clearly important discussions there that I was not aware
> of until now.

Indeed, that's the case at present. Anyone stumbling across it (by,  
say, Googling for "openstreetmap forum" - not an unreasonable thing  
to do) would be quite likely not to realise that there are any  
mailing lists, let alone that they're the principal method of  
communication.

But if we were to have an official forum, we could liberally festoon  
it with text saying "This is for questions and answers, project  
discussions take place that way ---->", and even call it something  
like "OpenStreetMap Help Forum" to indicate its role.

> I'm not a fan of Gmane either. What do you think of the Google
> Groups interface? Frankly it's tempting to link up to that just
> to get better searching of the archives anyway...

It's not bad at all; it's certainly a familiar interface for many  
people. I guess the two disadvantages are that it's up and down more  
often than the OSM servers, and that there's the moral question as to  
whether we - as a project - should be seen to be relying on Messrs Evil.

Personally I don't really see the need for a list<->forum gateway - a  
forum would be replacing newbies@, which has very little traffic, not  
talk@ - but others may feel differently.

> Actually putting it on one of our server will probably need to wait
> a few weeks/months until we've reorganised a bit - at the moment the
> obvious location would be the VM and that is quite overloaded already.

Understood.

cheers
Richard